Devizes, Wiltshire

When is a castle not a castle?

...When it’s a toll house.

This small building was erected some time in the mid-19th century, probably the 1840s, to collect tolls on a turnpike road form Devizes to Chippenham. The building is all of a piece, with stone walls, windows with dripstones, and a parapet with battlements that remind one of a castle. But there are three distinct sections. The largest part, to the left in the photograph, would have provided residential rooms for the toll-collector, whose accommodation also took up much of the middle, octagonal, section. However the octagonal shape of this part was also useful for work, because the windows in the canted walls have good views of approaching traffic on either side – the building is actually at a fork in the road the forms the meeting place of the modern A361 (to Trowbridge) and A342 (to Chippenham). Toll houses of this period were often octagonal and the resulting angles of view were often cited as the reason for this unusual shape. Another reason could be the very distinctiveness – an octagonal building stands out on the road.

The third, right-hand, section of the house is a porch, the door of which is now blocked because an entrance on the end is more convenient these days. Another doorway in the side has been blocked too, and the space decorated with a trompe l’oeil image of a half-open door – you’d not want to step out of it these days, into the path of a passing bus. The porch afforded some shelter for the toll-collector on rainy or cold days. In the road, there would have been a gate and, when the toll-collector saw traffic approaching, he could lurk here in the dry until whatever it was – coach, carriage, cart, horse rider, pedestrian – was at the gate. He could then come out, collect the traveller’s money, and open the gate. Nowadays this is a busy stretch of road – getting a picture of the building without any cars, lorries or buses in front of it entailed some patience. Although it has been altered and now seems rather marooned between the two main roads, this castellated building still offers a glimpse of a past way of life.

Badby, Northamptonshire

Roadside eyecatcher

We’re so used to rectangular and square buildings that different shapes stand out. This house, on the A361 in Northamptonshire, is built on an octagonal plan, and immediately catches the eye. By why an octagonal house on its own on a main road? When I see something like this two things come to mind. First, a turnpike house where a toll-collector was based; such buildings are often polygonal, so that the occupant can see traffic approaching both ways along the road. Second, a gate lodge, a building type that’s often ornamental and frequently designed to stand out from the crowd.

This example began life as a gate lodge: it stands at what was an entrance to the grounds of a house called Fawsley Park and was probably built in the late-18th or early-19th century, possibly by James Wyatt. Its builders used the local ironstone, gave the windows leaded lights, and put buttresses at some of the corners, probably as much for ornament as for strength. There was originally a stone chimney at the centre of the roof.

By the 1970s the house was derelict, but it was restored in the early 1980s, when the leaded flue was added – perhaps the extension is of a similar date. It certainly seems to have made the lodge into a viable house once more, so that it remains as an attractive feature, next to some bluebell woods on the busy road not far outside Daventry on the way to Banbury.

Purton, Wiltshire

ARCHITEXTS: THINGS WRITTEN ON BUILDINGS (7)
Hexagonal or octagonal buildings often started life as the dwellings of the people responsible for collecting tolls on the turnpike roads of the 18th and 19th centuries – that’s why they’re often referred to as pike houses. They are this peculiar shape for a reason – having sides facing different ways meant that the toll-collector could easily see people coming along the road from more than one direction, and could be ready to leap out and collect the appropriate dues before a traveller slipped swiftly by in his gig or chaise.

By the year 1800 there were around 23,000 miles of turnpike road in England controlled by more than 1,000 separate local turnpike trusts. There are still lots of their former pike houses dotted all over the country. But not many of these survivors bear their old toll boards, listing the fees charged to different kinds of traffic, wheeled and/or hoofed. Tenpence for a score of oxen, fourpence halfpenny for a coach, and so on. This signboard is on a polygonal pike house in Purton, Wiltshire, that was built in the early-19th century by the Swindon, Calne and Cricklade Turnpike Trust. Its occupant would have collected tolls from traffic travelling between Cricklade and Wootton Bassett. It’s good to know that both house and signboard are still there, even though a man doesn’t pop out and demand fourpence halfpenny as one passes.