Wells, Somerset

Wells, wells

I’ve peeped through the entrance archway to the bishop’s palace at Wells more than once, but never visited the palace itself or its garden. The other day, it seemed high time I had a closer look, and I was confident that there would be architectural as well as horticultural interest within. Not least fascinating to me were such things as the back view of the palace and the defensive walls. On an altogether smaller scale, I was drawn to this rose-covered stone building. As I spotted it in the distance, I wondered what it might be, quickly ruling out a gazebo (the windows seemed too small) or a posh potting shed (not in the right place).

A helpful interpretation board enlightened me. It’s all about water management. An underground channel from the well pool in the grounds fills a sizeable tank, and the resulting head of water creates enough pressure to feed the water supply for the palace and an outlet in the city’s market place, providing a fresh water supply for local residents. That, at least, was how it worked in 1451, when the then Bishop of Bath and Wells, Thomas Beckynton or Beckington, granted this boon to the town. Nowadays, the people of Wells get their water through pipes to each house, just like the rest of us. Back then, it must have been a huge benefit to both convenience and health to have a supply of fresh, clean water a short, bucket-carrying walk away from your house. The wells of Wells being prolific, there was often enough surplus water for the butchers on the market place to flush away the sanguinary drippings of their trade.

Naturally, the bishop provided a seemly home for the water tank, so it didn’t intrude too much into his garden. A simple square building with a hint of the ornamental to the cusped windows has done the job for centuries. Those with sharp eyes (click on the image to enlarge it) will spot the ornamental finial at the apex of the roof. It’s said to depict the bishop’s favourite hunting dog.

Wells, Somerset

 
Slightly foxed

At the weekend I was teaching a course about architectural ornament and the participants were amused and, I think, charmed by a number of variations on the classical orders that I showed them. I wanted to demonstrate that the orders weren’t necessarily regarded by masons, carvers, and builders as a set of hard-and-fast rules. They could be starting points on which the craftsman played variations. A particular hit was a Corinthian capital with a bird fluttering among its acanthus leaves in Birmingham. It reminded me that there are capitals featuring animal heads on a building in the High Street at Wells. They occur on the Bath stone facade of a bank of about 1880. But what kind of capitals are they? And what are the animals?

The official listing text for the building describes the capitals as “quasi-Ionic”; the text doesn’t mention the animals at all, not concerning itself with such trivialities. The Ionic element is the spirals, although there are also some acanthus leaves lurking at the back, so it might just as well be “quasi-Corinthian” I suppose. The beast is an oddity: the Resident Wise Woman suggested an attempted fox, observing that the ears seem to be turning into a leaves. A mythical beast? Or just a poorly carved one? No matter. It’s a bit of fun however you look at it.

Deddington, Oxfordshire

This is the creature that was never seen…

Looking rather soulfully down at potential customers is this three-dimensional sign on the Unicorn Inn in the Oxfordshire town of Deddington. I’m kicking myself for not having noticed it before, as it’s an appealing sign. But perhaps these days it’s not as affective an eye-catcher as it was – driving past, you are apt to be dodging other vehicles in the town’s busy market place, which is made narrow by parked cars. Walking along the pavement, the sign is easy to miss as you pass, being tucked on its ledge, its white body set against the pale background of the wall behind.

When you do see it, though, it’s arresting, the golden bits helping its white body to stand out against the white wall, and it’s one of those bits of folk art that’s worth admiring. And what a fine and distinctive creature to put on your inn – mythical, enigmatic, elusive (‘This is the creature there has never been,’ begins Rilke’s sonnet on the beast, in J B Leishman’s translation), and yet instantly identifiable all the same.

