A web of wood

Having posted about Dunster’s charming and well preserved dovecote the other week, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the most prominent building in the centre of the village, the striking octagonal Yarn Market. This is, probably, everyone’s favourite building in Dunster. Thousands who have paused here for a moment have taken a photograph of this structure and, with a passing thought that it’s not like any other building* and very much unlike most of the old market buildings that survive (rectangular structures open below and with rooms above) have moved on.

Some will know that it’s a 17th-century building, showing that the wool trade hereabouts continued well beyond the Middle Ages. In fact, it’s an indication of a change in trading conditions. Dunster had been a port with a hinterland stretching across Exmoor, but the sea retreated and a new trading base was established here in the middle of the village. The Yarn Market’s presence is an indication of a significant amount of business and merchants’ need for shelter and security. Its striking shape shows that those 17th-century traders liked the idea of creating a building that could be easily identified and could form something of a landmark.

Anyone who goes inside can see that the octagonal roof required a network of rafters, braces and struts (photograph below); together with the posts that hold up the whole building and the lantern on trhe top, most of the structure is made of wood. The central stone column is a key support, and the whole structure is made more complicated by the generous roof overhang and the dormer windows, necessary to let more light into the space below. This wonderful building gives us an uncommon chance to look inside a roof structure of its period – most roof frameworks are hidden from the public by ceilings, after all. The pleasure I get from it is akin to the pleasure I’ve got from occasional views up into the interiors of church spires. These webs of woodwork required skill, ingenuity and a surprising amount of timber. Hats off to the carpenters who built them, and built them to last.

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*Although there is at least one later homage to the Yarn Market, at the Cadbury’s model suburb of Bournville.Dunster, Yarn Market, central column and roof timbers

What a cheek, or, Odd things in churches (15)

My occasional series, Odd things in churches, is dedicated to showing that it really is very surprising what one can find inside the places of worship of the Church of England. From instruments of punishment to fire-fighting equipment, items of whimsy to testimonies to obscure traditions, they’re all to be found, left behind by our ancestors and now regarded with a range of attitudes from indifference to notoriety. Today’s example is the embodiment of notoriety. Sometimes the more notorious features built into the fabric of churches can seem to us distinctly odd, nowhere more so than the numerous grotesque and rude carvings that seem to have been tolerated in medieval places of worship. Perhaps the most famous of these are the female figures known as Sheela na Gigs, but there are also male exhibitionists, like this man, carved high up in an aisle roof in Hereford’s medieval church of All Saints.

The All Saints exhibitionist has raised quite a few eyebrows in recent years – in part because he’s now more visible to the public since the church started serving coffee and provided seats and table in an upstairs gallery below the roof from which he moons down on us. He’s unusual in all kinds of ways. Although grotesques, even obscene ones, are not uncommon on medieval churches, they most often occur on the outside. When they do appear inside, they’re usually above doorways, arches, or entrances, and for many, this helps to explain their presence: they’re there, it’s said, to ward off evil spirits attempting to enter a sacred space. They do this, it is argued, by means of a kind of homoeopathy perhaps best summed up in the phrase ‘like cures like’. This kind of protective notion does not explain this figure’s presence high in the roof. Neither does another theory, that they are there to dissuade us from the sins they represent – before the construction of the gallery the exhibitionist was very difficult to spot.

Many like to suggest that he’s simply a carver’s joke. In one corner of the roof, he could have been done as the carver was finishing his work, and the scaffolding swiftly removed before the priest or the parish bigwigs had had the chance to inspect the roof too closely. We’ll never know whether this was the case. To modern eyes he just seems to be attracting attention of a particularly saucy kind. Something to ponder over the next cappuccino and cake.

 

Catslide

Cropthorne lies in the orchard-rich country around Evesham, an area full not just of fruit trees but also of houses built with frames of oak. Some have thatched roofs, often with attic windows peeping out under ‘eyebrows’ of thatch, like the ones on the house to the right in my photograph. Thatch lends itself to these sculptural forms, and also to the roof feature that caught my eye in the house on the left: the catslide.

A catslide is a roof that sweeps down almost to the ground over a single-storey extension. If you add a room on to the side of a building, the thatcher can continue the slope of the main roof at the same angle in one continuous run. You end up with a much lower ceiling height inside, but often this did not bother the occupants – people’s average heights were shorter in past centuries, and if you were going to use the room mainly for storage, or for a bedroom, headroom was not the main requirement. The advantage of this type of roof was mainly an economic one. If you’d built the side wall to full height, to keep the same angle of slope you’d need a higher ridge for the whole roof, meaning more money spent on roof timbers and more thatch on the other side of the house too. So many people favoured the catslide.

