Naunton, Gloucestershire

 

Across the fields

This is one of those buildings I’d seen for years across the fields, but hadn’t got round to a proper visit until comparatively recently. Maybe at the back of my mind was the fact that I’ve featured dovecotes on this blog several times – perhaps another was a dovecote too far. But having a further look at my pictures, I’m inspired to share them, especially as this one is a little different from the others because of its history.

As many readers will know, dovecotes in England were restricted in use in the medieval period – only lords of the manor or members of the clergy were allowed to keep doves or pigeons and take the birds’ young as food. Many villages had one dovecote for lord or priest, but most of these fell out of use – if not earlier, then in the 19th century, when corn prices soared and birds ate more grain than the value of the meat they produced. The dovecote in the Gloucestershire village of Naunton was one that survived because it was converted for another use.

As you can see from my first photograph, this dovecote is square and built of Cotswold limestone. The roof has four gables and is covered with local Cotswold stone ‘slates’. At the apex is a tiny turret with entrance holes for the birds. The location of this entrance is such that a bird could get a good view of the sky and possible predators before venturing out. That gabled roof design is very typical of the Cotswolds, and the resulting valleys where the sections of roof meet show the skill of the skill of the Cotswold roofer. What I’d not considered until I looked this building up online* was that these sections of roof provide attractive perching surfaces for the birds. At any time of day, at least one part of the roof will be sheltered from the wind and when the sun is out, there’s always one section of the roof that its rays can meet.

Inside there were originally about 1200 nesting holes, which makes this a very large dovecote. At some point the bottom five layers of holes were blocked, perhaps because of incursions of rats, but there are still 903 holes, which would have provided meat for a very large household.

By the 19th century the building was used as a mill. This may have been the time when the lean-to extension was added. Photographs from the 19th century show narrow streams connecting this building with the nearby river, acting as the head- and tail-race for the waterwheel within. So instead of housing wheat-eating doves, the building ground the grain into flour. I don’t know how long the mill operated – several decades probably. The lean-to is seen without a roof in a photograph of 1949. Now both dovecote and lean-to remain empty, accessible to visitors and cared for by the Naunton Dovecote Trust. Empty, that is, apart from a few avian inhabitants, a couple of whom can be seen perching on a high beam in my second photograph.

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* I’m indebted to the excellent website of the Naunton Dovecote Trust for this and other information.

York, Rowntree Park

 

Gate of peace

I thought, when I first caught site of this structure in York’s Rowntree Park, that it must have been moved here from elsewhere. It looked old, with its silvered oak timbers and melllow bricks – certainly older than the date of 1919–21, when Rowntree and Company donated the park to the city as a memorial to its workers who fell in World War I. The structure’s similarity to a church lychgate, and the fact that it does not stand at the entrance to the park but within it, added to my confusion.

Looking more closely, though, I could see that things were not quite as they seemed. Although there is a timber framework, the side walls have a much larger area of brick than in a medieval or Tudor timber-framed building – those bricks are doing much of the heavy lifting. And it turns out that this gateway was built for the park, its architect probably being Fred Rowntree or W. J. Swain, as in the nearby multi-purpose house and café building in my previous post. Material online about the park does, however, confusingly refer to it as a lychgate, the structure traditionally marking the entrance to a churchyard, where at funerals, the bearers may rest with the coffin, before proceeding on to the church (‘lych’ being an old word for corpse).

In fact it is a gateway from the outer part of the park, where the café stands, to a quieter inner area, a garden with a water feature, a statue of Mercury and an ample supply of benches, where one might rest and indeed remember those who laid down their lives in war, as the Rowntree family clearly intended. I have begun to think of it as a lychgate to a memorial garden, that garden being the horticultural equivalent of a cenotaph.

