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that the very first human homes were in caves and that these were clearly damp, dark, unpleasant places to live, soon superseded by tents, wooden huts, and other such shelters.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.

Ashby de la Zouch, Leicestershire

Geologist wanted: apply within

When I passed through Ashby de le Zouch last year it was quite late in the day. There was time only to ponder an interesting shop front, have a high-speed browse in a bookshop, and walk around the town in the gathering dusk. The impressive parish church, St Helen’s, was open, but it was virtually dark in there and I made a mental note to return; and I had to be content with jumping and stretching in front of a stone wall to try to see bits of the castle.

Looking at the outside of the church, one thing that struck me was the interesting mix of building materials. My photograph shows a section of the west wall of the tower, which is part of the original 15th-century structure. Geology is not my métier, and I’m not sure what is going on with the materials here. The red stone is fairly obviously local sandstone; the grey stone I thought must be limestone,* although there are local sandstones with a greyer or yellowish tint, so it may be one of those. There are also bits of infill in what look like reused tiles. In the first version of this post I wondered if these could be Roman tiles, but a reader (see the Comments section) quite rightly points out that they're too thin to be Roman tiles, and represent relatively modern repairs.

A bit of research, online and in books, hasn’t thrown up any clear answers to the question of the stone.§ Various sources refer to the building as a sandstone church (which it is, predominantly); one or two say “limestone and sandstone”.† If anyone knows more about the various origins of this rich and colourful array of building materials, I’d be very pleased to hear from them.

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*The Resident Wise Woman, who has been, in her time, a keen collector of fossils, also thought it looked like limestone.

§English Heritage’s informative Building Stone Atlases for Leicestershire and the neighbouring counties show mostly sandstones in this area, although there’s a patchwork of other stones in small quantities.

†Some architectural sources, such as Pevsner and the building’s official listing, barely mention materials at all. Architectural historians are often at sea when it comes to geology.

Abbey Dore, Herefordshire

The monks and the birds

Near the border of England and Wales, deep in Herefordshire’s Golden Valley (the valley of the River Dore), among high hedges and garrulous rookeries, within sight of the Black Mountains with their evocatively named heights (Hay Bluff, Lord Hereford’s Knob), and close to one of my routes to the book-lovers’ haven of Hay on Wye, lies the sandstone Dore Abbey, home of the royal arms in my previous post. It’s the kind of quiet spot the Cistercians favoured, away from the distractions of the world and the city, where they could farm in peace (they were among the most successful sheep farmers in the Middle Ages), and build their monasteries and their communities.

Most of Britain’s greatest Cistercian abbeys, such as Yorkshire’s Fountains and Rievaulx, Gloucestershire’s Hailes, and Tintern in the valley of the Wye, are ruins now, but at Dore Abbey, part of the building – the choir, transept, and crossing of the original church – remains in service for parish worship. In the monks’ time, where there are trees in the left-hand part of my photograph above there was a long nave, and its disappearance accounts for the unusual shape of the church. As we look at this fragment, though, with its continuous background noise of cawing rooks, the tall pointed lancet windows give an idea of the building’s strong but simple Gothic architecture.

 
It is even more impressive inside. Repeated lancet windows, pointed arches, and piers with multiple shafts line the choir. Light pours in from the splayed upper windows, creating patterns of light where the arches are deeply moulded. There is a minimum of carved ornament (the austere Cistercians eschewed the sort of rich foliate carving that covered other Gothic churches of the time)  but a strong sense of linear pattern. The arches and mouldings create a clear sense of the kind of space the monks wanted – and it is a rare treat to find it all surviving as an interior, roofed and used and protected from the elements and enhanced with fine furnishings from the 17th-century restoration. And so quiet too, in little known southwestern Herefordshire, in a corner where now the rooks must far outnumber the human population but the lucky few who are left can enjoy a place of peace and a setting for contemplation.

Kilpeck, Herefordshire

Virtuoso carvings

Last week I went to Herefordshire to show some friends one of my favourite buildings, the parish church at Kilpeck. It rained, and the local countryside, already sodden, took on a dark beauty all its own, the contrast between wet green grass and red soil and stone as powerful as ever. The light wasn’t ideal for photography, though, so the pictures are from an earlier trip.

The church of Saints Mary and David, Kilpeck, was built in the 12th century, probably the 1130s, and survives intact with very few later alterations. It is the best place to go to look at the sculpture of the extraordinary ‘Herefordshire school’, whose work is scattered through many Norman churches in the county and in parts of neighbouring Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, but is seen in its most concentrated form in Kilpeck’s small church, which is both well preserved and stunningly decorated.

The 12th-century Herefordshire sculptors produced carvings not only of saints and priests, but also of animals, monsters, and grotesques. Their work is capable of both stylish simplicity and complex detail, high seriousness and earthy humour, and it encompasses huge fonts, Kilpeck’s elaborate doorway, carved shafts and panels, and small, often humorous corbels. The photographs here show part of the doorway and a few of the corbels, which depict a range of subjects from real animals and musicians to mythical beasts.

Scholars have detected Celtic, French, Spanish, and Scandinavian influences in the Herefordshire carvings. The Scandinavian element may come via the Normans’ Viking heritage, the western French and Spanish from a trip made by local pilgrims through France to Compostela. The synthesis, though, carved in the red sandstone so typical of the area, is pure Herefordshire.

If I get the chance to return to Kilpeck in better weather I will post more photographs of this building. But meanwhile, most of the sculptures on the church can be seen here.


Kilpeck, a selection of corbels

Kilpeck, south doorway, drawing by G R Lewis, 1840

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.

Weobley, Herefordshire

With one city, no big towns, a small, mainly rural population, and a dearth of motorways and heavy industry, Herefordshire is one of the quietest of all English counties, little known to outsiders. Yet it has a beautiful rural landscape – of rolling hills, sheep fields, cider apple orchards, views towards the uplands of Wales. As in much of rural England, buildings add to and enhance this character. Herefordshire has some good building stone – the pinkish sandstone that Hereford Cathedral is built of, for example, and limestones in a range of colours from yellow to chocolate. But in many areas the dominant local building style is “black and white” – a timber frame infilled with wattle and daub.

There are whole villages of black and white houses in Herefordshire, and one of the finest is Weobley, between Hereford and Kington. The photograph shows the Red Lion, bits of which date back to the 14th century. This part of the building has a timber-framed upper floor on top of a sandstone ground floor. The upper floor has a big overhang, a feature called a jetty which gives a little more floor space upstairs. More importantly, a jetty was a sign of status – to the medieval mind it said, ‘I can afford the extra wood and the skilled carpenter that this feature demands.’ The arch-shaped timber braces either side of the window on the end wall are high-status features too. The plaster red lion is a much later addition, but affords a touch of charm and colour. Here’s to it.