The name is wonderfully evocative. One can imagine a roof-climbing cat losing its footing, sliding down the slope to the eaves, and falling only a short distance to the ground before walking off with typical feline nonchalance. As satisfying for the animal as for the thatcher completing a smooth continuous slope, capping the whole roof with ornately cut reeds on the ridge, and standing back in admiration.

High and bright

The dazzling painted screen at Long Sutton in my previous post attracted quite a lot of admiration, so here’s another example of restored colour in the late-medieval manner, this time from the church of St Peter, Evercreech, in the same county of Somerset. Like a number of Somerset wooden roofs (the county is rich in medieval church woodwork), the one at Evercreech is inhabited by a flock of angels.
The angelic host look down at us in the nave, their multi-coloured wings pointing towards us, their hands grasping shields, their hair gilded, and their pale faces marked with the merest dot of red, like a touch of blusher. 

The ties beams themselves, plus the other main components of this medieval roof are vividly painted and gilded, and this colouring stands out against the unpainted timbers and the whitewashed walls. As with the Long Sutton screen, this painted roof provides just a hint of the bright colour with which many medieval churches were covered. Anyone who wants to see the kind of effect that coloured decoration can achieve in a high-status building should visit the glorious Sainte-Chapelle in Paris – it’s like stepping inside an enormous jewel box. The effect in this English church is more home-spun. But the carved angels still draw the eye upward, as no doubt their medieval creators intended, so that we can visualise in our minds’ eyes the greater heavenly host.

Oasis, or Odd things in churches (9)

There are certain churches that I like to return to every now and then. They are mostly small and often remote or in villages that are off the beaten track in places like Herefordshire or Gloucestershire. They are usually old and quiet and though (as with Abbey Dore or Kilpeck) they may be architectural treasures, it is often atmosphere and peace as much as architecture that occupy me – these qualities take me back, for example, to Dunitsbourne Rouse or Inglesham, places where the combination of isolation and layers of history suggest that they have been oases of calm for hundreds of years.

Hoarwithy, J P Seddon’s great Byzantine-revival church in Herefordshire, is starting to become another of these places. There is not much to beat the way its square sandstone pyramid-topped tower rises out of the landscape, so that, if you look the right way, you can imagine yourself in Tuscany or the Veneto talking not of a bell-tower but of a campanile. Mosaics, tessellated flooring, carved capitals, and hanging lamps fulfil the promise inside.

But then, on my most recent visit, there was this small shock. A flower vase placed carefully on the floor of the nave, with yellow Post-It Notes nearby. ‘TO CATCH RAIN!’ say the notes. The building has already undergone some major repairs to the tower stonework recently, so one hopes, given the small size of the bowl full of water-absorbing material, that the roof has only a minor leak, and that the parish will soon be able to get the problem put right.

I nearly called this post ‘Sad things in churches’, because it is sad, when buckets and vases have to be pressed into service to catch rain. But as I sat in the nave and pondered this state of affairs and savoured the quiet, I remembered that the water-absorbing floral foam in the vase is also known by the name of Oasis. Reminded once more of those oases of calm, I hoped that dryness would be restored as soon as possible, stuck a donation in the alms box, and went, quietly, on my way.

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My earlier post about this church, here, provides some more architectural detail, and a couple of different photographs.

Survival and change

The parish church in the middle of Deddington, built of toffee-coloured stone like much of the town, is a mixture of periods, with notable details from the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 17th centuries. The 17th-century parts include the north porch, an example of the survival of a kind of Gothic into the period when much English architecture was turning Classical. The old antiquarians used to call this style ‘debased’, because it was a kind of mongrel mixture of traditional late-medieval Gothic with other elements that owed something to the new classicism – and the Gothic elements weren’t always very orthodox. The more current designation, ‘Gothic survival’, doesn’t do it justice either. Gothic has done more than survived: it has changed, sometimes in very interesting ways.

My photograph, of the roof of the north porch, shows, I think, some of this interest. The basic form is a shallow dome, but if this sounds like a classical kind of roof, there’s nothing classical about the details. The dome is finished with a network of ribs a bit like those in a fan vault – but forming a circle, not a fan. It’s almost like a rose window, with the glazed parts filled in with stone and the central part finished with the ubiquitous quatrefoil. By adding a trefoil at each corner, the circle is squared. The whole design is a telling example of the coming together of tradition and innovation, and the sort of quiet architectural surprise which keeps me visiting parish churches.

On high

Mildenhall (which I'm told is pronounced 'Minal') is roughly east of Marlborough in Wiltshire. The local stone is chalk, and in this area there's a variety of traditional building materials, including brick, flint, and wood, as well as chalk itself. There are quite a few large barns with wooden weatherboarded walls and thatched roofs, but this substantial barn (now clearly converted for some other use) has one of the biggest corrugated iron roofs I've seen recently dwarfing its boarded walls. The corduroy texture of the corrugated iron is if anything emphasized by the material's variegated colour, which seems to be a mixture of black paint and pale areas where the paint has flaked away.