The gateway’s simple vernacular structure does this job well, aided by two further powerfully suggestive elements. Inside are two brass plaques, describing the donation of the park after World War I and the further donation of some fine wrought-iron gates after World War II. The first plaque is in retrospect very sad, expressing at it does the hope that the first conflict might be the ‘end of war’ and that the creation of the League of Nations might be the crowning post-war achievement. In the light of subsequent events, a further suggestive symbol is perhaps more powerful: in the roof of the lychgate is a dovecote – the entrances for the birds are just visible in the gable end – and white doves still flutter in and out. At least these delicate creatures endure, living symbols of peace, both peace in general and the peace of the garden that the Quaker Rowntrees shared with those of us who survive.

Dunster, Somerset

Inside view

Anyone who looks at the different types of building that I write about on the English Buildings blog would be forgiven for thinking that I have a bit of a thing about dovecotes. I’ve done about a dozen posts about dovecotes over the years and yes, I do like them, both for the light they shed on past lives and diets and for their variety of structural forms – examples include structures built of stone, brick and wood; plans range from squares to octagons and, mostly common of all, circles.

Why circular dovecotes? The one at Dunster, which may date back to the 13th or 14th century but which many think is more likely to be 16th century, is well enough preserved to show how such a building worked. From the outside, the emphasis is on solid walls and small openings (through the little lantern or louvre at the top), to let in the doves or pigeons, while keeping out larger predators. The largest predator of all, man, can enter through the door, which would most of the time have been kept securely closed. Through it, the workers of the local lord (or, if the dovecote is from one of the earlier possible dates, monks of the Benedictine priory)* could enter and gain access to the nest boxes, where the eggs or young birds could be gathered to provide a welcome supplement to the medieval diet.

The key feature inside, apart from the 500 or so nest boxes set in the walls, is the central wooden device called the potence (photograph below). This consists of a substantial central post that can rotate and to which are attached horizontal beams and platforms. These in turn support a ladder. When the potence is turned, the ladder gives access to different next boxes, making the whole array of boxes accessible. Many ancient dovecotes have lost this mechanism, but at Dunster it’s preserved, giving us more of an idea than usual about how the dovecote was used, and an insight into the ingenuity of medieval and later carpenters.

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* Only nobles or members of the clergy (monastic or secular) were allowed to build and maintain dovecotes in the Middle Ages.

Dunster dovecote, interior showing nest boxes and potence

Compton Beauchamp, Oxfordshire*

For the birds…and the rest of us

One of the incidental benefits of church crawling is the other buildings one encounters on the way or near the destination. Before I’d even entered the church at Compton Beauchamp I’d already glimpsed the neighbouring big house (too private to photograph) and as I walked up the path to the church, this little building met my eyes almost at the same time as the pale chalk walls of the church itself. It’s a wooden dovecote, and is best appreciated from inside the churchyard, where it sits on the edge of its own small enclave, behind a yew hedge, in a part of the churchyard apparently set aside for one or two secluded graves. There’s even a nearby bench on which to collect one’s thoughts.

Weatherboarded walls, a roof of stone ‘slates’, and a tiny structure on top, too small to be a turret, too slight to be a cupola, too open and louvreless to be a louvre. Pevsner assures us that the nest boxes are still within, and one would be tempted to introduce a dove or three and see if they took to it. It’s said to be 18th-century, and what my picture above doesn’t show is that it is raised on staddle stones, those mushroom-like structures usually used to raise granaries away from the ground and impede the progress of rats and other grain-eating rodents.

Albeit unoccupied now by birds, this building is a small delight. If it’s a reminder of an unsentimental time when people removed the young doves or pigeons (known as squabs) for the cooking pot, it’s also a testimony to a way of building that could make even a modest structure pleasant to look at. We’d do well to have a bit more of that today. 

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* Formerly in Berkshire, which as a devotee of the old county boundaries I feel compelled to mention; also because it is still included in the Berkshire volume of the Pevsner Buildings of England series.

Staddle stone supporting dovecote, Compton Beauchamp

Bridport, Dorset

Chapel in a garden

Bridport’s Unitarian chapel was built in the 1790s after a group split from an existing independent congregation in 1742. The then minister, Thomas Collins, refused to affirm the divinity of Christ, leading some 200 people to leave and set up their own congregational chapel elsewhere in the town. Those who remained continued under Collins’ ministry, and in 1974 they agreed to build a new chapel, then called the New Meeting, the building that survives today.

