Kinver, Staffordshire

At the rock houses

When I first went to school we were taught that the very first human homes were in caves and that these were clearly damp, dark, unpleasant places to live, soon superseded by tents, wooden huts, and other such shelters. Today, we have a great deal more knowledge of early human habitations around the world, from houses built on frames of mammoth bones to bark-walled dwellings. But along with this knowledge goes an awareness that we are in fact ignorant of the lives of many people thousands of years ago…and of more recent communities.

What’s perhaps surprising is that in some places people were living in caves – or at least houses made by modifying caves – well into the 20th century. One of the most remarkable places where this happened was on the sandstone ridge known as Kinver Edge in Staffordshire. People hacked out large volumes of rock to make shelters and then deeper caves and built permanent brick or stone walls in front, to keep out the elements. The National Trust has done a good job of preserving a group of these houses at Kinver Edge, and the Resident Wise Woman and I did what we’d been meaning to do for ages and visited them the other day.

It’s extraordinary to look at a sandstone cliff and see a series of walls with windows and front doors set into its surface. Inside are living spaces divided into rooms – at least one room for the day and one for the night. Inside a few rooms are furnished in typical rural working-class style of the 19th or 20th century – simple wooden furniture, rag rugs, a kitchen range that combines the functions of heating, cooking, and producing hot water. The furnishings in the case of the rock houses are based on early photographs and a painting, After Dinner Rest Awhile (c. 1900), by Alfred Rushton, which hangs in the Kinver Constitutional Club. With the range fired up, the rooms seem pleasantly cosy, particularly I suppose to people like me, whose grandparents lived in a cottage kitted out in a similar way.

My grandparents’ cottage, however, had several advantages over a rock house. Because the rock is porous, the houses are perpetually damp. We were told that residents would have had to keep a fire on the go 24 hours a day to maintain an acceptably dry atmosphere. In addition, light and fresh air entered each house only from the front window and its adjacent door. This was not a recipe for healthy living.

So who lived in these houses, and when were they occupied? It’s hard to say how far they go back. Flints found just outside some of the rock shelters and houses suggest that there may have been people living nearby, perhaps in the caves themselves, in the Neolithic period (c. 4000–2500 BCE). But documentary evidence of inhabitants is of course much more recent. The earliest is of a woman known as Margaret of the Foxearth (aka Meg O’Foxholes), who lived in a shelter or house at Nanny’s Rock, about a kilometre from the houses in my photographs, and who died in 1617. Most of the surviving records concern people in the 19th or 20th centuries, when some local people must have toiled in the adjacent stone quarries or iron workings. The last inhabitants toughed it out here until the 1950s or 1960s, according to different versions of the houses’ story.

Thanks to the National Trust for looking after these traces of a forgotten way of life – without their care, the dwellings would deteriorate quickly. Even during the Covid lockdowns of 2020, algae began to grow on the damp cave walls when no-one could come to ventilate the dwellings and light a fire. Though the rock of the walls is very solid, the interiors are as delicate as threads in the fabric of a rag rug.

Bridgnorth, Shropshire

Funiculi funicula

The Shropshire town of Bridgnorth is set on steep sandstone cliffs that have brought all kinds of advantages to the place over the years – a good defensive position, caves that have been lived in until surprisingly recently, excellent views into the countryside. But it’s a challenge scaling the scores of steps that climb the 111-foot rise from the Low Town to the High Town and so in the 1890s a solution was found that most of us associate with the seaside: a cliff railway.

The building-fancier in me was immediately taken by the head building at the top of the track, a charming bit of 1892 fancy with an ‘old English’ timber-framed tower topped with a rather French looking roof. Beneath it run a pair of tracks. The original twin carriages were powered by water and gravity. Each car was mounted on top of a water tank. When the car reached the top of the slope its tank was filled, the weight sending it down the track and pulling up the other car with its empty tank.

Nowadays the lifting is done by electrical winding gear. The cars were renewed in 1955 in a curvaceous style like miniature versions of the charabancs of the time. But if with its 1950s cars and 1890s ticket office the cliff railway looks old fashioned, it’s obviously still providing an important service. The day I was there passengers were plentiful – and engineering, design, and public service were combining triumphantly together.

Reculver, Kent

Close shave

Between Herne Bay and Ramsgate, near the remains of the Roman fort of Regulbium, not far from swathes of caravans, on a cliff overlooking the relentless sea stand the two towers of St Mary’s Reculver. They are what’s left of St Mary’s Abbey, a church begun in the Saxon period – in around 669 – by followers of the St Augustine who converted the southeast of England to Christianity. The church survived the battering of the waves, the Norman invasion (after which the towers were added), the ups and downs of the Middle Ages, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the rest of the upheavals that time threw at Britain until 1809. But in that year everything changed, as the Parish Clerk recorded and Pevsner relates: ‘Mr C. C. Nailor been Vicar of the parish, his mother fancied that the church was kept for a poppet show, and she persuaded her son to take it down.’

All except for the west front with its pair of towers. Trinity House, mindful that church towers are often useful markers for those journeying on land and sea, realized the value of the towers as a sea mark for passing vessels. So they took over the towers and restored them. Tall, small windowed, once topped with spires, the pair are lovely examples of the building of the early Norman period, with their plain walls recalling those of contemporary castles. They make a stunning sight, whether seen from the land side through the ruins of the rest of the church, or, still more romantically, glimpsed on their cliff from the sea.