Cast-iron evidence

The Resident Wise Woman reported that she’d noticed an intriguing pair of iron gateposts a few hundred yards away from where we were staying in the Suffolk town of Wickham Market. Before long I was out on their trail and quickly found the posts, with their fluted uprights and extraordinary spiky finials, which resemble some sort of close-combat weapon, such as a medieval mace. The posts are between some white brick buildings on the town’s main street. A little research revealed their story.*

The gateposts flank the former entrance to the works of Whitmore and Binyon, which in the 19th century was a major employer in the town. Nathaniel Whitmore was a millwright at the end of the 18th century; subsequent generations grew the business, producing not only equipment for milling, but also several kinds of metal goods, from bedsteads to steam engines. From their beginnings as a small local concern, the firm grew top employ some 200 people and by 1868, the Whitmores were joined by George Binyon, a successful engineer and entrepreneur, who brought expertise in agricultural engineering.

The white brick buildings on either side of the gate, which I’d taken to be houses and a shop, were in fact offices of Whitmore and Binyon, together with a shop where customers could call to discuss an order for a steam engine or a pair of gatepoists. From these premises and the factory at the rear, steam engines for mills were dispatched across Suffolk and beyond and diamond-washing equipment was made for the three main diamond mines in South Africa. The company exhibited at major milling exhibitions and had an office in Mark Street, in the City of London. The company seems to have done very well – but for a relatively short time. By 1902 it was in trouble and the works and contents were sold off. From the street, this striking pair of gateposts and modest range of buildings is a quiet testimony to what was once here. Surviving steam engines, including one in the Museum of East Anglian Life that once powered a mill down the road, provide further reminders of a once successful firm.†

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* See for example Wickham Market Movers and Shapers, here.

† I plan to do a further post about the mill for which this engine was built.

 

Small but significant

Sometimes on a road apparently in the middle of nowhere, sometimes in the middle of a village, you come across small houses next to gateways – the lodges that guard entrances to the grounds of manor houses and country houses. They’re part locator landmarks, part boundary markers, part home for the estate worker, part of whose job it is to close the gates at night or, in some cases, to keep watch ands open the gate for those who are welcome to enter.

Their style of these buildings varies, and I’ve featured a couple of handfuls on this blog with a range of looks from domed classical to timber-framed Tudoresque. The example I’m posting today is one of a couple (many miles apart) I have passed quite often, never taking a photograph because in one case, the lodge is on a busy main road with nowhere to park and in the other, there’s nearly always a car parked right outside. This is the latter one, and the other day, car or no car, I decided to stop and take a photograph anyway. The gate lodge is in northern Northamptonshire, on a corner in the village of Moreton Pinkney and guards the entrance to Moreton Pinkney Manor, a 17th-century house that was rebuilt in 1859, probably incorporating some of the older fabric. The village is on the belt of butterscotch-coloured ironstone that’s prevalent around here and helps to make this building attractive. The gateway has a segmental arch with a panel above that was designed to frame coats of arms of the Barons Semphill, the 19th-century owners of the manor, The gateway and lodge are said to have been built at the same time as the main house, and the mullioned windows and steeply pitched roofs reflect those of the manor itself. The round tower, however, is the stand-out feature, the thing that catches the eye and gives the little building a sense of importance: small but significant.

Quietly showy

This is the west lodge to Dillington House, a mainly Jacobean revival house, now leased by Somerset County Council and run as a centre for continuing education, conferences, and other events. It’s a small cottage orné of about 1830,* sited where the drive to the house joins a bend in the road, its three ‘front’ faces looking out on the road and giving no doubt a useful range of views of the curve. It would originally have been occupied by someone whose job (or part of whose job) was to oversee and open and close a gate to the grounds of the great house. The accommodation would be small and basic – I’ve seen inside a similar cottage built for toll gate on a road and it was on the cramped side of compact. Polygonal buildings also have the drawback of non-rectangular rooms, which can pose difficulties with fitting it furniture, although these difficulties aren’t insurmountable. Many such buildings, if in use today, have been extended at the back.

This house’s Y-tracery, Gothic doorway, and thatched roof into which the upper windows protrude are all classic features of the ornamental cottage of the 19th century. The building is clearly meant to be a small landmark, telling visitors that they have arrived at the entrance to the grounds, and its ashlar masonry on the front walls, rubble on others, makes it obvious that it was always designed to be seen from the road. The ‘three sides to the road’ design is similar to that of other lodges not far from Ilminster, which mark another former way in to the house, but these lodges don’t have the thatched roof that makes this little house stand out. None of the buildings is grand. They’re not the kind of lodges that bring instantly to mind the phrase ‘trumpet at a distant gate’† although the gates in both cases are certainly distant from the main house. If a trumpet sounds, it’s fitted with a mute. The tune it plays is charming nonetheless.

