Lamport, Northamptonshire

In the shadow of the great house (2)

The predominant building type in the English countryside is the cottage. As we travel around, we’re used to seeing them, clustered together in villages, occupying isolated positions at junctions or even, like the cottage my maternal grandfather lived in, set in fields full of ruminating cows. Many of the older, more picturesque ones, are vernacular cottages, built by local builders in local materials. But some cottages are designed in a more self-conscious way, with a deliberate “look”. Houses built for the workers on the great country estates, especially in the 19th century, are often like this. They might be built in brick rather than local stone, or have uniform ornamental bargeboards, or a particular kind of glazing, or the coat of arms of the lord of the manor. They stand out from the norm, and locals known instantly that they belong to such and such an estate.

Few estate cottages stand out, though, like these polychrome houses in Lamport , done in three shades of brick. They date from the 1850s, when the Victorian Gothic revival was well underway, architects like William Butterfield were dreaming up elaborate brick churches such as All Saints’ Margaret Street, London, and when the writer John Ruskin was promoting the idea of “structural polychromy” – in other words multicoloured buildings in which the colours were derived from the actual materials, rather than being merely skin-deep. Not that Butterfield or Ruskin had in mind quite the jazzy approach of this pair of estate cottages. Part of me sees them as uncomfortable aliens amongst the toffee-coloured lias stone of Northamptonshire; part of me admires their sheer nerve.

Sherborne, Gloucestershire

Limestone is one of the most versatile of England’s traditional materials. It runs in a band from Lyme Bay in Dorset to a point north of Filey in Yorkshire, a belt of stone that has given us some of our most memorable buildings – the terraces of Bath, the cottages of the Cotswolds, the church spires of Northamptonshire. Where I live in the Cotswolds nearly everything in some buildings is made of oolitic limestone - roofs, walls, window frames, floors, pavements. For centuries, Cotswolders came into the world to the sound of water boiling in a stone fireplace, and left it to be buried in a grave marked with a headstone made of the same oolite.

Everyone who has been to the Gloucestershire Cotswolds has seen houses like this – stone walls, stone roofs, dormer windows, and probably a stone garden wall and roses around the door too. The one I show above is in a village full of them. But if you look closely at it you’ll see something slightly unusual.

The doorway of this cottage has a rounded top with zigzag carving around it and the semi-circular stone above the door is carved with crosses. In other words, this house has a church doorway – and that zigzag carving reveals that it’s a Norman church doorway dating to the 12th century. What’s more, Pevsner informs us that there’s another Norman doorway around the back. If there had been one doorway, I'd have guessed that it had been moved to the site from somewhere else. But a pair of church doorways suggested to me when I first saw this house that the building began life as a place of worship before being converted (perhaps in the 19th century) for residential use – there’s another, still functioning, parish church in the village. Now a reader with a connection to the village (to whom many thanks for the information) has put me right. Apparently the foundations of a former church are still visible in the field opposite: the doorways were moved across the road.

Here in the Cotswolds we’re apt to get a bit blasé about our stone buildings. They’re everywhere and it’s easy to let them become part of the background, ignoring their details, their colour, and their beauty. Surprises like this one remind us to keep our eyes open. And as we look, to prepare to be amazed.