Leigh Brockamin, Worcestershire

I still seem to be recovering from covid, which has left me easily exhausted and the victim from time to time of something I can only call brain fog. However I am now making small trips out, and plan to continue here with occasional short blog posts. This one describes a building only about 30 miles from where I live, but far, far away in terms of its architecture and structure from what we are used to in these postmodern times.

Cathedrals of wood

The great medieval barns of England are cathedrals of woodwork, and Leigh Court Barn in Worcestershire is one of the best. Its exterior a charming mixture of brick, weatherboarding and wattle with a big tiled roof, does not quiet have the grandeur of stone barns like the magnificent Great Coxwell, but the sheer size of the structure, with its pair of vast cart entrances and that sweeping roof, prepares us, up to a point, for the interior.

When we step through the door, the sight is breathtaking: a succession of eleven enormous trusses, each made of a large cruck frame held together by horizontal beams and diagonal braces. Crucks, the pairs of long timbers that form an inverted ‘V’, are normally made by splitting the trunk of a sizeable oak tree in two. Here, each side of each cruck was made with a single tree, to give thew maximum size and strength. The effect is awesome, and all the more remarkable for its early date – it was erected in the early 14th century.

This makes it one of the earliest extant cruck-framed buildings, and also the largest in Britain. It was built for the use of a farm belonging to Pershore Abbey and the walls were originally covered with wattles (panels of woven laths, looking from a distance like basketwork). Most of this original cladding has gone, and is mostly replaced with boarding. This is vernacular architecture, done by local craftsmen using local materials, to supply a practical need. But what a vivid demonstration they gave of how this ‘humble’ kind of building could produce an effect as magnificent as a great cathedral, larger in scale than a manor house. John Betjeman used to say that some churches made him immediately want to knell down in prayer. This building had a similarly humbling effect on me.

Stanton, Gloucestershire

More curves

Bear with me, patient reader, as I indulge my interest with yet one more bit of corrugated iron. The key to the material’s success, from the time of its invention in the 19th century to today, is how the corrugations give this thin, lightweight material strength. Another of its virtues is how it can be bent during the building process, to make roofs that are inexpensive, strong, and curved to shed the rain effectively. Hence its widespread use in barns and sheds – as long-suffering regular readers will know from various past posts.

Here’s another use of the curving process. The photograph was taken some years ago at a plant nursery tucked away in the Cotswolds. The owner was then using several corrugated iron sheds and Nissen huts for work and storage, and where two sit together, whoever erected them has improvised a broad gutter between the two to take the rainwater that runs off. This entailed merely bending a sheet of corrugated iron into a semi-circle. It’s disarmingly simple, and could be made to fit the gap, which is a little wide for a single conventional gutter. Of course, like any gutter, it needs cleaning out, otherwise plants will grow in it, as they have begun to do here. But it’s an ingenious bit of bricolage, to which I raise my hat.

Ryall, Worcestershire

Curvy 

Somewhere in rural Worcestershire, on a road I use quite often when there are no restrictions on travel, these pleasant curves pop up near the roadside. They’re one of the rural landmarks that tell me roughly where I am, how near I might be to one town or another, and they take their place in the ranks of field barns, outlying farms, lone pines, lonelier pubs, and telephone boxes on corners as my personal markers. I suppose I first noticed these buildings because they’re pale in colour, standing out from but harmonising with the surrounding landscape, as they harmonise with the cow parsley blooms in this view, taken when I finally stopped to take a better look.

They confirmed my liking for corrugated-iron buildings with curved roofs – the barns, railway sheds, Nissen huts, and other structures I’ve noticed here from time to time. And they confirm too that corrugated iron can look good in colours other than the usual green or the railway liveries now seen mostly at preserved or ‘heritage’ stations. I think they probably show the material’s adaptability too. I don’t know how these sheds began life – I’d not be surprised if they were built for agricultural use, given where they are. But they now seem to be used as some sort of automotive body-repair shop. They can’t be a bad fit for this use: they are spacious and provide plenty of headroom for vehicles much larger than the chunky classic Land-Rover in the foreground. The shelter and space are no doubt useful for paint jobs too. A good honest working building: so often, that’s just what’s needed.