The building is a standard 18th-century chapel, with symmetrical front, round-headed windows, hipped roof, and central porch, the latter given a touch of elegance by its semi-circular shape and Ionic columns. But the most distinctive thing about it today is its position, set back from the street and fronted with greenery and flowers. It’s hard to imagine a better setting for a chapel in the middle of a town. The congregation invites passers-by to sit and enjoy the green space, where they can find rest, relaxation, and, perhaps encouraged by the gentle cooing of the doves, spiritual enrichment.

The doves have their own miniature building, which can be seen on the left in my photograph. It’s ornate, octagonal, and painted the same white as the bricks of the chapel’s facade. The occupants perched obligingly and eyed me as, taking welcome relief from Bridport’s busy main street, stopped to take the photograph. Christians have long used the dove as a symbol of the Holy Spirit. Unitarianism rejects the Trinitarian notion of the deity, so have no place for that symbol. However, doves have long been linked with peace and purity, and few, in this tranquil setting, would take issue with that.

Avebury, Wiltshire

Humans and other animals

Another of the incidental joys of Avebury, ignored by many visitors, or at least taken in with a rapid glance, is this dovecote. It is not the first dovecote I’ve posted in the long history of this blog, which is in part here to celebrate buildings that are out of the ordinary run of domestic, religious, or industrial architecture (although there’s plenty of all that here too). I particularly like many dovecotes because they are round – a shape that’s visually pleasing but also well suited to an internal design in which a central post carries a ladder that can be rotated so that one can reach any one of the hundreds of nest boxes inside.

Like the museum in my previous post and the stones in Avebury’s great prehistoric circle, this building is made of sarsen stone, with a couple of details in brick. This helps this out of the ordinary structure belong in its grassy spot among a collection of buildings, including the wooden barn that houses one of Avebury’s two museum spaces and the stone stables now occupied by the other museum. Stables, barns, dovecotes: this corner of Avebury would once have been home to a variety of creatures. Now the human animal – behaving in an admirably civilized manner when we were there – is the most usual living thing, its English variety frequently in search of coffee or tea.

Rousham, Oxfordshire

Finishing touch

After my recent dovecote post, I remembered one more dovecote that couldn’t resist sharing with my readers. This is the one close to the great house at Rousham. The little building, tucked away in a walled garden, is unregarded in a place that’s full of interesting architecture: Rousham’s gardens have few rivals in this respect, and because they’re not vast and always open, the impressive array of garden buildings and sculpture is not difficult to see. This dovecote is in marked contrast to the small-scale but grand classicism and gothicism of the garden structures. It’s a country building in the vernacular tradition, with local stone walls and a stone-tiled roof. ‘Dovecote of 1685, with a conical roof with hipped dormers’ is about all Pevsner feels the need to say about it.

But look at the lovely louvre* at the top, with its lead-covered ogee top (mirroring a similar ogee cupola on the nearby stable block), and its neat wooden bars, with wider spaces at the bottom to let the birds in and out. I don’t think there are birds living in it now, but this culminating louvre (being wooden it’s presumably a modern replacement) seems to me a perfect finishing touch. Its artful design seems typical of the place: whenever I’ve visited, Rousham has given me the impression of a place that’s well cared for by the family who own it – and who’ve lived there since the house was built in 1635, fifty years before this charming structure was first erected across the walled garden next to their house.

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* Louvre is the accepted term for the a turret- or lantern-like structure at the top of a roof, open in some way to let out smoke from a hearth or to admit the inhabitants of a dovecote.

Spetchley, Worcestershire

For dove devotees
As is often the way with my explorations of English buildings, I went in search of one thing and found something else as well. In this case I was heading out of Worcester on a road I don’t usually take, in order to visit the church at Spetchley, with its impressive group of Berkeley monuments. Not far away I spotted this, and although the picture is from a while back, the stormy sky seemed appropriate for this month’s rough winds in Britain.

