Lacock, Wiltshire

Looking up in Lacock

You probably know Lacock. It's the Wiltshire village that's wholly owned by the National Trust and preserved as a perfect prospect of limestone and timber framing. The village centre, with its range of houses from medieval to 19th century, its stone barn, its medieval church, is almost too perfect. Take away the cars and it could almost be an English village of the early-19th century – and it has played just that role in various film and television adaptations of Jane Austen novels, including the famous 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. It has been in Harry Potter films and other movies too.

Faced with such picture-perfect villagescape, it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees. So here, up near the eaves of one house, are, if not trees, some leaves – or at least carvings of leaves. These odd carvings with leaves and spirals are actually capitals – they want to be on top of columns or pilasters, doing the architectural job that capitals usually do. But all they have beneath them is plain wall, as if the builder had a spare lot of capitals left over from some other job and someone said, "Oh well, let's stick them up here, then."

They are an unusual kind of capital too. Most of us are familiar with Ionic capitals, with their spiral volutes, but Ionic capitals have no leaves and their spirals are the other other way around. This "wrong way round spiral with added leaves" was made popular by the great Italian baroque architect Francesco Borromini and was copied by various builders in England. I've noticed these Borromini capitals before at Blandford Forum in Dorset, where the local builder, the splendidly named John Bastard, used them more conventionally, at the tops of pilasters. But if Borromini capitals raised an eyebrow in Blandford Forum, here on the top of house at Lacock they are a real source of surprise.

Lacock, Wiltshire

Take the A-Frame

Nearly every house in the Wiltshire village of Lacock is interesting, but it’s easy to miss the interest of this one – looking at the end of the building, squashed up against the house next door, one can see that it’s based on a cruck frame. Crucks were basically A-frames in which the two main pieces were made up of matching timbers, naturally curving if possible, and sometimes cut by splitting a tree trunk so that they matched perfectly. This cruck shows the construction well – how the curve in the timber is exploited; how the frame is set above the ground on a low stone plinth; how the eaves are supported by a horizontal timber that protrudes from the main frame; how this arrangement allows for a vertical front wall. There will be another cruck at the other end of the house, and the pair would have been assembled on the ground and then lifted into place and connected by means of a horizontal ridge pole.

I don’t know how old this building is – probably late medieval. It used to be thought that primitive-looking cruck buildings were inevitably older than those with box-frames. But the cruck frame is mainly a geographical phenomenon – crucks are most common in the North of England, the Midlands, and the West (but not the far southwest). They are very rare in East Anglia and southeastern England, where there are many ancient box-frames. It’s uncertain why this should be so, but Alec Clifton-Taylor, in The Pattern of English Building, suggests that in the eastern part of the country there was more influence from France and the Netherlands, where crucks are not used, and that in the West there were more suitable trees for this kind of frame. And some of these ancient trees are still doing the job they did more than 500 years ago.