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* For more on this kind of house, see Roger White, Cottages Ornés (Yale U. P., 2017), which I reviewed here.

† See Timothy Mowl and Brian Earnshaw, Trumpet at a Distant Gate: The Lodge as Prelude to the Country House (Waterstone, 1985)

Tame and wild

I’d probably not normally have given the two lodges outside the village of Uffington, near Stamford, a very long glance. As we passed, we wondered what house might lay behind them and I thought they might be early-19th century. Then suddenly, simultaneously, two pairs of eyes met two pairs of eyes.’Look! Wild men!’ we cried, seeing the carvings on top of the rusticated gate piers. Wild men, men of the woods, wodewose – grisly of hair and beard, they have various names and many incarnations, but are unusual adornments for a pair of gates at the entrance to a country house.§ They seemed worth another look, so I began to search for somewhere to pull in.

The parking place turned out to be next to a pub, the Bertie Arms, and I realised the significance of the carvings on the gate piers. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Bertie wild men.’ The remark brought an interrogative stare from the Resident Wise Woman. ‘The Bertie family,’ I said. ‘They have a wild man on their coat of arms.’* I knew about Bertie wild men because there is one on one of their family tombs in the church in Spilsby, also in Lincolnshire, near where I was born – although what we were actually looking at were Saracens – see the note* below.
Looking the place up afterwards, I learned that Uffington House had been built for Charles Bertie, 2nd Earl of Lindsey in the 1680s and was destroyed in a fire in 1904. It was one of those late-17th century houses with rows of sash windows, a hipped roof, dormers and a central pediment.† Now this gateway and some other gate piers remind passers-by of the house’s presence and these very Classical, civilised-looking lodges make a memorable contrast with the splendid, vigorously carved heads atop the piers who, making a welcome change from the usual urns, stare wide-eyed across the fields towards Bourne, Spalding, and the endless fens.

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§ Wild men are everywhere in myth, literature, and heraldry. Perhaps Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the most ancient of all surviving epics, is the first wild man; they are still around in the works of Tolkien and Ted Hughes. They occur on coats of arms from the low countries to Central Europe, and Antwerp has a wild man and a wild woman as supporters of their arms. The Danish royal arms has wild men supporters and when the Danes began to rule Greece, the wild men became figures representing their Classical cousin Herakles.

* There were no wild men on the pub sign, though, presumably because the wild man on the coat of arms is one of the supporters, and the pub sign did not show these. A reader has pointed out that a wild man does indeed appear as a supporter on the Bertie coat of arms; what is on the gate piers is actually their crest (the symbol on the top of the arms), which is a crowned saracen's head.

† Uffington was one of the hundreds of houses included in the famous 1974 V&A exhibition The Destruction of the Country House.
  

Well shod

When it comes to exploring churches, sometimes the fun starts before you even get to the building.

Pausing by the churchyard wall in the Cotswold village of Farmington, you see this: a gate made up of 90-odd horseshoes, artfully arranged. Horseshoe gates are not unusual. I suppose they’re a pragmatic example of recycling – with the added attraction, for the superstitious user, that horseshoes are supposed to bring good luck. But what struck me with this example was that the horsehoes had been arranged architecturally. What I mean is that the central motif, a quatrefoil made up of four horseshoes, is a  piece of architectural ornament, and one often used in medieval churches. I have noticed quatrefoils before, on church fonts, church walls, church windows. The quatrefoil, you might say, is a way of making a horseshoe gate into a fitting entrance to a churchyard.

Or you might just say that it’s a winning bit of fun.

Stone and glass…and paintwork

Just out of the town centre of Ilminster is one of the few hints that’s there’s a big house close by: a pair of hexagonal gate lodges next to some stone gate piers. My photograph shows the right-hand lodge, which was catching the sun, warming up its local limestone walls and bringing out their slight orangey tinge here and there.

This is a building of the early-19th century, and guards one of the drives to Dillington House, a building originally of the 16th and 17th centuries that was hugely altered by Sir James Pennethorne in 1837. Dillington now hosts educational courses on all sorts of enticing subjects – as it happens I was teaching one of these courses last week, which is how I came to be here.