I’ve managed to miss the Tate Gallery’s exhibition of Folk Art in London, but intend to catch it at Compton Verney soon. I’m hoping that it includes some pub signs – both painted and three-dimensional – along with the marvellous ships’ figureheads, shop signs, felt pictures, and other delights I’ve seen illustrating reviews of the show. Traditional inn signs, it seems to me, offer a terrific opportunity to display works of art out of doors, and the nature of the genre dictates that they be clear, easy to read, and characterful. Even though I found it hard to spot, Deddington’s unicorn makes up in character what it lacks in other ways: it seems to fit the bill.

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If you like this sort of thing, I’ve noticed a few other three-dimensional inn signs on my travels. They include: the uniquely named Dying Gladiator at Brigg, Lincolnshire; the splendid, gold-maned White Lion at Upton on Severn, Worcestershire; the Old Sugar Loaf at Dunstable, Bedfordshire; and the Swan at Wells, Somerset (with musical bonus).

Wells, Somerset

More light

In Wells, turning my back, for a moment, on the magnificent west front of the Cathedral, and remembering Jonathan Meades’s characterization of another cathedral close (the one at Salisbury) as a complete three-dimensional history of architecture, I focused on the more modest houses on Wells’s Cathedral Green.

My eyes came to rest on this, one of a varied row on the Green’s south side. The first thing to catch my attention was the doorway, with its beautiful late-18th century fanlight and door surround with open pediment and Doric uprights. The fanlight, it is said, was brought from Dublin and the surround was put together from various fragments, including some bits that began life in a convent. All this high-class bricolage points to the fact that, for all its sash windows and fancy entrance, this is actually a 17th-century house that was altered in the 18th and 20th centuries.

The proportions – with low ground floor and the whole building sitting lower down the the green in front of it – are another hint to the building’s age: not for this house the standard narrow sash windows, three panes wide and four deep, that are usual in the Georgian houses of cities such as Bath. Here we have glorious big windows with 20 panes each on the ground floor and 16 panes on the floor above. Their size is no doubt testimony to earlier 17th-century openings – and to the fact that this is a north-facing house with an interior that needs plenty of light. Perhaps these generous windows help to make the house as pleasant inside as, set off with the elegant railings, gate, and iron overthrow, it is from without.

Wells, Somerset

The silver swan

Swans – elegant, silent, monogamous, soft of down but powerful of wing – are amongst the most emblematic of our birds. They pop up in all kinds of odd places in English culture. As royal birds, the swans on the Thames, for example, are owned (if you can own a swan) by the queen – with exception of those belonging to the London livery companies of Vintners and Dyers, who mark their swans every year in the ceremony of swan upping, marvellously portrayed by the artist Stanley Spencer.

Poetically, the swan can be a symbol of the overmastering power of a god in the story of Leda and the Swan (in the work of Yeats, among others), but swansdown is symbolic of softness (as in a lyric by Ben Jonson). Swans hang around buildings, too. I have already blogged about their presence in the moat of the Archbishop’s Palace at Wells, and how they ring the bell when they want feeding. I was reminded of this the other day when watching the film Hot Fuzz, filmed in Wells (though the tiny city plays the role of a small town in Gloucestershire). In the film, ‘the swan’ goes missing, reappearing to interrupt in a very British way a hilarious car-chase across fields in police panda cars.

So here’s a picture of the sign of the Swan Hotel in Wells, the city’s three-dimensional and hospitable tribute to its avian inhabitants. Like its living counterparts, it’s mute, which reminds me of the madrigal and poem by the great English composer Orlando Gibbons, ‘The Silver Swan’ of 1612:
The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
Farewell, all joys; O death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.

More geese than swans will be consumed in the next few days, so enjoy yours. And enjoy too this version of the madrigal by the Hilliard Ensemble.

Then go out and buy their records, for their singing has all the swan’s strength and its delicacy too. Season’s greetings.

Wells, Somerset

I have lived in houses with mice, watched swallows nest under neighbours’ eaves, and fretted about martens in roof spaces. I’ve found wasps’ nests in attics, heard tales of badgers undermining foundations, and once lived in a house where there was a fox’s earth beneath the garden shed. In a country house I’ve visited, bats (members of a protected species) fluttered around the upper floors, the owners nonchalantly ignoring the daily fly-past.

