Idlicote, Warwickshire

Masculine, feminine…

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a soft spot for dovecotes – useful and often picturesque buildings from centuries gone by. Dovecotes often have an usual shape – round or octagonal, for example. Such shapes can be functional as well as picturesque because inside there’s a ladder on a central rotating column that you can push around to reach the hundreds of nest holes inside.

The octagonal dovecote at Idlicote, visible from the gateway to the nearby big house, is especially attractive because it’s tall, so makes a strong impact, and because it has some charming faux-Gothic features: curvy ogee-headed windows, and imitation arrow slits, as if it’s left over from some ancient fortification. It isn’t of course. The first record of a dovecote here dates to 1681, well after the castle age, and experts now think that most of the current fabric is from the 1760s and that Sanderson Miller was probably the designer. The Gothic features sit well with his flair for this style and Miller was a local man who worked a lot in Warwickshire, so this seems to fit.*

Sanderson Miller liked creating an impression of medieval castle architecture with towers and battlements, evoking what Horace Walpole called ‘the rust of the Barons’ Wars’: a hint of the tough, masculine stuff of which castles were made. But he also had a love of the more filigree, feminine side of Gothic – bigger windows, ogee arches. To a purist, these two aspects of the Gothic style sit uncomfortably together, but Miller and his clients had no such qualms. For them, structures like this dovecote seemed to sum up the Middle Ages. For us, they sum up the particular vision of a Georgian architect who was at home in the Warwickshire countryside, as is this charming building.†  

* * * *

*I’m indebted for this information to the new edition of the Pevsner Buildings of England volume on Warwickshire, which in turn cites William Hawkes, editor of The Diaries of Sanderson Miller of Radway (2005). This new Pevsner volume is full of such nuggets of fact and attribution, and when I’ve absorbed more of them I’ll review the book in my next batch of reviews, later in the summer.

†I wrote about how dovecotes were used in an earlier post, here.

Edge Hill, Warwickshire

Cutting edge

Coming across this on an autumn morning on a quiet road in Warwickshire is enough to bring the curious traveller to a halt, and reduce one to slack-jawed and questioning amazement. What is it, exactly, and why is it here?

The short answer, it’s a pub, is only part of the story. This stone tower hasn’t been a pub all its life. It’s not a castle either. The windows are much too big for a medieval castle that had to defend itself against slings and arrows. The battlements are too slight to conceal all but the most elfin defender. The whole thing looks more like the fanciful Gothic (or ‘Gothick’) of the 18th century, intended to make its mark in the landscape. And so it proves.

The tower at Edge Hill was built by Sanderson Miller, a local gentleman and amateur architect who was improving his estate in the middle of the 18th century. As well as transforming his Tudor house at Radway in the Gothic style, and doing up his gardens, he built the octagonal tower as a combination of eyecatcher and viewpoint, right on the edge of the escarpment. According to legend, the place was also the precise spot where King Charles raised his standard before the battle of Edge Hill, the inconclusive clash of 1642 at the beginning of the English Civil War.

In 1747, Miller put up the octagonal tower, and he soon added the adjoining buildings, including the square tower and bridge, recently renewed, designed to span the road. The octagonal part is modelled on a tower at Warwick Castle, and commands panoramic views across the plain below. As if the links with the vast castle at Warwick, and with Charles I, weren’t allusions enough to English history, the interior included a ceiling decorated with the coats of arms of the Saxon kingdoms.

So the Edge Hill tower was a building with ‘heritage’ plastered all over it and tradition set in its stones. But in the 1740s this was all rather revolutionary. Gothic was still an unusual style for country houses, but at the same tima as Miller was working at Edge Hill and Radway, Horace Walpole, the man credited with kick-starting the 18th-century Gothic revival, was rebuilding his Twickenham House, Strawberry Hill, in a similar, yet more fanciful, Gothic style. Miller’s work, like the more famous Walpole’s, caught the imagination of country house owners. A number were soon asking Miller to redesign their homes, and a modest scattering of castle towers, fan vaults, tracery, and sham ruins began to spread across Warwickshire and beyond. Miller’s tower, at first glance a rich landowner’s folly, was also an architect’s calling card.