The lodges may well be of the same date as the Pennethorne remodelling of the main house. They are in the simplified Gothic style of the time – pointed openings, Y-shaped tracery to the windows, small battlements on top – that does very nicely for a small gate lodge. Buildings like this quite often came in odd shapes – circular, octagonal, or hexagonal – to catch the eye, to catch the sun, and perhaps sometimes because the design allowed the person inside to have a view in more than one direction, so that they could keep an eye on comings and goings.

However there’s an added twist to this building. The windows have the patterned glazing bars so popular in estate buildings in this period, but the window immediately above the door is a false one. There’s no glass there at all, just a stone impression of a window, to be decorative, with the glazing bars painted on to the masonry. A bit of trickery to remind us, I think, that this little lodge is as much as anything else a bit of architectural fun.

Narrow gateway, wide world

Just opposite the vicarage in my previous post is this grandiose gateway, through which one walks along a path to the parish church. You may well feel that there’s something odd about this structure. It seems vastly out of proportion to the low wall on either side of it, and the opening itself looks disproportionately narrow in relation to its height. I think the reason for this is that the gateway has been moved from elsewhere – probably one of the entrances to Great Tew Park – and rebuilt on a smaller, narrower scale to serve as this eye-catching prelude to the churchyard.

What remains is certainly imposing, and the ornament is very much redolent of the first half of the 17th century, when Inigo Jones and his followers were starting to introduce their disciplined and scholarly form of classicism to Britain. The masonry is carved with horizontal bands of vermiculation – the ornamental motif that is supposed to create the effect of the stone having been eaten away by worms – and each pier has a large niche topped with an arch in the form of a shell. Above each niche is a smaller oval indentation. The lintel is carved with festoons of fruit on either side of a central keystone. The use of banded vermiculation reminds me a little of the much more elaborate gateway in London’s Embankment Gardens, another 17th-century gateway that has lost its original purpose and that looks stranded but still magnificent in its current setting.
This carving from perhaps the 1620s takes us back to a time when the manor house at Great Tew was owned by one of the most remarkable figures of the time, Lucius Cary, who became 2nd Viscount Falkland and subsequently Chancellor to Charles I. One of my readers (see the Comments section to the post on the vicarage) has already mentioned Falkland, who invited to Great Tew a stellar group of his contemporaries, men who relished the intellectual discussions on offer, gatherings compared by contemporaries to those convened by Erasmus.* Many of those present came from Oxford (only about 12 miles away), but Falkland had friends from further afield too. In his Brief Life of Falkland, John Aubrey mentions some of the period’s most celebrated writers who were guests at Great Tew: ‘For learned Gentlemen of the Country, his acquaintance was Mr Sandys, the Traveller and Translator; Ben. Johnson [sic]; Edmund Waller, Esq.; Mr Thomas Hobbes, and all the excellent of that peaceable time.’  Falkland, says Aubrey, was not a great writer himself, quoting Dr Earles who said that ‘he wrote not a smoth verse, but a great deal of sense’.

Falkland died young, when the peaceable times had ended and he was fighting for the king at Newbury. It was said that he threw his life away, riding rashly into the fray when he need not have done so, and various reasons have been suggested for this, from his pessimistic analysis of his side’s chances in the war, to his deep grief at the death of the woman he loved.

Whether or not he actually had it built, this gateway, with its design that seems at home here but derives from a wide world of culture and scholarship, is no doubt the sort of thing Falkland would have appreciated. His house has been rebuilt and he has only a modest, 19th-century monument in the church, but such architectural fragments as this can act as his memorials.

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*It was Clarendon who made the comparison, and he also compared Falkland to Cicero, the great Roman consul, philosopher, orator, and letter-writer, who was as it happens an important character for Falkland’s friend Ben Jonson too.

Looking at Coleshill again (1)

I’ve visited the village of Coleshill several times and on one occasion I posted briefly about the Coleshill estate, the site of a great 17th-century house that was burned down in 1952, the remains being demolished soon afterwards. In my earlier post I highlighted the elaborate pair of gate piers pictured above, and I pointed out that I found their position slightly odd and that their ‘best’ side could only be seen from inside the gate – evidence, I thought, that they were designed to be seen by the occupants of the house rather than by passers-by.