Animals have a way of colonizing our spaces. We’re not always pleased about this of course. Few of us take kindly to the common furniture beetle or his other timber-destroying cousins. And some owners of buildings go to great lengths to prevent birds landing on ledges and dropping droppings on the masonry. But there are more benign animal visitors to our buildings. Take the bishop’s palace at Wells. Perhaps the most outstanding bishop’s residence in England, it dates from the 13th century, and is surrounded by a set of outer walls from the 14th century that are in turn surrounded by a moat fed by one of the wells of Wells, around the back. This moat is remarkable for its occupants, for swans have lived here for many long generations. The current pair have managed to produce a very healthy family of eight cygnets this year, and they have gathered by the gatehouse bridge because someone, just out of shot, has begun to throw bits of bread into the water for them to eat.

This bounty means that these elegant creatures are not doing what Wells swans are supposed to do. Around the corner there is a metal chain attached to the palace wall, its lower end comfortably within beak’s range. At the other end of the chain is a bell. The swans of Wells know if they ring this bell someone will be summoned, bearing swan-food. Bell ringing. It’s hungry work, as any campanologist will tell you.



The bell-ringer at work

Wells, Somerset

Usually when I’m writing posts for this blog, I like to give you a bit of historical information – a date, an architect’s name, a few details that fill in the background. Sometimes my search for such enlightenment draws a blank, but mysteries can be interesting to share.

Take this sign in Wells. It tells us quite a lot, naming two members of the same family, a male mason and a female dealer in tea, coffee, tobacco, pepper, and snuff. There’s no date, but the style of the lettering is similar to signs I’ve seen from the late-17th and early-18th centuries. Snuff, introduced to England in 1660, became popular here in the 18th century, by which time tea-drinking was also well established. So my guess would be that this is an 18th-century sign.

Presumably the symbol after Richard’s name is his mason’s mark. I associate masons’ marks with the Middle Ages, but they were certainly used in later centuries too.

There is no indication either of the relationship between Sarah and Richard. Sister and brother? Widowed mother and son, perhaps? Maybe someone out there knows and would like to share their knowledge. Meanwhile hats off to whoever it was who preserved this inscription, an enduring trace of two forgotten lives.

Wells, Somerset

Wells Cathedral was begun towards the end of the 12th century and its builders, as was usual in the Middle Ages, began at the east end with the choir and then worked their way westwards. By the 1220s they had got to the west front, one of the most striking fronts of any cathedral, consisting of a vast stone screen of niches, in which were set hundreds of statues of saints, bishops, Biblical figures, and others.

In most English churches the medieval sculptures were destroyed during the period of puritanical iconoclasm in the 17th century. But for some reason many of those at Wells were spared, and more than 300 remain, although in almost 800 years the elements have eroded some of them badly. What is more this screen of sculptures, which covers the entire western wall of the cathedral, also extends around on either side to cover part of the north and south walls. The whole makes up England’s greatest collection of statuary from the early Gothic phase of the 13th century.

Most visitors, deterred by eye strain, vertigo, or impatience to get inside the cathedral, don’t spend very long looking at each statue, especially those around the sides. So here are a pair of knights that stand high up on the north side. One has his head covered in a kind of proto-balaclava helmet of mail. His neighbour wears on his head a great helm with eye slits and breathing holes.

Their heads fit neatly into their intricate trefoil-headed niches, which are beautifully carved even though unregarded except by those with enthusiasm for such things, preferably backed up with binoculars or a telephoto lens. A bird's-eye view would be best, though birds are clearly apt to look at a Gothic niche in terms of its suitability for a nesting site.Thanks to Zoë Brooks, her sharp eyes, and her zoom lens, for the pictures.