Framlingham, Suffolk

Show of strength 

Framlingham Castle looks very impressive as you approach it from the town. Today the entrance is along a path bounded by hedges, across a small 16th century bridge over a defensive ditch, and through the gatehouse. The main defensive element is the stout curtain wall, punctuated by 13 rectangular towers. Inside, built against the walls were the main accommodation buildings including a chamber block and chapel of which only fragments remain.

The defensive walls look strong, as well they might, because they were home to the Bigod family, earls of Norfolk and in the 12th and 13th centuries probably the most powerful family in Suffolk. Hugh Bigod was famously astute at changing sides during the civil war that erupted in the 12th century between the two rival claimants to the throne, Stephen and Matilda. However, when Henry II became king, he sought to curtail Hugh’s power, took over the castle, and dismantled it…although he finally gave the estate back to Hugh. Hugh’s son Roger rebuilt the outer walls of the castle, probably completing them by 1213, when King John stayed at Framlingham.

Although the walls and towers certainly look the part, the towers are not as substantial as they seem from outside – they are open at the back and most have no inner floors for accommodation, just an upper wooden bridge to allow defenders (and now visitors) to walk along the upper part of the walls. They would, though, have provided defending arches with a useful vantage point from which to observe, and shoot, approaching enemies. Another showy feature was added later. A number of the towers have particularly ornate tall chimneys. These were added in the 15th century, by which time the Bigod line had died out and the castle was held by the Dukes of Norfolk. My photograph shows three chimneys, though there are several more. Hardly any of them were ever connected to fireplaces – the towers, after all had no rear walls. They seem to have been there primarily as rather superficial status symbols. ‘We live in the lap of luxury here,’ they seem to say.

We are used to thinking of castles as military buildings, built to be as strong as possible for defensive reasons, and devoid of anything approaching comfort, let alone luxury. According to this view, if a castle bore status symbols, they’d come in the form of defensive bells and whistles – an extra-strong drawbridge, perhaps, or a supersized moat. The towers at Framlingham could be said to fall into this category. But the chimneys are different, speaking of an image of comfort and sophistication. The more work is done on castles, the more this sort of thing emerges – some castles had not just vast banqueting halls, but elaborate gardens, for example. A castle was a home as well as a fortress.

Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire

 

Local industry

Many people visit the Cotswolds, and most of them come to see quaint limestone cottages and medieval churches, and to walk in the hills along the many waymarked footpaths, taking in stunning views of vale and hill as they go. They come for rural beauty and tranquility, but many of them end up in the most popular showcase towns and villages, from Chipping Campden to Lower Slaughter.* They find find what they’re looking for, but also sometimes what they don’t expect, like surviving evidence of past industry, from cloth-weaving to corn milling, for Cotswold sheep produced wool from which cloth was made and Cotswold people needed flour to make bread. The area is crisscrossed by fast-flowing streams that provided water power for some of these industries.

So it was at Lower Slaughter, which is mainly a stone village that also contains this former corn mill, built partly of brick. There was a corn mill here at the time of Domesday Book, drawing water power from the local stream, the River Eye. In the 18th century, the mill was rebuilt partly in brick, and at some point steam power must have taken over from water, hence the chimney. The millstones turned to grind corn into flour until 1958, when it closed, no doubt unable to compete with larger mills elsewhere. From the late 20th century until the very recently, the mill was a tourist attraction, with displays showing the history of the village and its mill and where visitors could still see the round stones that ground the corn and the other mill machinery.

Although according to online sources, corn ceased to be ground in the 1950s, I’m sure I remember visiting the mill in around 1997 or 1998 and buying a bag of flour ground there. Perhaps the flour was ground at another site belonging to the then owners? Maybe one of my readers could enlighten me. There was certainly a shop and tea room on the premises until recently.

However, the mill is now closed to tourists and its future is uncertain. But at least visitors can still see its impressive chimney and water wheel, evidence that, for centuries, there was more to the Cotswolds than agriculture and quaintness. I hope the building finds new owners who can find a use for it and preserve it.

- - - - -

* The name Slaughter has no macabre origins. It comes from an Old English word for ‘wet land’.

Hereford

Have a butcher’s at this

After a necessarily brief trip to Hereford recently, the Resident Wise Woman and I simultaneously came up with the thought that we ought to return and explore the place more thoroughly. It was not just that interesting buildings other than the familiar cathedral seemed to be popping up all over the place, but also that the sunshine brought out many details I’d not really looked at before, like some of the carving on this timber-framed building in the city centre. This landmark of 1621 is known as Butcher’s Hall, and was originally part of a row of wooden-framed shops and houses built by the city’s butchers. The rest of the row was demolished in a wave of architectural violence that occurred, I think, in the 19th century, when the city’s extraordinary medieval market hall was also destroyed. Only this stunner, now isolated at one end of the long open market place called High Town, remains.

The building’s name is almost certainly misleading. It seems not to have been a public building but was put up by one man, said to be the butcher John Jones, for his own use. It’s a riot of wooden posts, beams, and braces, and is generously windowed with what would have been very costly glass. The carving, on corbels, lintels, and bargeboards, is particularly lavish, although some of that on the porch is actually an 1880s addition, done when the building was converted to form the premises of a bank. In a fishing touch that many must miss, the square brick chimney is finished with crenellations and corner projections so that it resembles a tiny castle keep. With buildings like this, there’s always something that repays a second look. Butcher’s Hall is now a museum, and when I have more time I plan to return and go inside.

Butcher’s Hall, Hereford, chimney and bargeboards

Cookham, Berkshire...and Buckinghamshire

Where is it?

