Pinnock, Gloucestershire

Sunken lane

Encouraged by the lengthening evenings and a really warm, sunny day, I head off for a short walk before sundown. I remember a similar walk some years ago, when the Resident Wise Woman pointed us in the direction of some earthworks that are all that remain of the medieval village of Pinnock, high in the Cotswold sheep country. Leaving the car at a wide place in the road, I walk along the tarmac until I come to a gap in the hedge and find this sunken lane leading downhill towards the earthworks. Here in the country, it's noisy, as usual, but the noises are appropriately rural: larks singing as they rise from a nearby field; the occasional pheasant erupting with a noise of flapping wings and clanking call; the ceaseless baaing of sheep and lambs.

Sunken tracks like this are not unusual. One theory of their formation is that they mark the ancient edge of two landholdings, and that each landowner marked the boundary by an earth bank. Digging the earth to make the banks left a dip in the middle which formed an access track, and, as rainwater flowed down the slope, more soil eroded away and the track became still deeper. Hedges and trees on either side grow until they almost cover the path. Their roots and the stony ground make the way uneven and hard on the feet.

As I come to the lumps and bumps that mark the site of the deserted village I realise that, of course, the light is quite wrong to photograph them. To catch their shadows in the grass I need to point my lens right into the low evening sun. The whole site would naturally be clearer if I could get above it in an aircraft. So as the light begins to fail, I climb back up the sunken lane, thankful at least for the rural tranquility and the glimpse of this atmospheric and ancient route between the trees.

Gloucestershire noise-maker

* * *

Just after writing this, I discovered that Robert Macfarlane, superlative chronicler and analyst of all things to do with places and our routes into and through and across them, is about to publish Holloway, about his journeys along sunken lanes in Dorset with late and great Roger Deakin and Macfarlane's subsequent visits to the same places after Deakin's death. I'm sure that Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household's novel in which the hero hides in a Dorset holloway, will loom large in Macfarlane's book. It was also on my mind as I made my own walk, as was another, less well known, novel by Household, Watcher in the Shadows, which comes to its compelling climax in Gloucestershire, a few miles from where I was walking. 

Wantage, Berkshire*

Look down

I'm always telling people to look up, but this time the opposite advice is the order of the day...

While photographing some sash windows in Wantage, I catch the eye of an elderly gentleman. 'Interested in photography, are you? There's a camera club here.' I politely explain that I'm not local and anyway, my interest is more architectural than photographic. 'Ah. In that case, you should take a look at the almshouses over there.'

And I'm directed to the Stiles Almshouses: solid, brick, unpretentious, and with a weathered stone plaque telling me that they were built by an Amsterdam merchant,† of all people, in 1680, which makes them the earliest datable brick building in this admirably brickish town. I thank my companion, but he encourages me to look further, to push open the door, and cast my eyes down. And what I see takes my breath away: a floor made partly of sheep's knucklebones, a serviceable if knobbly substitute for stone cobbles no doubt contemporary with the rest of the building.

A similar floor was found last year by archaeologists excavating the site of the Curtain, the London theatre that hosted Shakespeare's company before they decamped to the more famous Globe. In those days they knew how to knuckle down and cobble together a hard-wearing floor.

- - -

*Wantage is now in Oxfordshire, but I use the traditional English counties because they reflect the usage in Pevsner's invaluable Buildings of England books – and because I like them.

- - -

†There's more about the founder of the Almshouses and the plaque above the door in the Comments section – click on the word COMMENTS below.

Hay on Wye, Powys

Hay, good looking

This is the English Buildings blog, so I don’t as a rule record what I see on my visits (all too brief for the most part) to Scotland or Wales. But I live within striking distance of the Welsh border, and it occurs to me that now and then my readers might be interested in the occasional Welsh building, perhaps one so close to the border that it can virtually be seen from England.

Hay on Wye is a town I visit often, and it’s near enough to the border to be more or less on it. It’s famous as the town of secondhand books, and even in these digital times the place is full of bookshops. People come from all over the country to browse and buy here and, as more and more secondhand bookshops disappear from most High Streets, Hay seems to survive. It’s a stimulating place to browse, and you never know what you will find – it’s the opposite of a search engine, the ultimate in non-targeted, algorithm-free discovery.

The person who began it all was Richard Booth, who started his first bookshop in Hay in 1961 and attracted publicity not just with his large and diverse stock, but also by declaring the town an independent kingdom (with himself as king, naturally). Booth has sold books from several premises in the town since then, and a couple of dozen other booksellers also trade from shops in the town’s knot of narrow streets. This is Richard Booth’s shop in Lion Street, beautifully restored with maroon period paint. It’s an interesting design, structurally a bit like an enormous shed, but with a front that’s nearly all glass. There are lots of ornate details, such as the gilded lion at the top above a date stone that says 1886, and the very fancy capitals.


But what makes it even more special is the wonderful selection of tiles on the front. The sheep and cattle depicted on the tiles have led many to assume that this was originally a butcher’s premises, but this building doesn’t feel like a butcher’s somehow – I’m inclined to believe the sources that say it’s a former agricultural supplier’s. The quality of the space inside (high ceilings upstairs, spacious wooden floors) and the wide door that one could imagine wheeling sacks through on a truck fit with this. The interior has recently been refitted with custom-made shelves, ample seating, and a café – it’s a far cry now from a seedsman’s warehouse, and a good place for both physical and intellectual nourishment.

Dymchurch, Kent

The lookers and their huts

The flat landscape of Romney Marsh is dotted with a number of small buildings that most of us would hardly give a second glance. Tiny, brick-built, with a pitched roof and a chimney at one end, these are the lookers’ huts that provided shelter for those who looked after sheep on the marsh and who needed to be near their flocks for weeks on end – especially during the lambing season. Although they’re not elaborate pieces of architecture, these huts are important because they were a vital part in the lives of ordinary people for many generations over a period of around 200 years.

Once there were hundreds of lookers’ huts, but now only 12 survive intact. Changes in farming and lifestyle have meant that many have disappeared and, because most of them were in isolated positions they often found no new use. As a result they were seen as superfluous and many were knocked down; others succumbed to time or vandals.

If the remaining lookers’ huts are not to go the way of the rest, wiping out a unique piece of history, they need advocates, and they have a powerful one in Mark Duncan, who has made it his mission to photograph all the remaining huts. Now there is an exhibition of some of his photographs of the huts, highlighting those that are most at risk. I for one hope that Duncan’s exhibition succeeds in its aim to raise awareness of these very special structures and their role in the lives of generations of lookers who worked beneath the endless open skies of Romney Marsh.

* * * *

Giving Up The Ghost, an exhibition of photographs by Mark Duncan, is at the Romney Marsh Visitor Centre, Dymchurch Road, New Romney, Kent, from 28 August to 25 October. There is more about it, with examples of Mark Duncan’s photographs, here.

The photograph above is by Mark Duncan.