Vindolanda, Northumberland

Markers of significance

Oh I do like a good sign. Shop signs, inn signs, ghost signs, road signs. Signs that tell us to ‘Commit no nuisance’; signs that implore us to adjust our dress before leaving. Signs that transport us to other times and other ways.* When our hosts took us to the wonderful Roman site at Vindolanda, they had a bonus to show us: not one old sign, but two close together, from vastly different eras. First, the stone column in the upper photograph. That’s a Roman milestone, and the only one in Britain that survives both intact and in its original position. It was one of a series marking the miles on the Stanegate, the Roman road that once linked Corbridge and Carlisle. The Stanegate, and the forts along it such as Vindolanda, date from the time in the 1st century CE when the Romans were advancing into what is now Scotland. When their progress was impeded in 79 CE they withdrew, so that the road became in effect the empire’s northern frontier. Hadrian became emperor in 117 and visited Britain in 122, probably staying at Vindolanda, when he ordered the wall to be built. Milestones marked the distance to the next important place along the road and had an additional propaganda value because their inscriptions mentioned the emperor. Sadly the inscription on this one has worn away, but its survival reminds us of a once essential route for the Romans, at first as a point from which to advance and later as a route for the defenders of the frontier.

As an antiquity of great importance, the milestone was put under the care of the Ministry of Works in the 20th century. The object in my second photograph is one of the ministry’s admirable cast-iron signs naming the monument and its location, and warning the reader that damaging it will render the culprit liable to prosecution. There used to be hundreds if not thousands of signs like this and their iron construction made them very durable. This one would have been put up during the lifetime of the Ministry of Works (1940–62); in 1962, the body was renamed the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, which it remained until 1970, when it became part of the Department of the Environment. The sign refers to this monument as the Chesterholm Milestone, Chesterholm being the name of a nearby 19th-century house built by the antiquarian Anthony Hedley. Before the name Vindolanda became known (in 1914, when an altar to the god Vulcan inscribed with the name was discovered), ‘Chesterholm’ was often used to describe the fort and objects found there. Although the sign was put up after 1940, people had obviously been referring to the stone as the Chesterholm Milestone for many years and the name was still in circulation.

When I started visiting castles and other ancient monuments as a boy with my parents in the 1960s, both this style of sign and the ‘Public Buildings and Works’ signs that replaced them were commonplace. Most of them have been replaced by later signs, but a few, like this one, survive. Where did all the others go? Who knows? Most of them probably went for scrap. A few must have been snapped up by collectors. Signs hold a lasting fascination for many, whether for their design, their historical associations, the nostalgia they can evoke in the beholder, or personal connections. I know of a café not far from where I live that has an old National Trust sign of similar vintage, I have friends who own old advertising signs and other antiquated notices. I am pleased that such things have found good homes, but I also like it when such a sign can still be found in its original setting, just like the more ancient and highly significant the Roman milestone.

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* For a lighthearted post on old signs, see The signs of yesteryear, from 2018.

Hexham, Northumberland

 

Welcome intervention

I’ve written before about the many positive contributions to British culture made over the centuries by those who arrived on these shores as refugees.* Perhaps the contribution to architecture and design that has been most celebrated over the last 90 or so years was that of the numerous Jewish architects, designers, and craftspeople whose flight from Nazism brought them to Britain. But there have been so many others. One group that is not widely known nowadays is made up of the Belgians who came here after the fall of their country in the first year of World War I. The numbers were vast, their impact was varied, and when I visited Hexham I saw one building where it shows.

One craftsman who settled in the area was Joseph or Josephus Ceulemans, a woodcarver.† While in Hexham he restored Hexham Abbey’s medieval font cover, which had fallen to pieces, providing intricate carving to complement what was left of the original. More of his work is visible on a shop in Fore Street. In Ceulemans’ time this was Gibson’s the chemist, where a collection of Flemish and French books had been assembled so that the refugees, many of whom initially spoke no English, had something to read. Ceulemans lavished his carving skills on the shop front, adding a profusion of vine leaves and bunches ofd grapes above one doorway (top photograph) and creating a carved tribute to Philip Gibson, Freeman of the City of London, above the shop sign (lower photograph). There is also carved foliage of various kinds and several coats of arms.

The variety of decoration found on surviving Victorian and early-20th century shop fronts is extraordinary, from Gothic arches to Classical columns, cast ironwork to colourful tiles. Wood, however, is the main material for shop fronts of this date, and few are as decorative, or ornamented with such lavishness, as this one. Another Belgian refugee commented on his and his friends’ plight: ‘We find nothing to occupy ourselves …and this idleness weighs upon us.’ Some, though, like Joseph Ceulemans, did find things to do and this carving marks a turning point in a craftsman’s life. Forced to leave his homeland, he was trying to be as active as he could in his craft (keeping his hand in, as we say), while also, no doubt, paying a tribute to the local people who made him welcome.