It’s odd, said a Czech friend, how many English houses have their chimneys at the end. We were having this conversation in southern Bohemia, surrounded by houses with chimneys right in the middle of the building, where the warmth they generate helps to heat the whole of the house. I was showing him Cotswold pictures, and here every house seemed to have its chimneys at the end, in the gable. I explained that this was partly to do with history – many of these houses had started as timber-framed buildings, with a brick chimney built as a semi-independent structure, to best protect against fire damage. The layout survived the change to stone building.

Of course, end chimneys are not the invariable rule. Here’s a house of an unusual shape, with a chimney right in the centre of its octagonal plan. The building is a toll house, and such houses were often polygonal, so that the person inside could see traffic coming from different directions. With such a building it seems natural to put the chimney in the middle, both for convenience – keeping the fireplaces away from the walls, freeing them up for windows – and aesthetics.

When I saw this small brick tollhouse on the end of Cookham Bridge, I looked it up in Pevsner’s Berkshire volume. There was the entry for the bridge (1867, iron, by Pierce, Hutchinson and Co of Darlington, with quatrefoils on the parapet). So far, so good. But no entry for the tollhouse. Then it dawned on me. Here we are right on the border between Berks and Bucks – the river (it’s the Thames) marks the boundary. The tollhouse is in Buckinghamshire. It’s said to be early-19th century, so perhaps it’s older than the bridge. It still seems to be used as a house, and though the days of tolls for this particular crossing are long gone is still a shining example of usefulness and elegance.

Bredon, Worcestershire

Added extra

Bredon is in South Worcestershire. The low-lying apple-growing country of Evesham is not far away, but neither are the Cotswold uplands – Bredon Hill is a Cotswold outlier, and shares the limestone geology of the main Cotswold range. It’s not surprising, then, that the Reed Almshouses in Bredon combine the brick of the vale (seen in the walls round the back and the chimneys) with a Cotswold stone front to the courtyard. This stone front, with its mullioned windows, dormers, and shallow arched doorways could be on the Cotswolds – and, with those arches could date from the Tudor period, although in fact it’s a building of the 1690s.

But what’s that small freestanding building with the big brick chimney and the interesting little louvre at the top? It had me scratching my head: it doesn’t look like extra flats or houses, it’s too elaborate for a shed, and has too many windows for a dovecote. It turns out to be a laundry, built in 1871, by Bodley and Garner, no less, when they restored the almshouses. George Frederick Bodley was one of the greatest Victorian architects, known especially for fine Gothic Revival churches. He had a long working life, a lot of it in partnership with Thomas Garner. They designed churches, buildings in Oxford and Cambridge, and country houses. but clearly did not spurn smaller jobs.

I don’t know if the laundry is still used for its original function, but it’s an attractive and practical addition, a tribute to the almshouse authorities, who seem to have wanted to provide the residents with convenient facilities as well as a pleasing environment. A nice example of a small structure acting as a memorable focus – both to the building it serves and to the street as a whole.

Fownhope, Herefordshire

Wood and stone

Heading towards the church in Fownhope, I was distracted by this interesting house. I’m attracted by Herefordshire timber-framed houses and this is a substantial one, probably of the 16th or 17th century, with later additions. As is often the way, there are stone chimneys stacks at the end, and these have been extended in brick, probably in the 19th century. It all adds up to a satisfying mix of materials, even if the brick is a bit harsh and industrial in appearance compared with the rest of the building

After admiring the timber frame and the stone stacks I was struck by the low stone structure between them. What is this? A large inglenook? Bread ovens? I don’t recall noticing this type of structure before. No doubt now I’ve noticed it, I’ll be seeing them everywhere.

Bosbury, Herefordshire

On-street irregular

In contrast to the rather grand timber-framed houses in my previous posts, here's a more modest example from Herefordshire. This pair of houses in Bosbury are probably 17th century, although they have been much altered (for example, with the fitting of new window frames) in the 20th century. They have white-painted brick infill between the timbers of the rather irregular frame and the somewhat rustic-looking irregularity, with a frame consisting of different sized rectangles, timbers of varying widths, and features such as half-dormers, adds up to a kind of building quite often seen among the villages and farms of Herefordshire and the west of England more generally.

Another common feature of the timber-framed houses in this part of England is the large stone chimney stack at the end of the building, positioned to keep the heat of the fire away from the vulnerable timbers. It would perhaps originally have contained a very large fireplace but now, of all things, there's a window in one side of the stack and there must be a relatively small fireplace with a diagonal shaft running up to the brick chimney above.

Hollybush, Worcestershire

Alternative settlements (1)

From Turkey to Colombia, from Italy to Wales, there is a tradition that if you can build a house in a single night on a piece of unoccupied land then you gain the right to stay there: the landowner cannot evict you. Sometimes there is the proviso that for these squatters' rights to be secure, the chimney must be smoking by morning, or the table ready to serve up a meal, but the principle is widespread, and traced variously to Roman law, Germanic tradition, or some other ancient authority.

‘One-night houses’ are said to exist in many parts of England, on slivers of land by roadsides, on the edges of big village greens, or on ancient commons. At Hollybush, on the borders of Herefordshire and Worcestershire, there are said to be many, scattered apparently at random over the common. This building, in the middle of the common next to its landmark tree, a pale rendered cottage standing out amongst the green, must be one of them.

Such houses would originally have been timber-framed for the fastest possible build, with just the all-important chimney made of brick or stone, but have since been remodelled in masonry, rebuilt to last. They make their mark in a scatter quite unlike either the traditional nucleated village or the pattern of isolated farms that make up the majority of English rural settlement, so that if they no longer look as they originally did, these houses still provide vivid visual evidence of a once-famous bit of English folk law.