Frampton-on-Severn, Gloucestershire

 

Tapestry

If the Herefordshire farmyard in my previous post presented a pleasant contrast between timber and brickwork, this large barn near the Severn at Frampton is a tapestry of materials: timber framing, basket-weave infill, weatherboarding, brickwork, a stone base, a shingled roof. It’s not unusual in the Vale of Severn to see in one glance several different building materials, though it is surprising to find such a mix in one building. It’s not difficult to imagine how it happened. The different materials were probably added in stages, as repairs and changes became necessary. Stone is not present close to the site, and transporting stone is costly (even though the river makes transporting heavy goods straightforward), but it’s worth getting stone for the base. On top of that you put a strong oak frame, filling in the gaps at first with wattle and daub, with perhaps some sections of woven, basket-like infill to give good ventilation. At some point the wattle and daub needs replacing. Brick is now made locally so that’s a good, durable material for infill, so some parts get brick ‘nogging’. Then you extend the barn, now all in brick, on a lower stone plinth. The weatherboarded end may represent another repair at some stage. All this is pure guesswork, of course, and it could have happened in other ways, but the effect is one of effective and pragmatic bricolage. 

There’s something visually satisfying about the resulting patchwork (or patch-up work). Maybe that’s because most of what’s there has been there a long time, and the building looks as if it has grown old gracefully. In addition, the barn has been carefully repaired in recent years so that it’s sound, as well as beautiful. And there’s also the fact that all this variety makes up the distinctive sight of a characterful and ancient great barn, giving it a noble, indeed monumental, appearance. This is, in essence, an industrial building, made that way because its original users knew it would work that way. But it is a world distant from the structures put up on most farms now, let alone on most industrial estates. Frampton – and the world – are better places for such things. 

Brampton Bryan, Herefordshire

Patterned brick, farm style

I don’t often post farm buildings on this blog, but I do often peer through farm gates, across yards, and along drives that were once used by tractors or herds of cows and now lead to clusters of ‘desirable homes’ in converted barns. Visiting Aardvark Books (a different kind of agricultural conversion, a book farm) I’ve sometimes had a short walk to see what else there is in the village, and have glanced at this near neighbour. What I see is, on the right, a timber framed building with the spaces between the bays partly infilled with weatherboarding, and on the left a lower brick barn.

The pattern of holes in the brickwork in the left-hand barn, used for ventilation, is something I’ve noticed several times in Herefordshire and elsewhere. The widespread use of brick came late to the West Midlands and border counties, getting established in the 17th century, in contrast to the East of England, where brick buildings survive from the late Middle Ages. I’d guess this barn is probably 19th century, and it may well have started life with a slate roof like the one it has today. The diamond of ventilation holes is typical, and must have been relatively easy to do for a bricklayer used to laying bricks with precision. I have the impression that it is, though, a slightly larger diamond than many I’ve seen. With a small array of holes, or two or three smaller arrays, the builder would have room for stretches of solid brickwork in between, to keep the structure sound. But this large diamond-shaped area of perforation seems to work, and to help a building in the once alien material of brick fit into the varied pattern of Herefordshire vernacular architecture, with its sandstone and timber-framed structures set against a background of rolling hills.

Aylton, Herefordshire

 

Buildings great and small 

A while back, well before the curse that is Covid 19 restricted everyone’s movements, my son and his girlfriend, who live in London, came to visit us in the Cotswolds. At some point their two laptops were placed on our dining table, along with my own. So there were three silver laptops, all made by Apple and including one (belonging to my son) that had a much bigger screen than the other two. I was instantly reminded of Horace Walpole’s remark about the Brighton Pavilion: ‘It is as if the dome of St Paul’s had come down to Brighton and pupped.’ A similar thought stirred in my mind when I passed these farm buildings in a remote Herefordshire setting. This is an unremarkable sight – corrugated iron barns and sheds are everywhere – but I feel that part of what I’m for is to notice the unremarkable, which often seems to me to be standing around waiting to have remarks made about it.