It’s a dovecote in a farmyard. I’ve posted pictures of dovecotes before. They’re often interestingly shaped buildings – circular or octagonal, for example: round dovecotes are especially favoured because they worked well with a ladder on a pivoting arm, enabling the owner to reach the young doves in their nest boxes.

This one however is square, probably 17th or 18th century, and timber-framed, reflecting much of Worcestershire’s traditional architecture. The walls are plain but there’s a touch of swagger in the little turret or louvre at the top, with its arched entrances through which the inmates can come and go. Its tiny overhanging pyramidal roof, covered with the same red tiles as the main roof, is a charming touch, sheltering the entrances and providing a landmark for returning doves seeking shelter from the storm.

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For more dovecote posts, see, these round, octagonal, and square examples, all built of stone; or, for yet more, click on the relevant word in the tag cloud in the right-hand column.

Eardisland, Herefordshire

Fit for new purposes

Looking for something to post at a time when I'd not seen anything new recently, I made a virtual visit to Eardisland by browsing through my photo library. I was reminded that, have diverted to this Herefordshire place when en route to somewhere else, I'd found not only the preserved AA telephone box that I posted some years ago, but also a wonderful brick-built dovecote. They say it's 18th century, although at least one source dates the building to the 17th. The most recent edition of the Pevsner Buildings of England Herefordshire volume sums it up: c. 1700.

Whatever its exact age, it's impressive, even though it shows signs of repair and alteration in the 20th century. The louvre at the top where the doves came in and out, at the junction of the four-gabled roof, is still there, and there are still large stretches of original brickwork, albeit punctuated by a large section of presumably later bricks in a different colour on the flank wall. The square, four-gable shape is not an unusual one for a dovecote. I suppose it has the twin benefits of allowing the birds to fly up into the louvre exit from whichever side they're nesting on, while also producing a pleasing shape that can often act as a focal point in a yard, garden, or, as here, a village street. This dovecote is quite tall, and unusually has ground and upper floors: the ground floor was originally a garden room while the doves occupied the upper space.

The dovecote looks well as you approach it over the bridge, and it's good to see it has found new uses – changes of use are often vital if ancient buildings are to be preserved, and can enable a building to become not just a heritage asset but also useful, and so more likely to last. The dovecote now houses a museum on the upper floor and a small shop downstairs. As I was passing quickly through when I took this photograph, I didn't call in at the the shop, but I see online that it's run by volunteers for the benefit of the community. Such an enterprise can be an asset to a village, especially if it has has lost an earlier village store or Post Office. Small shops become community hubs, centres where people not only buy provisions but also exchange news and information, and pass the time of day. Next time I'm passing, I'll make a point of stopping, saying 'hello', and, I hope, making a purchase or two.

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* There is a reference to a dovecote here in 1469, but that would have been a different structure.

Idlicote, Warwickshire

Masculine, feminine…

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a soft spot for dovecotes – useful and often picturesque buildings from centuries gone by. Dovecotes often have an usual shape – round or octagonal, for example. Such shapes can be functional as well as picturesque because inside there’s a ladder on a central rotating column that you can push around to reach the hundreds of nest holes inside.

The octagonal dovecote at Idlicote, visible from the gateway to the nearby big house, is especially attractive because it’s tall, so makes a strong impact, and because it has some charming faux-Gothic features: curvy ogee-headed windows, and imitation arrow slits, as if it’s left over from some ancient fortification. It isn’t of course. The first record of a dovecote here dates to 1681, well after the castle age, and experts now think that most of the current fabric is from the 1760s and that Sanderson Miller was probably the designer. The Gothic features sit well with his flair for this style and Miller was a local man who worked a lot in Warwickshire, so this seems to fit.*

Sanderson Miller liked creating an impression of medieval castle architecture with towers and battlements, evoking what Horace Walpole called ‘the rust of the Barons’ Wars’: a hint of the tough, masculine stuff of which castles were made. But he also had a love of the more filigree, feminine side of Gothic – bigger windows, ogee arches. To a purist, these two aspects of the Gothic style sit uncomfortably together, but Miller and his clients had no such qualms. For them, structures like this dovecote seemed to sum up the Middle Ages. For us, they sum up the particular vision of a Georgian architect who was at home in the Warwickshire countryside, as is this charming building.†  

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*I’m indebted for this information to the new edition of the Pevsner Buildings of England volume on Warwickshire, which in turn cites William Hawkes, editor of The Diaries of Sanderson Miller of Radway (2005). This new Pevsner volume is full of such nuggets of fact and attribution, and when I’ve absorbed more of them I’ll review the book in my next batch of reviews, later in the summer.