Something I read yesterday sent me back to my old post. I have been reading parts of a fascinating new book, a series of essays edited by Jon Stobart and Andrew Hann called The Country House: Material Culture and Consumption. I’m sure I will read the rest of this book and write about it in my next group of reviews in the spring, but meanwhile I cannot resist mentioning what I read in the book’s final essay, on the estate at Coleshill.† The author of the essay, Karen Fielder, has lots of good things to say about the significance of this estate with its vanished house, but what she says about the gate piers especially caught my eye. The piers, she reveals, have been moved. They were originally in the formal gardens of the house, when no doubt the niches (and the busts they once contained¶) were set off to best advantage. But in the late-18th century the 2nd Earl of Radnor re-landscaped the garden and re-sited the piers by the road through the village so that they framed a view of the house from that road. The passer-by would have been interested in the view that the piers were framing, not in the sculptures or the gates, so placing the gateway that way round worked.

I’m grateful to this essay for putting me right about the piers’ apparently rather odd placement. It would have made perfect sense when the house was still standing. I’m grateful too for the chance to think again about this evocative place and for discovering how these traces of history tell part of its story.§ It makes me want to pay another visit.

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*Modern boundaries place Coleshill in Oxfordshire. I allocate it to Berkshire because of a sentimental attachment to the historic English counties and because these old boundaries are used by the invaluable Pevsner Buildings of England series.

†Karen Fielder, ‘X marks the spot: narratives of a lost country house’ in Jon Stobart and Andrew Hann (eds), The Country House: Material Culture and Consumption (Historic England, 2016)

¶The book includes a 1922 photograph by Nathaniel Lloyd that shows a pair of busts (of Roman-looking figures) in the niches of the piers.

§The estate’s later history, including the remains of underground tunnels used by auxiliary units, formed to supply the resistance in the event of an invasion during World War II, are also clearly well worth exploring.

Setting down a marker

Gate piers. They're one of the primary architectural signals of large buildings. You see them and straight away the eyes are peeled, the neck is craned. Somewhere beyond there's going to be a big house or somethings else – a school? a hotel? offices? something industrial? And rapidly your buildings correspondent is summing up the possibilities: is this a welcoming gate or one that wants me to keep out? If the latter, is there a gap in the hedge somewhere that offers a view of what's inside? Gate piers, like entrance lodges, are often the prelude to something interesting and exciting.

But sometimes, as I've noticed on this blog more than once before, the anticipation can no longer be fulfilled. The gate may be there, but what it heralded has long gone. It is often the way with country houses, which disappeared in their scores in the 1950s, less often with industrial buildings. But these gate piers on the Great West Road are reminders of an architectural loss as great as that of all but the grandest country house. From 1928 to 1980 they fronted the Firestone tyre factory, one of the most spectacular of the Art Deco factories on the western approaches to London. After it closed, it was demolished, during a public holiday in August 1980, just before a listing was due to come into force.

A long white Art Deco front, with big windows separated by white piers topped with colourful capitals; a central doorway with ornate surround in blue tiles; the company name emblazoned across the top in large letters that were illuminated in red neon at night – the factory was a stunner, worthy to be compared with two others that have survived, the Hoover building on Western Avenue and the Carreras tobacco factory at Mornington Crescent. And on a summer weekend in 1980, it all disappeared, save for these gate piers and gates, elegant and very Art Deco reminders of the building and its sad fate.

If every cloud has a silver lining, the consolation here is that the factory's demolition galvanised campaigners and architects to look out for other vulnerable 20th-century structures. The Thirties Society (now the Twentieth Century Society) had been founded in 1979 to protect buildings of what was then an under-appreciated period in British architecture. News of the Firestone demolition focussed public opinion, led to the listing of many important 20th-century buildings, and helped 1930s enthusiasts convince people of the merits of such structures as lidos, 1930s underground stations, and telephone boxes. The Firestone gate piers are a reminder of what it took make people realise what they could be missing.

Iron eyecatcher

In Kidderminster, while I had my eyes on the towers of distant carpet factories, the Resident Wise Woman (who can spot an edible mushroom at 200 yards through her eye corner while driving at speed along a country road) had her attention fixed on the small but significant things around her: “Look at that!”

“That” turns out to be the one surviving gate pier of Kidderminster’s former cattle market. Having been held on the streets, the market was moved here in 1871, when presumably this pier (and at least one other to match it) was put up, along with the nearby brick Jacobean-style entrance lodge. The pier and lodge are the only market structures that remain on the site, and livestock are no longer sold here, although the town still has a large general street market.