It appears to have been in the 1820s that an engineer called Henry Robinson Palmer had the idea of putting corrugations into thin iron sheets, to make them stronger. He took out a patent in 1829 and designed large sheds for the London Dock Company, for which he worked, with corrugated iron roofs. These roofs were curved, giving them still greater strength and enabling water to run off, and from the mid-19th century onwards curved corrugated iron roofs – on everything from large railway train sheds to tiny trackside lamp huts – have been common.

The barn in my photograph is typical of this – capacious, curved-roofed, and bought prefabricated from a company that specialised in this kind of structure. As usual, their name appears on the gable end. This one bears he name Phillips & Co of Hereford, but many companies made iron buildings and Britain’s once extensive railway network allowed them to be delivered to a more or less convenient station, from which a local carrier would bring them to the site. This one did not have to travel far, but firms like Boulton & Paul of Norwich, Frederick Braby of Glasgow, or Hill & Smith of Brierley Hill, sent a variety of corrugated iron structures far and wide, including to distant corners of the British empire.

Next to this barn is what looks like its tiny offspring. At first, distant glance I took it to be a railway lamp hut repurposed for the farm, and maybe it is. But its sides don’t seem to be corrugated as they are on the classic lamp huts used for example by the Great Western Railway, so I think it’s more likely to be a home-made wooden shed roofed with corrugated iron to take advantage of this durable, practical, and inexpensive material. Whoever made it, I hope it still has years of service ahead of it.

Great Coxwell, Oxfordshire

More shade

In the previous post, I featured a carving of the sun, and alluded to the fact that medieval churches are often good places to go to keep cool. This set me thinking. Which other buildings might one combine historical and aesthetic pleasure with the welcoming embrace of cool shade in a heatwave? An ancient stone barn, spacious, airy, and lacking large windows, could be such a place. One of my favourites is Great Coxwell barn, southwest of Faringdon. I expect it is a favourite of quite a few of my readers too, as it’s a National Trust property and has won the praise and attention of everyone from William Morris to that great photographer of place, Edwin Smith. I’ve blogged about it before – in fact it featured on one of my very first posts. Here’s part of what I wrote about it, back in July 2007:

It’s one of the barns built by Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire to store the corn produced on the monastery's far-flung estates. Built in around 1300 of glowing Cotswold stone, it’s a barn on a grand scale – it’s just over 150 feet in length and the doors are broad enough for the farm's biggest carts to drive straight in. Smaller openings in the walls are for owls to fly in and eat up any rats or mice rash enough to nibble away at the grain. Inside, from threshing-floor to rafters, the space soars like a cathedral – a comparison made by William Morris, one of this glorious building’s greatest admirers.

I’d encourage anyone who’s not visited this great barn to give it a go. If you’ve been already, and are anywhere within striking distance off the Berkshire-Oxfordshire borders, I don’t need to encourage you to visit again.

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My post about Edwin Smith, featuring his photographs of Great Coxwell barn and Didmarton church, is here.

The National Trust has visitor information about Great Coxwell barn on its site, here.

Snowshill, Gloucestershire

Coloured counties (2)

In view of the colourful cheer my picture of Hailes brought to a number of my readers, I thought I'd do something I do only rarely: reprise a picture from an earlier post. I first posted this picture, which was taken by the Resident Wise Woman, back in 2009 and, looking at it again, it seems to exemplify the happy combination of colour and building that I was celebrating in my post of Hailes. Even more so than that picture, the scene here comes about purely as a result of a working landscape. The barn – stone walled by roofed in corrugated iron – is a basic working building if ever there was one. A knockabout building. And a knocked-about building. But with my admiration for corrugated iron, even with a coat of rust, I like it nonetheless. As for the flowers, they're lavender, a crop grown commercially in these parts that lights up summer hillsides with blue, and sends visitors out with their cameras.