†I wrote about how dovecotes were used in an earlier post, here.

Harlestone, Northamptonshire

Doves and dollies

I think I would have shared this dovecote with you whatever its context. I was immediately taken with its circular form, conical roof, and canted walls, a shape that seems to give it extra stability, as does the string course for that matter, while setting off its lovely toffee-coloured ironstone walls to great effect. It’s in what I take to be an outlying hamlet of the Northamptonshire village of Harlestone, a place not so much nucleated as a series of straggling lanes and junctions that is very much in the orbit of the Spencer estate of Althorp, whose park wall I drove past just before stopping by this arresting little building.

However, the context makes it more memorable still: a small group of cottages and associated buildings, plus a larger house (Park Farm House, ironstone again, with quoins), and above all the former premises of the Dovecote Laundry – no longer plying the dolly or posser, but still sporting its sign. It was the sign, course, that made me still more excited: regular readers will know my love of old signs and interesting lettering. Well, if you going to start a laundry here, next to the dovecote, you probably would call it the Dovecote Laundry, and you probably would give it a big blue sign with tall, eye-catching letters like these.

I’ve written several times before about the medieval liking for pigeon-meat and its general restriction to the upper and land-holding classes, noting, with my love of odd-shaped buildings, at least one round dovecote, one octagonal one, and another built into a church. I don’t know whether this 15th-century example sent its young pigeons to the table of the Spencers’ great house nearby or whether they were the preserve of the farmer, but no doubt many thousands found their way to appreciative consumer’s plates across the years. Coo!

Milcombe, Oxfordshire

A different angle

There is something satisfying about buildings that break away from the convention that determines that most of our houses and places of work are rectangular structures with rectangular rooms. Rectangles have their advantages, of course, They’re practical, accommodate our furnishings, and fit together well. But how about a round building occasionally, or an octagon, if not for human use, then for the featured tribe? There are quite a few circular dovecotes around, for the good reasons that they look good and work well. Inside, the walls are lined with nest holes, and in the centre of the interior is a vertical pole supporting a framework and a ladder. This contraption, sometimes called a potence, rotates, allowing the dovecote’s owner access to all the nest holes, so that the young pigeons (known as squabs) may be removed, and consumed. Octagonal dovecotes also have potences, although presumably the ladder can’t be so consistently close to the walls as with a circular design. Close enough, though, to allow one to lean out a bit, reach in, and do what one has to do.

This lovely example in local ironstone, with dormers in the roof and a crowning lantern through which the doves could come and go, adorns a green in the Oxfordshire village of Milcombe. The birds have long flown, but the little building is still an ornament to the village. It probably dates to the early-18th century and would originally have belonged to a farm or manor. The neat hipped dormers and lantern, together with the building’s unusual octagonal form, ensure that it’s still a visual asset to the locality, even though no longer used in the way its builders intended, and an object lesson in the pleasures that can come from buildings that avoid the ubiquitous right-angle.

Elkstone, Gloucestershire

Pigeon post (2)

The 12th-century church at Elkstone, high on the Cotswolds between Cheltenham and Cirencester, is one of my favourite parish churches. I’ve posted about it before, sharing some photographs of its doorway and its interior, with its zigzag-carved chancel arch and vaulted chancel. When I went there again a couple of weeks ago during the recent snow, it occurred to me that there’s one other aspect of this church that might interest my readers, and it’s a very curious one.

My photograph of the exterior of the church shows the east end in the foreground. The small, round-headed window above the buttress is the window in the end of the chancel, above the high altar. If you look at my earlier post about the church you’ll see that the chancel interior is actually quite low. But this exterior is higher, with a second, narrower window above the round-headed one. Unusually, this little church has a room above the chancel.