The coat of arms is the one used by the town between the 18th century and 1963, although the colours have been tampered with. The two chevrons and three large roundels should be gold and the four roundels on each chevron black. Battered and bruised, the coat of arms remains on this corroded iron pier that is coming apart but, wonderfully, has resisted the elements, the demolition men, and the heraldic perfectionists to survive to attract and please those with sharp eyes.

Spoils of war

I travel often to Central Europe, where of course I find much, architecturally, to admire. One way in which the Czech Republic and its neighbours are different from Britain is the amount of dazzling – sometimes overwhelming – baroque architecture: churches dripping with putti and vast statues of bishops, brightly coloured plastered house fronts, that kind of thing. Our Czech friends insist that there is no ‘proper baroque’ in England, and it’s true, what passes for baroque architecture here – the work of Vanbrugh, for example, or Hawksmoor – is very different from the curious combination of grand scale and icing-sugar delicacy that typifies the baroque of Germany and Bohemia.

But every now and then one comes across something that makes one think a bit differently about what we have in England. These gate piers that mark one of the entrances of Petworth House are a case in point. They conjure up the idea of the spoils of war – an enemy’s armour displayed in triumph. But what extraordinary armour and what a bizarre way to display it. The helmet is supported on – what? Pevsner and Nairn, in their Buildings of England volume on Sussex, suggest a tree trunk. but what kind of tree has a trunk like this? A baroque tree, I suppose. As for the armour itself, from its lavish curlicues to its crested helmet, it’s amazing, the kit of the showiest show-off. The face on one of the shields is an especially ornate touch, as are the swirling crests, the feathered arrows, and the loops and tucks of fabric and tooled leather. Whoever made these piers was a virtuoso carver.

It comes as no surprise that this is the work of a sculptor from the European mainland. Apparently there are some drawings in the Petworth archives signed by ‘V Dost’ of Dijon that show military spoils like the ones on the gate piers. I can’t find out anything about Monsieur Dost, even his dates. I’d have thought the piers were early-18th century but the National Archives web site seems to think that the drawings are 19th-century. I remain delighted in my ignorance.

Gone, but not forgotten

Coleshill was the archetypal large house of the mid-17th century. Designed by the gentleman architect Sir Roger Pratt for his cousin, Sir George Pratt, apparently with the advice of Inigo Jones and perhaps also the involvement of John Webb, it had all the features of a grand house of its period – the Italianate proportions with rows of sash windows, the semi-basement storey to raise up the main floors, the strong cornice, the hipped roof with dormer windows, the big chimney stacks, and the best in classical mouldings and details. The interiors were impressive too, especially the grand double symmetrical staircase, lit by a cupola from above.

Alas, one day in September 1952 the whole lot went up in flames. In a chain of events similar to the fire at Uppark in Sussex in 1989, the blaze began during repair work, and house staff and estate workers ferried antiques and paintings out of the house, dodging molten lead from the roof as teams of firemen tried to bring the blaze under control. In spite of their efforts, the building was gutted and – here the resemblance to Uppark ends – the remaining masonry shell was later demolished. So Coleshill is a memory, one that lives on in black and white photographs in old architecture books.

But the great house has left its traces – estate buildings such as a farm and cottages, and these gate piers, which, with their accompanying stone wall, signal to the passer-by that there was once a grand building hereabouts. It’s initially a surprise that these piers are more ornate on the inside, away from the road. And then one realises that they signal no entrance drive and are a few paces away from a ha-ha surrounding the park. Clearly, they were designed to be looked at from the park, perhaps from the house itself, to enhance the view, a charming bit of visual punctuation amongst the water meadows and parkland that were once home to a very special English house.

Coleshill House in the years before the fire

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.

Water gate revelation

I used to work in Covent Garden and sometimes, especially in summer, there was a strong temptation to cross the Strand and make for the refreshment provided by Gordon’s Wine Bar in Villiers Street. After a glass or two one could walk back via an architectural detour, through the remains of the Adelphi perhaps, or across the Embankment Gardens, past this monumental gateway, a reminder of a London long gone.

Before the Victoria Embankment was built in 1862, the gateway stood on the river bank. It was built in 1626 as the water gate to York House, home of George Villiers 1st Duke of Buckingham (whose name and title are commemorated in the street names hereabouts). The builder was the appropriately named Nicholas Stone, Buckingham’s master mason and an associate of Inigo Jones, the man who had introduced Palladian architecture to England a few years earlier.