What works, then, can be beautiful or admirable. You know that, probably, if you're a regular reader of my posts. But whether or not you share my liking for the rusty old iron, you can enjoy the drifts of blue that have grown up around it.

Mildenhall, Wiltshire

On high

Mildenhall (which I'm told is pronounced 'Minal') is roughly east of Marlborough in Wiltshire. The local stone is chalk, and in this area there's a variety of traditional building materials, including brick, flint, and wood, as well as chalk itself. There are quite a few large barns with wooden weatherboarded walls and thatched roofs, but this substantial barn (now clearly converted for some other use) has one of the biggest corrugated iron roofs I've seen recently dwarfing its boarded walls. The corduroy texture of the corrugated iron is if anything emphasized by the material's variegated colour, which seems to be a mixture of black paint and pale areas where the paint has flaked away.

This is such a big roof that the overused word 'awesome' came into my mind as I stared at it. It is clearly made up of three rows of sheets, but I'm not sure how long the sheets are – 8 or 10 feet each, perhaps. Whatever the precise size, it's a lot of corrugated iron to set beside the brick, white-walled, and thatched cottages that stand nearby. But I think it works.

I've been a fan of this kind of use of non-traditional materials in rural settings ever since moving to the Cotswolds. Here the traditional roofing material is honey-coloured Cotswold stone, but many farm buildings have grey slate roofs. I've grown used to listening to pundits bemoaning the fact that farmers dare to roof their buildings with slates, but I'm not convinced that every roof has to look the same or that everything has to be built in stone. I'm even happy to see a bit of rusty wriggly tin now and again on a Cotswold farm.

I feel the same about roofs like this one in Wiltshire. It's practical and effective and it sits rather well above the weatherboarding and behind the white-barked trees and green shrubs that surround it. It has terrific texture too. If corrugated iron is often thought of as a lowly material, a roof like this raises it to fresh heights.

Badmin's England (2)

As a follow-up to my previous post about the book Village and Town, written and illustrated by S R Badmin, here is one more of his evocative illustrations. This is "A limestone village", Badmin's portrayal of the architecture of the limestone belt that sweeps up England from Somerset, through Gloucestershire, parts of Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire and Rutland, to the eastern part of Lincolnshire. From this broad band of stone country, Badmin has set his imaginary stone village in the Cotswolds – it is all rolling hills and golden walls.

The houses have the rows of parapetted gables typical of the region, together with the stone-mullioned windows and tall chimneys mostly placed at the gable ends. A church tower, reminiscent of the one at Chipping Campden, looks down on the scene, and the field in the foreground has a drystone wall. To the right is a large stone barn (based loosely on the barn at Bradford on Avon on the fringes of the Cotswolds in Wiltshire), on which the Cotswold stone "slates" are laid in the traditional way, large stones at the bottom of the slope near the eaves, smaller ones at the top, near the apex.

As with other illustrations in Village and Town, Badmin has brought together buildings and objects from different places to create his village scene. And not just the buildings. That cart in the foreground looks like something Badmin had spotted and drew and couldn't wait to incorporate into a bigger picture. (In the same way he incorporated a wonderful crane into a woodland logging scene in his Shell Guide to Trees and Shrubs.) But made-up as it is, this Limestone Village scene is convincing in terms of both architecture and landscape.

