Potterne, Wiltshire

Bargeboards and bollards

The Porch House in Potterne’s High Street is a beautiful timber-framed house of about 1480, restored in the 19th century* but with many of its original features intact, including fancy woodwork, such as some of the glorious carved bargeboards. Raised on a plinth of very solid stones, it’s a close-studded frame, meaning that it has many vertical timbers, placed close together – a sign, together with the carving, that the person who had this place built could pay for a top-class timber frame, and a well decorated one to boot.

It may have been built by the church – it was lived in by at least one bishop – and was later variously a brewery, bakehouse, pub (the White Horse), and house again. It has a lot of the features that one is taught marked out the ‘classic’ medieval manor house – a central, full-height hall (where the tall bay window is) flanked by two cross wings, which would have contained private rooms on one side and service rooms on the other. The porch, protruding from one of the cross wings, is placed unusually, and its protrusion now makes the building vulnerable to knocks and scrapes from passing traffic, hence, no doubt, the profusion of bollards, posts, and concrete curbs that seem to have sprung up in front of it.†

The saviour of the house was an artist, George Richmond, who found it in a dilapidated state, bought it, and set about restoring it with the help of the architect Ewan Christian, in the 1870s. Searches were made for missing bits – it’s said that the old front door was found on the floor of a local pigsty, with a pig reclining on it – timbers were repaired, and fragments of old stained glass were installed in some of the windows. So profuse thanks to Richmond and Christian for their good work, and to subsequent owners who have clearly looked after the house. And to those who have attempted to protect it from the dashing objects on the A360 that I had to dodge to take my photograph.

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* Some give the date as early-16th century; there were two 19th-century restorations, in 1847 and 1876.

†Some of which look as if they have been doing their job.

Potterne, Wiltshire

A downward glance

‘Isn’t that slag?’ The Resident Wise Woman’s mind was more on geology than the elegant but rather forbidding Early English Gothic Gothic architecture of St Mary’s church, Potterne. What caught her eye was the black material among the masonry lining the steps in the churchyard, a by-product of smelting (probably of iron, though one sometimes sees copper slag): a substance that is hard, irregular, dark, and durable.

It’s something we’d noticed before in a different form in the Gloucestershire town of Newnham on Severn, where there’s a house partly built of slag. There, the material, produced during copper smelting, had been poured into moulds while still liquid, so that it set in big rectangular blocks ideal for building. Here at Potterne, though, it’s simply made up of irregular lumps. It’s dark, and more forbidding in its way that the architecture of the church, but has found a useful function.

I don’t know where this slag came from – Wiltshire is not a place I particularly associate with historic ironworking (the Weald and the Forest of Dean were more the places for this kind of thing) although I have seen online references to Saxon-period smelting in the Ramsbury area and Westbury had an iron industry in the 19th century. I’d love to know more about the origin of this unusually located and unlooked-for slag.*

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* Thanks to a reader who has pointed out that the Seend ironworks was not far away: this is a likely source.