Hurstbourne Tarrant, Hampshire

Down in the chalk country

In a lot of southern England the rock that underlies the fields, villages, and towns is chalk: there’s a lot of chalk underfoot in Dorset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Sussex, Kent, and Surrey. You can build with chalk, but it’s a soft rock and not an ideal building material, but along with the chalk goes flint, which is found in the upper layers of the chalk and is used in many places for building. Flint, on the face of it, isn’t an ideal building material either. It occurs in rounded nodules, and to build a wall out of these small lumps of flint, you usually need a lot of mortar. When napped or split into workable pieces with a flat side to form the face of the wall it often looks black or grey, and this can be overwhelming in large stretches.

So for visual reasons and for structural ones (lots of mortar can make a weak wall) the builders of the chalk areas have devised lots of ways of combining flint with other materials – bands or strips or blocks of other more workable stone, or courses of bricks. This kind of combination of flint and brick, which I was looking at in Wiltshire and Hampshire the other week, can be particularly attractive.

These houses are in Hurstbourne Tarrant, where there are several such buildings. Brick is often used at the corners, and around windows and doors, as can be seen clearly in the left-hand house. In the thatched house to the right, the combination is more of a mash-up, probably because the building has been altered or rebuilt at some point (or at several points). One often sees houses that combine these flint and brick walls with walls of other materials – a side wall that’s all brick, for example, or, nearly as often, a front wall of brick and a side wall of both flint and brick. The resulting patterns are usually pleasing from whichever angle you view the building, with ingenuity and visual flair working well together: in places with this kind of architecture there’s never a visually dull moment.

Westbury, Wiltshire

Layers of history (1)

The hillside figures of the chalk downs are some of England’s most memorable sights and testimony of the human need to make marks on the landscape on a large scale. This need has clearly existed for hundreds of years – though quite how many centuries no one really knows, as the origins of these figures are undocumented. There is a persistent story that this one near Westbury in Wiltshire was first cut to commemorate the Battle of Ethandun, the occasion when King Arthur defeated the Vikings in 878. The battle was probably fought near here at Edington, though the exact location is not certain. The chalk beast may originally have been a more stylized horse, like the wonderful one on the downs near Uffington. But the first written mentions of the Westbury horse are as recent as the 18th century – the creature is mentioned in 1742 and was recut in 1778 by George Gee, steward of Lord Abingdon.

The Westbury horse is in a dramatic hillside position and makes a stunning sight as one drives eastwards along the B3098 out of Westbury, the view I have tried to capture in my photograph by risking life and limb and standing in the middle of the road. This hillside is interesting for another reason – it forms the edge of an iron-age hill fort, the earthwork-bound Bratton Camp, which was occupied in the 250 years before the Romans invaded England. And this is a still more ancient site, because the hill also houses a Neolithic barrow some 2,000 years older than the hill fort.

So the horse at Westbury is an example of the tendency, common in England, to place structures or images of significance on or near ancient sites. This is hardly surprising when the ancients picked such good locations for their barrows and hill forts, of course. But it is interesting how often this historical layering of structures marks a continuity of occupation and significance going back over millennia.

Perhaps it only goes to emphasize the importance of the figure and its positioning that in he 1950s someone thought it right to replace the bare chalk with a layer of white concrete, eliminating the need for the figure to be constantly recut. Much as I’d like it to remain a true chalk figure, I’m also glad that, in its modified form, it is still there, reminding us of the past generations who lived on the hill and gave the area is enduring symbol.

Uffington, Oxfordshire*

Chalk, pale and friable, seems an unlikely building material, but it’s the local stone on the Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Dorset Downs, on the Chilterns, on the North and South Downs, in parts of Cambridgeshire, and on the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds. In many of these areas you can find traditional buildings constructed of blocks of chalk. Builders liked this material because it is easy to shape, but they had to use it wisely if it was to last.

The village of Uffington is famous for the chalk figure of a horse, cut into the turf of the nearby hillside and best viewed from the air. The place has a number of old chalk buildings too, notably this schoolhouse, which dates form the Jacobean period as wears its 400 years well. Like many chalk buildings it stands on a base of stronger stone. It’s interesting to contrast the quality of the masonry of the upper and lower portions of the building. The tougher stone is rougher of surface and laid in irregular, rubble-like pieces. The chalk has been cut into larger blocks laid in regular courses, neatly jointed. This soft stone was much easier to cut finely and joint precisely, and masons no doubt liked the neat finish they could achieve with it.

A cottage in the same village shows the traditional roof for a chalk building – thick thatch with a generous overhang. The stone base and thatch covering give the house, in the old phrase, ‘a good hat and a good pair of shoes’, so relatively little rain gets to the chalk in between. Well constructed and cared for, this house has lasted for centuries in spite of the soft and yielding material of its walls.

*Postscript: To me, Uffington is still in Berkshire, and it is to be found in the Berkshire volume of Pevsner's Buildings of England series, which still adheres to the old county boundaries, praise be.