But does this scene represent an idealized view of England? It certainly looks very neat and tidy – neater and tidier than the Cotswolds I remember from my boyhood a couple of decades after the picture was made. Back then there was much poverty, houses were often badly maintained, and you were more likely to meet a heard of cows than a traffic jam. Now everything is tidier and in better repair, but there are cars everywhere.*

To be fair to Badmin, he does show us that this is a working place. The barn is in use; the cart stands ready; chickens are scratching around (it all becomes clearer if you click on the image to enlarge it). In the distance is the farmland that kept people alive in Badmin's time and brought prosperity to this area in the Middle Ages, making possible all this upmarket stone building. A mixture of cornfields and sheep pasture extends into the distance, over the hills, between the woods, and towards the far horizon.

*And it sometimes feels as if you have to have the income of a movie star to live here.

Solihull, Warwickshire

Greece in the Midlands

This is the most unexpected sight to see on a suburban street in Solihull. Its architect, the young John Soane, soon to design the most elaborate country houses, such as Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire and Tyringham Hall in Buckinghamshire, described it as a barn à la Paestum. While Soane’s houses are elegant Georgian or Regency buildings with complex interiors often displaying a sense of space that’s both intricate and dazzlingly sophisticated, this barn is designed in the simplest, plainest red-brick classicism.

The building dates to the early phase of the architect’s career. He had studied at the Royal Academy and in 1777 won the Academy’s most glittering prize: its Travelling Scholarship. This enabled him to go to Italy to study the buildings of Rome. While there he also traveled south to visit Caserta, Baia, and Pompeii. One of the highlights of this trip was Paestum, the Greco-Roman city some 50 miles southeast of Naples, where the ruins of three ancient Doric temples, built by Greek colonists, survive. These temples, dating from the 5th and 6th centuries BC, are among some of the best preserved of all ancient Greek buildings. Their antiquity and their proportions inspired Soane.

While in Italy Soane met a number of British aristocrats and gentry whom he saw as prospective clients. Among them were several young men who hired Soane as a draughtsman to travel with them from Italy to Sicily and Malta. One member of this group was Henry Greswold Lewis, a landowner from Solihull, and it was for Lewis in 1798 that Soane designed this unlikely structure as a kind of homage to the ruins he had seen at Peastum.

The building is severe, and rather shocking. It’s not exactly like a Greek temple, which would have evenly spaced columns, a deeper entablature above the columns, and no round arch in the centre. But its carefully laid soft red bricks and imperfect white entablature do the job of suggesting ancient Greece and translating some of its architectural hallmarks into the very English medium of brick. For all its severity, it must have made Lewis think of his youthful travels, and smile.

Burford, Oxfordshire

Coming home

Landmark noun An object or feature of a landscape or town that can easily be seen from a distance, especially one that enables someone to establish their location.

As we travel around, we acquire a personal inventory of landmarks that punctuate our journeys and help us to recognise places. They can be hills, lone trees, or other natural features, but often they’re buildings. Church towers and spires in distant valleys, factory chimneys, windmills. And also more modest buildings – toll houses at junctions, roadside cafés or pubs, isolated farms. They help us give people directions: ‘Turn left at the White Hart, and first right after the telephone box.’ ‘Park near the church.’ ‘Drive up the hill until you come to the filling station.’ They tell us where we’ve got to on a journey. And sometimes they become personal symbols of a particular place.

When I drive home to the Cotswolds from London, part of my journey is along the A40, which takes me across Oxfordshire and into the hills of Gloucestershire to my destination. Just before the Oxfordshire town of Burford I begin to notice the drystone walls of the Cotswold fields and the limestone architecture of my home patch, and for me, on this journey, all this is symbolized by this stone barn, which sits in a field near trees a couple of hundred yards from the road.

On the Cotswolds, field barns like this were mostly built in the 18th century and later, to service the kind of farming that came in when the open fields and commons were enclosed. They often have just one large porch – unlike farmyard barns, which usually have two, providing a big interior space for threshing. These field barns weren’t used for threshing – they were for keeping fodder for animals and for sheltering the beasts in winter. After a long life, this one has been re-roofed with what looks like corrugated asbestos, a popular cheap roofing material 50 years ago, and I think is unused now.