Tucked in next to the chancel arch is a small door and this opens on to the narrow and very tight spiral staircase that leads to the upper room. When you get to the top you find – nest holes for pigeons. This was the priest’s pigeon loft and presumably the birds flew in and out through the narrow window, while the priest popped up the stairs when he fancied pigeon pie. It’s extraordinary. I’ve never come across a church with its own pigeon loft before.


This room has probably not always been here. In the 12th century, the church had a central tower, positioned roughly between the two large buttresses on the left-hand wall so that it separated the nave from the chancel. At some point in the Middle Ages (probably in the 13th century) this tower collapsed and the upper part of the chancel was remodelled – this would have been when the upper room was added. The lovely west tower was built in the 15th century. As is commonly the case, the story of our medieval buildings is one of evolution over the centuries, and when you look closely, things are often not quite what they seem.

Chastleton, Oxfordshire

Pigeon post (1)

Pigeons were traditionally upper-class food and the dovecotes in which they were kept are often interesting buildings, a cut above the normal farmyard structure. This one is not in a farmyard at all, but in the middle of a field opposite the beautiful Chastleton House. It’s built of the local limestone of the north Oxfordshire Cotswolds and, like many Cotswold dovecotes is square, with four gables, and is roofed with limestone ‘slates’. What’s more unusual is the way the building is raised up on arches, with the loft reach via a trapdoor inside.

At first glance the segmental arches with their heavy piers have a 176th-century look about them – when I first saw them they reminded me of a scaled-down version of a Jacobean market hall. But this building is actually Georgian and is inscribed with the date 1762 and name of Thomas Fothergill. Fothergill lived not in the big house some 150 yards away but in another house, since demolished, next to which the dovecote stood.

The date of the building, 1762, is significant. Until 1761, building a dovecote was one of the privileges of lordship. You had to be a member of the aristocracy or a churchman to build one. Even so, by the 17th century, by which time the rules had been relaxed to a certain extent, it’s said there were some 26,000 dovecotes in England. According to some accounts, the restriction was removed completely in 1761, and farmers who had some spare money started to build dovecotes and keep pigeons to supply their own tables. If that's the case† Thomas Fothergill was quite quick off the mark and his building of 1762 is now the only trace above ground of what must have been a substantial property.

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† I have edited the text of this post slightly since it was written, in the light of some comments: it seems hard to find an actual piece of legislation than changed the law about dovecote-building in 1761–2. See the comments on this post for further information, and some references.

Minster Lovell, Oxfordshire

The ruined 15th-century manor house at Minster Lovell is an idyllic spot for picnicking, kingfisher-spotting, and meditating on the passing of time. Although the years haven’t been kind to the house – it seems to have been dismantled in the 18th century and the remains used as farm buildings – the wonderful circular dovecote is still very much intact.

Hundreds of nest holes line the walls and an impressive bit of carpentry holds together the roof, with its central lantern, through which the birds could come and go. On a hot summer’s day it’s cool inside the substantial stone wall, which is thick enough to accommodate nest holes almost an arm’s-length in depth.

That was quite deep enough, as it was the dovecote-keeper’s job to reach into the nest holes and pull out the young pigeons – known as squabs – when they were well grown and plump, but not quite ready to fly. The squabs were harvested during the breeding season (roughly March to October), providing the Lord of the Manor with a source of tasty meat. In the Middle Ages only barons, manorial lords, and abbots were allowed to keep a dovecote, so pigeon-meat was a luxury for the upper-classes, not, as is sometimes said, a winter supplement to the diet of the poor.

Dovecotes come in several different shapes. Oxfordshire alone has wonderful round, octagonal, and rectangular examples. As working farmyard buildings, they’re not usually highly decorated, but the timber-work required to roof a round or eight-sided building often has an intricacy of its own. Thanks to Neil Philip of Adventures in the Print Trade for introducing me to this one, and for providing the picture. And while I’m at it, thanks too to Emma Bradford for a picnic worthy of the Lord of the Manor.