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* For one piece I have written about the positive impact of settlers from overseas, see this blog post from 2014.

† I am indebted to the website of the Allen Valleys Local History Group for information about Joseph Ceulemans.

Hexham, Northumberland

 

Grapes and glazing

I read online that in Britain the rate of pub closures continues to be high: on average one pub is closing every day. Apart from the loss of places to eat and drink and the disapearance of jobs, this also has an impact on architectural heritage. The more important or spectacular pub buildings are protected by listing, but there are many that, while not significant enough for listing still retain interesting or pleasing features that can disappear with a change of use. So when old pub fittings or decorations survive, I’m usually pleased, and sometimes my pleasure finds expression on this blog.

In Hexham, my eye was caught by some good embossed glass in the windows of the Grapes. Sure enough, the decoration features among other things…grapes. It also bears an unusual wording, ‘Family Department’, which may be clearer if you click on the picture to enlarge it. I’d not seen this wording on a pub before. I wonder if any of my readers know of pubs that describe their separate bars or rooms as departments? I’d be interested to hear from them via the comments page if so.

I assume that these glass windows date to the late-Victorian period. They’d be ruinously expensive to install today, especially the curved glass pieces – there are actually two of these, one on either side of the door. Their imagery (mythical beasts, vases containing plants, scrolls and the eponymous grapes) were produced by a skilled craft worker. In his excellent book Victorian Pubs,* Mark Girouard quotes a remark from an 1898 textbook of glass decoration that shows how common this kind of work once was: ‘there is scarcely a warehouse, a bank, a shipping office, or public building throughout our great towns in which embossed or ornamental glass in some shape or another is not used.’

So much of this has vanished over the years; much of what remains is in pubs. There were at least two different ways of producing these designs on glass. Both involved masking part of the design and applying acids to the unmasked portion. In some more elaborate designs, additional techniques such as brilliant cutting the glass, or applying gilding or coloured paints, were also used, but these were expensive techniques and many pubs, like the Grapes in Hexham, made do with the basic embossed decoration. The result, while calling attention to the pub and also restricting the view in from outside, can be elegant, engaging, and well worth preserving. It says ‘pub’ almost as clearly as a swinging hanging sign.†

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* Mark Girouard, Victorian Pubs (Yale University Press, 1984)

† If you’re interested in another example of this kind of glass, see my post of some ten years ago on the Albert pub in Victoria, London.

Wooler, Northumberland

In continued admiration

Up a street leading away from the town centre of Wooler I glimpsed the needle-like spire of a church. Intent on architectural wonders after the Black Bull Inn in my previous post, I climbed the upward-sloping street and quickly found that this was no ordinary church or at least no ordinary church tower, for the rest of the building in truth did seem rather ordinary, a plain nave with a flat wall to the street and a row of simple pointed windows. The tower, however, was something else.

I think of the style of this tower as Arts and Crafts Gothic with a dash of Art Nouveau. That’s to say, the architect (it’s George Reavell again) has taken the basic elements of the Perpendicular Gothic of the 15th century (pointed arches, window tracery with pronounced vertical elements but also transoms,* stone panelling that looks like blind windows, gargoyles, crenellations) and added other features that you’d never seen on a medieval building. Chief of these added things are the chunky pinnacles that lack the spirelets that top medieval pinnacles having instead little roofs with a curvy profile. Another such feature is the way in which the crenellations have tops that curve and dip towards the middle of each section. The curves up here are less Gothic than Art Nouveau and add a fin-de-siècle twist of lemon Victorian Gothic. 

Hats off, then, to George Reavell, who made this building over and gave it its outstanding tower in 1904 for the Congregational (now United Reformed) Church. There’s almost a touch of the admirable late Gothic of J. D. Sedding’s magnificent Holy Trinity Sloane Square, dubbed ‘the cathedral of the Arts and Crafts’ by John Betjeman. Not quite a cathedral, but an outstanding bit of architecture of which this modest Northumberland town should be proud. *

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* Apologies for the less than perfect picture. It was impossible to photograph this tower without at least one car and one overhead wire getting in the way. From this angle, the tower conceals another pleasing Reavell detail: a small louvre and spirelet crowning the nave roof. 

Wooler, Northumberland

 

In(n) admiration

At first glance the main Wooler seemed, how shall I put it, a somewhat plain vanilla place, but refreshment drew us here and as we made our way across the street towards a coffee shop I was brought up sharp by the Black Bull Inn. There was nothing ordinary about that enormous double-height bow window nor, now I came to think about it, was the whole facade at all bad – those many-paned upper sashes seemed redolent of Arts and Crafts and the careful contrast between the ashlar stonework around the windows and the rougher masonry surrounding it was also quietly impressive. I began to revise my opinion.

