Avebury, Wiltshire

Marking time 

A refreshing if cold winter morning walking around the great stone circle at Avebury brought many pleasures, as it always does. The site was empty enough for us to take in the stones as individual objects, their chipped and pitted surfaces periodically lit up by the sun, and one could also enjoy the great sweeping arcs of the stones and earthworks – we were reminded yet again how much sheer work must have gone into the shifting of earth with wooden or antler shovels thousands of years ago.

Avebury also brings incidental pleasures. This is the Alexander Keiller Museum, named for and founded by the man who excavated in and around Avebury in the 1930s (funding the work with money that came from his family’s business making jam and marmalade). The museum is housed in a building that started out as the stables for nearby Avebury Manor, a structure variously dated to the 17th and 18th centuries. Like a lot of Avebury, it is built of the same hard sarsen stone as the standing stones themselves – tough stuff that’s generally used in large blocks, cutting it without modern machinery being extremely heavy work. The largest blocks here are the single stones used as lintels for the doors and windows.

The chunky look of the stone walls is beautifully offset by the treatment of this end gable, which metamorphoses into a clock tower and ends in a delicate hexagonal bell turret. I don’t know how long the carpentry work of the turret has been there, but its turned shafts and rounded arches certainly don’t look out of place on a 17th-century building, and whoever renewed them has produced something in what feels to me a fitting style. The clock face has gilded numerals and central sun rays that seem to belong in an earlier era too. It seems right, the horses having vacated the building, that it found a new and continuing use housing relics and records of Avebury’s history and excavation.* 

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* The museum was not open when I was recently at Avebury, due to restrictions imposed by the coronavirus, but the site is open as always and the National Trust’s café was doing a good job of offering a safe and distanced service, with tables outdoors for those dressed for winter as well as tables inside.

Stourport, Worcestershire

Place of resort

The elegant piece of carpentry on top of the dovecote at Rousham set me thinking about other buildings I’d seen embellished with a bit of the woodworker’s art. As it happened, I was reading a book on urban history and chanced upon a paragraph about Stourport-on-Severn. I was reminded that Stourport is best known as a canal town, begun in the late-18th century as the terminus of the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal.

When the canal got going, various utilitarian buildings – warehouses, barge sheds, workshops, and the like – were built by the canal basin and a steady traffic of boats built up. This excited quite a bit of interest, with people coming to the town just to look at the boats. The town began to become a ‘resort of people of fashion’ and a hotel was built. In addition, there seem to have been attempts to beautify the place, to make it more attractive to visitors. This warehouse, originally quite plain, was adorned with its white-painted turret, with weather vane. The clock was donated by the people of Stourport in the year 1812.

The clock turret is visually attractive and a public amenity for passers-by. It’s also a reminder that there’s a danger in thinking of places in one way. Stourport was not only a canal town, even if the canal was its raison d’être. Towns, almost by definition, are home to varied activities and the ‘resort’ of visitors who come for all kinds of reasons. It’s interesting that a clock turret that’s easy to take for granted is a sign of that varied history.

Coalbrookdale, Shropshire

 Showing your wares

In my previous post I focused on the former Severn Warehouse at Ironbridge, an industrial building that was built with an eye to appearances, a deliberate eye-catcher. This time, a rather plainer industrial building not far from the one in the previous post, but one with one particularly eye-catching feature, something that is perhaps more effective as advertising than the Gothic structure of the old Severn Warehouse.

My photograph above shows the building housing the Museum of Iron, which the Resident Wise Woman and I had decided to visit. It’s a fascinating museum, giving us plenty of background on iron and inorworking in general, on the various generations of the Darby family and the great John ‘Iron Mad’ Wilkinson in particular, and on the products of the industry in Coalbrookdale, from fire grates to firearms. All this is housed in a brick-walled warehouse building, put up by the the Coalbrookdale Company some time in the first half of the 19th century. The striking clock tower bears the date 1843, but this is said to be a later addition to an already existing building. Some sources say that the warehouse was first built in 1792, but it’s not shown on a map of 1805. 1838 is the likely year of construction.

Part of the structure is appropriately of iron – there are iron columns inside holding up the floors, but there’s also much wood in evidence: this is not one of those fireproof buildings that many textile mill owners, mindful of sparks igniting wool or cotton, liked to put up. Iron is also in evidence on the outside. The white-painted window lintels and sills are cast iron and the window frames are metal. So too is the clock tower, an elaborately decorative addition to an otherwise utilitarian building. It’s an effective piece of publicity for what you could do with metal in a decorative way, and a signal, perhaps, that as the Victorian era got up steam, manufacturers in Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale would increasingly be asked to produce highly decorative items – kitchen ranges, stoves, tables and chairs, not to mention garden railings and post boxes. There is a lot of this sort of stuff inside the museum. The clock tower is, you might say, exhibit number one.