Great Brington, Northamptonshire

On high

My affection for thatched buildings, for English pubs, and for those three-dimensional pub signs that sometimes mark hostelries such as the White Hart at Hingham or the White Lion at Upton-on-Severn comes together here. The Althorp Coaching Inn is an attractive stone building with a thatched roof where I had an enjoyable lunch recently. Walking back along the village street a bit later I noticed this charming thatched stag over the porch. He’s a cousin, clearly, of the animals that thatchers mount on roof ridges. People treat these as personal signatures, bits of local distinctiveness, marks of ownership, or just admirable whimsy.* But here at Great Brington, the stag is not on top of the thatched part of the roof at all, but surmounts the tiled section above the entrance. He’s not a name sign either – the pub is known as the Althorp Coaching Inn, and also bears the name Fox and Hounds, written in smaller letters like a subtitle on the main pub sign. Not apparently relevant then, but admirable anyway, and a memorable bit of British folk art.

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*See my earlier post, Brush with the lore, which cites Dorothy Hartley’s excellent old book, Made in England (1939); Hartley’s researches threw up these varied explanations.

Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire

Right stuff, White Stuff

“Ah, I know what that will be,” I thought to myself, looking up above a shop called White Stuff in the main street in Bishop’s Stortford. I was thinking that the building must have been a pub called the White Hart – a common pub name after all – and that I was looking at its former sign. Big 3-D signs like this are uncommon, but they do exist, and I was pleased to find another.

How wrong could I be? This magnificent beast is in fact the emblem of a volunteer regiment, the First Hertfordshire Light Horse. It was made in 1862 for the regiment’s barracks, but a few years later (some sources says in 1868, others 1872) the regiment disbanded. Major William Holland rescued the stag and had it mounted above the window of a shop he owned, where it stayed until the shop was pulled down in 1983.

Then the hart was restored and installed on this shop in 1986, where it has been ever since. It’s seriously large, this stag – it towers over the adjacent sash window, which must be well over 4 feet tall – and its shaggy coat is vigorously rendered. It’s an asset to the streetscape, a reminder of a bit of 19th-century history, and an object lesson in the way some features survive, as if truly alive and kicking, against all the odds.