Stone’s water gate is a vigorous, almost restless, design with its banded columns, its big keystones, and its busy cornice jutting in and out. Less restrained than most of Inigo Jones’s rather severe surviving buildings, it seems to look forward to the more baroque style of the late-17th century. And stranded in its garden it looks even odder than it must have done in the 1620s. One up to the London County Council (also long gone) for preserving it.

What the Romans did for us

The Romans – and those among the British who adopted the Roman way of life during the occupation – built a great deal. But most of their buildings in Britain, if they survive at all, do so as ruins a foot or two high. For example, only a few full-size Roman arches remain in Britain, and even Hadrian’s Wall, in all its windswept magnificence, is a shadow of its original self. The remains of a Roman town like Wroxeter, which survive as an acre or two of foundation and hypocaust, and a section of high wall, are impressive. But much more has vanished. Where on earth did it all go?

Well, some at least of the stone and brick was recycled. I have seen Roman bricks incorporated into the structures of Saxon churches, Norman castles, and gatehouses of uncertain age. The gateway to the churchyard of St Andrew’s, Wroxeter is testimony to just such a case of reuse. The two round stone columns come from the Roman site down the road, an inspired piece of recycling and rejigging - the bases are apparently from Roman farm buildings, the columns themselves from Wroxeter's baths, and the capitals from some other unknown Roman building in the locality. The walls of the church itself, which was first built in the Saxon period, though it has been much altered since, are also partly of stone blocks cut originally by the Romans. The Roman builders and masons did more for us than we sometimes realise.

The nick of time

Some of the greatest pleasures are the unexpected ones. I went to Ruardean in search of a Norman carving above the church doorway. But before I got near the church itself I was struck by this inscription, which is on the inside of the small lychgate that forms the entrance to the churchyard. The sun lit up the lychgate’s stone wall as I looked at it and, since the resulting photograph is very contrasty, here’s the text for the sake of clarity and ease of reading:
Redeeme thy precious Time which steals So fast away
and in gods Hous forgiveness Ask, and for Salvation Pray.
May ye 10th 1743
James Mutlow & Hendrey Heane, Churchwardens

I don’t know where these words come from, but they are similar to those of Bishop Ken’s morning hymn, which he wrote in the late-17th century but redrafted later, so that there are several different wordings, one of which includes the lines
Thy precious time misspent, redeem,
Each present day thy last esteem.

Ken’s hymn was widely circulated in A Manual of Prayers (1709) and so would no doubt have been a familiar part of the religious landscape when this variation on the theme of redeeming time was carved. The words also look as if they would do for a sundial, and I felt it was appropriate somehow for the setting evening sun to bathe them in warmth in my photograph.

The other thing that caught my eye, of course, is the style in which the letters are cut, with the plain forms now and then garnished with something capricious and different – the capital T of ‘Time’ and P of ‘Pray’. And the final s of ‘churchwardens’ looks like a determined effort not to be broken by the last straw – the word might have been made to fit if the corner had not chipped off the stone. In the nick of time, as it were, the carver decided to stick the ‘s’ on top of the ‘n’. And call it a day.

Resting place

Many churchyards have a little entrance building called a lych gate. The word ‘lych’ means corpse, and the idea of a lych gate was that it was where the deceased and mourners stopped before going to the graveside. Traditionally what happened was that the bearers would bring the corpse, shrouded or coffined according to the custom of the time, to the gate. Here, beneath the sheltering lych gate roof, the priest would meet them and read the first part of the burial service before the body was placed on a bier and taken to the grave.

Lych gates are usually simple wooden structures, rather like a shed roof supported by a post at each corner. Sometimes, though, there’s a more substantial building at the entrance to the churchyard. In the Cotswolds there are quite a few stone ones and sometimes even when they’re made of wood lych gates can be substantial structures. But here is something completely different. This building began life as a small cottage, with stone end walls and timber-framed sides. It was originally part of a row, but the others were demolished, leaving this survivor – it was a shop for a while, apparently – eventually losing some of its lower walls to form an entranceway to the churchyard.

Round the back, on the church side of the building, the timber frame has brick infill. Just another small surprise in this little structure made of stone, brick, timber, and thatch. It’s an interesting example of the way buildings that are no longer needed for their original purpose can be adapted to play a new role. Sometimes this means making a radical change, as here, where entire lower walls were removed, opening up what was once a downstairs room. Ruthless surgery, then, saved the building, gave it a new life, and provided a welcome shelter and landmark in the centre of this attractive village.