When I pass this barn I know that I’m in the limestone country at last and in a couple of minutes’ time I’ll be in Gloucestershire and on the last leg of my journey. I always look out for this building, and it has acquired a personal meaning for me beyond any architectural or historical interest it may have. As the sun of a winter’s evening lights up the surrounding trees and suffuses the barn’s limestone walls, catching my eye for a split second as I whiz by, it stands for nothing less than the warmth and welcome of home.

Snowshill, Gloucestershire

Memories of summer

Having returned from a dry but chilly Czech Republic to an England dampened by winter rain in full spate, I felt that I needed a memory of summer. So here's a picture of one of the lavender fields that paint the landscape around Snowshill, high in the North Cotswolds, with their special and evocative colour. Many fields round here are still bounded by their traditional Cotswold drystone walls, structures held together without mortar by the skill of the waller in selecting and placing appropriately shaped chunks of limestone. Many people don't realise, though, that some humble buildings – farm buildings, especially – also have drystone walls.

This example is a case in point. No doubt it was once roofed with Cotswold stone 'slates' too, but these have been replaced with corrugated iron. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a weakness for this humble sheeting, which ranks right at the bottom of the conventional pecking-order of building materials. Satisfying as a stone roof would be, I can also find a place in my heart for this iron roof covering, for the practical solution it offers when the investment required for the older material is simply too great – and even for the rich colour of its rust.

If you think the eye of this beholder is eccentric in finding beauty in the rusty roof, enjoy the flowers.

Hawling, Gloucestershire

The bends

I love corrugated iron. It’s both strong and light. It’s simple to work with, easy to bend to make gently curving roofs. It’s endlessly adaptable. Visually, it’s a material with light and shade built into it – the ridges create a wonderful texture in the sun, a rich grain because the ridges are never quite perfect, the lines never quite straight. What’s more, corrugated iron can be painted any colour, or it can be galvanized, when it gleams. With these different finishes it can look good in the walls of a barn, a shed, even a church. But corrugated iron is often seen as a low-status material. It’s for sheds and privies and outhouses on the cheap. And so it’s often left uncared-for, and allowed to rust. I’d argue that even then, it can look good. The deep oranges and browns of rusty iron can glow in the sun.

This is a rather extreme example. An iron barn in a field in the Cotswolds that has been left to the vagaries of neglect, wind, rain, and who knows what else. The result is a barn that Salvador Dali might have painted. A melting structure that won’t quite give up the ghost. The barn is next to a narrow lane in the middle of nowhere. Not too many people see it, though I pass it regularly on a back route at the beginning of my journey to London. I guess that some of those who do go past it see it as an eyesore, an example of the junk that farmers leave lying around spoiling the view in fields and yards: old harrows, decaying bits of tractors, oil drums, jerry-built chicken sheds, bendy barns.

But the countryside isn’t all rural idyll. It’s a workplace too, with all the detritus that entails. Some of the junk is useful; some of it looks interesting; some of it has a kind of in-your-face resilience. Often, like this barn, it stays in the same state, defying time, for years on end. All of which, along with the colour of the rust and the craziness of the curves, goes some way to explaining why, against all the odds, this building makes me smile.

Great Coxwell Barn, Oxfordshire

This is a rather better known building than most of the others in this blog, but it's a personal favourite and it deserves to be known even more widely. It's one of the barns built by Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire to store the corn produced on the monastery's far-flung estates. Built in around 1300 of glowing Cotswold stone, it's a barn on a grand scale – it's just over 150 feet in length and the doors are broad enough for the farm's biggest carts to drive straight in. Smaller openings in the walls are for owls to fly in and eat up any rats or mice rash enough to nibble away at the grain. Inside, from threshing-floor to rafters, the space soars like a cathedral – a comparison made by William Morris, one of this glorious building's greatest admirers.

Great Coxwell Barn, about 2 miles southwest of Faringdon, is owned by the National Trust. Visit it if you get the chance.