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

Stanway, Gloucestershire

The near pavilions

It is a winter’s afternoon just before the recent snow and the sun is about to drop down behind the nearby hill. It’s quiet, but not silent: somewhere not far away there’s the sound of a quad bike ticking over and beyond the trees some guns are at their work – a shot cracks through the cold air every minute or two. Parkland – old trees, iron railings, grass cropped by sheep – stretches behind me towards the golden-stone Stanway House next to its church, barn, and cluster of cottages.

But I have my back to all that, and I’m focussing on this unusual building, the wooden cricket pavilion built for the author J M Barrie, who regularly stayed at Stanway House in the 1920s. It (and a nearby tennis pavilion) was the work of a local builder, John Oakey, who provided walls of larch poles and a roof of thatch. Neither of these materials is typical of the Cotswolds and coming on this odd structure in this limestone country pulls one up short. But in a surprising Cotswold touch, the whole thing rests on staddle stones, those mushroom-shaped objects originally meant to support granaries, lifting them off the ground to deter vermin. These days staddle stones are more often seen lining people’s drives or keeping cars off grass verges, so it’s good to have this reminder of their original purpose.

During the summers Barrie spent at Stanway, many literary and artistic friends came to stay too, and cricket teams may have included such luminaries as H G Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. The Australian composer Percy Grainger also came to stay and one wonders whether, in between expeditions collecting folk songs, Grainger presided over some kind of amateur ashes contest. It’s a beautiful setting for an innings, even for an innings defeat…