Other details confirm that something creative was going on here in c. 1900. The very good downpipe – fancy brackets, elaborate hopper head with relief decoration – is notable. As are the details in the metalwork on the bow window – the gilded nailheads, Tudor rose and fleur de lys, the ornate but not to showy lettering and mongram, and (yes) the date, 1910.* Pevsner confirms that the inn was remodelled in 1910 by George Reavell, a local architect (he went to school in Alnwick and opened his first office there), who was clearly in touch with current fashions. I don’t know much about him but I see from the Northumberland Archives website that his daughter, Mary Proctor Cahill, trained as an architect and joined him in his practice. So as well as a competent designer he was also one of those who opened up a male-dominated profession to women.

I sipped my coffee reflectively, thinking that I should know better than to underestimate a small English town. I recalled the wise words embossed on the cover of Jonathan Meades’s book Museum Without Walls: ‘There is no such thing as a boring place”.† I will return to Wooler and the work of George Reavell in my next post.

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* Click on the image to seew the details more clearly. 

†  Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls (Unbound, 2012), first hardback edition.

Etal, Northumberland

Makers and their marks

As a pendant to my two recent posts about different kinds of fortified dwellings in Northumberland (the pele tower and the bastle), here’s a third, a small castle that saw action during the medieval and Tudor border raids, as well as in the border wars between England and Scotland in the 16th century. It’s Etal Castle and my top photograph shows its residential tower. This was built in about 1341 and is probably the oldest part of the castle. In later decades, a roughly rectangular curtain wall was built with this tower at one corner and a gatehouse, which also survives, at the opposite corner. There was one other corner tower and perhaps a further tower, although excavations and surveys have not yet found its remains. Going by the extant remains, the residential tower and gatehouse were substantially built, although the curtain wall was not very thick by castle standards – about 4 feet 6 inches (1.37 m). The building remained in use as a residence until the 18th century.

One of the things that struck me was the abundance of masons’ marks in the residential tower. My lower picture shows two different marks – an equal-armed cross like an addition sign and a pair of triangles joined at one point. Medieval masons often marked the stones they were working on, presumably either to ensure that each worker was paid for the stones they’d cut, or to help with quality control. Many buildings have no such marks; perhaps only a single mason was employed, or the organisation of the job made it obvious who was working where. But on a large project, with several masons working and a senior or master mason supervising them, marks must have been invaluable.

Masons’ marks like the ones at Etal, were designed to be easy to make by cutting straight lines. As there is a limit to the number of marks one can make with a few short, straight lines, there are examples of similar makes appearing in different places and times. This does not necessarily mean that masons travelled hundreds of miles from one job to another (although we know from documentary records that some medieval master masons did travel long distances). It’s more probable that workers in different places devised similar marks independently. It’s difficult to draw clear conclusions about the careers and lives of specific masons from their marks, but, as Matthew Champion points out, such marks are ‘signposts to a better understanding’.*

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* Matthew Champion, Medieval Graffiti (Ebury Press, 2015)

Hepple, Northumberland

Poor man’s tower

The pele tower of the kind featured in my previous post was not the only kind of fortified dwelling typical of the border country. There was also the bastle, or bastle house, a type of fortified farmhouse. Bastles (the name derives from the French bastille) usually had two (or sometimes three) storeys. The farmer’s livestock (or at least, the most valuable animals) occupied the ground floor. Above this were the owner’s living quarters, separated from the room below by either a wooden or stone-vaulted ceiling. The walls were usually thick (about a metre) and there were only a few small windows. This simple arrangement has led to some dubbing the bastle the ‘poor man’s tower’, though it is not strictly a tower at all. More than one thousand bastles were built in the border region between 1500 and 1700.

Many bastles fell into disuse after life got easier with the reduction in border raids during the 17th century. Some fell into ruin, some were adapted to make more comfortable dwellings; their solid construction has ensured that they survive well. Woodhouses Bastle, near the village of Hepple, has been preserved in something close to its original form. It’s a simple stone building that would be easy for the casual passer-by to mistake for a barn. The lower room is stone-vaulted, reducing the risk of the bastle being successfully attacked using fire. It sits on a hillside, commanding a broad view from three sides through tiny windows. The largest window on the side in my photograph is protected by bars

The building bears a date stone, carved with some initials and the date 1602. The initials include W.P., probably for the landowner, William Potte. The date may well be the year modifications were made or fortifications completed, since the building itself was probably put up in the 16th century. Soon after 1602, the Stuart king James VI and I set measures in progress to reduce the danger of border raiding. While a secure home remained a valuable asset in remote areas, the heyday of the fortified farmhouse would soon be coming to an end.