This is such a big roof that the overused word 'awesome' came into my mind as I stared at it. It is clearly made up of three rows of sheets, but I'm not sure how long the sheets are – 8 or 10 feet each, perhaps. Whatever the precise size, it's a lot of corrugated iron to set beside the brick, white-walled, and thatched cottages that stand nearby. But I think it works.

I've been a fan of this kind of use of non-traditional materials in rural settings ever since moving to the Cotswolds. Here the traditional roofing material is honey-coloured Cotswold stone, but many farm buildings have grey slate roofs. I've grown used to listening to pundits bemoaning the fact that farmers dare to roof their buildings with slates, but I'm not convinced that every roof has to look the same or that everything has to be built in stone. I'm even happy to see a bit of rusty wriggly tin now and again on a Cotswold farm.

I feel the same about roofs like this one in Wiltshire. It's practical and effective and it sits rather well above the weatherboarding and behind the white-barked trees and green shrubs that surround it. It has terrific texture too. If corrugated iron is often thought of as a lowly material, a roof like this raises it to fresh heights.

Brush with the lore

Peacocks, lambs, ducks, foxes: thatchers often like to top off their roofs with an animal finial. I’ve been noticing these flourishes for years, and, having seen flocks of pheasants in one village and congregations of ducks in another, I’d wondered idly, without really thinking about it, whether these were craftsmen’s ‘signatures’, rather as people used to say that the ornate patterns cut in the straw just below the roof ridge ‘belonged’ to the individual thatcher, and were his way of making his mark.

For her 1939 book Made in England, for which she trawled deeply among local tradition and lore, Dorothy Hartley asked about the significance of these figures and was given various answers. Some of her interlocutors said that the ornament identified the thatcher; some that it related to the owner of the house (or of the haystack, because stacks were also thatched and sometimes topped with animal figures). Another interviewee replied gnomically: 'Corn bird steals no corn and frits off corn buntin'.' A kind of scarecrow, then. I know someone who keeps a life-size model of a heron next to his fish pond for a similar reason. Nowadays, on a roof that's already covered with wire mesh to stop birds removing the straw, a fox or peacock is likely to be there because thatcher and owner think it will look good, or amusing, or catch the eye of bystanders. You can even buy straw animals online to add to your roof. Long live traditional crafts…

Three ways  

In the bleak midwinter, with rain on rain in this part of the world, here's a photograph to remind us of last summer's sun, warming up the Cotswold stone at Wyck Rissington, northeast of Bourton-on-the-Water.  Aside from the obvious charm of this stone building in its tree-lined churchyard, I'm attracted to this building for various reasons. Here are three things that interest me about it; three ways of looking at a building, if you like.

First, the architecture. Although this is a small church, built by unknown masons and added to over the centuries in what looks like a haphazard way (look at the miscellaneous selection of window styles), it has had architectural pretensions, especially with regard to the chancel (in the foreground of the photograph). This small part of an obscure church represents a moment in English architectural history. It dates from the mid-13th century and the end wall, with its two pairs of lancet windows and small corner buttresses with pointed tops, is very much of its period. So is the surviving single lancet on the side wall (the larger windows are later; originally there would have been more lancets along this side). This was the period when English builders were beginning to group lancet windows together and add smaller openings (circles, trefoils, quatrefoils) above them to create windows with tracery – the window on the side wall next to the drain pipe is an example from a later phase of building. In the end wall, the two concave-sided lozenge-shaped openings above the pairs of lancets, and the plainer diamond opening above them, create a kind of proto-tracery, as if the masons were feeling their way towards this idea but not quite getting there yet: fascinating.

Next, what has happened to the building recently, for all old buildings need care and repair, and how this is done affects both their survival and their appearance. On my visit in the summer, the church architect happened to be there making an inspection, and we talked both about the 13th-century architecture of the chancel and about the recent work on the church roof. As you can see, the nave roof has been completely recovered in new Cotswold stone "slates". Some of the old slates were still in good enough condition to be recycled, as were quite a few on the chancel roof. So when the nave roof was finished, the chancel roof was redone with the best of the old slates. Both roofs are now good for many years, and the new slates on the nave roof will eventually darken in colour, attract lichen, and match the older ones on the chancel. 

Finally, a historical association, because the people who use old buildings are frequently just as interesting as the buildings themselves. In the early 1890s, the 17-year-old  Gustav Holst got his first job here, as church organist. He soon added a similar position at nearby Bourton-on-the-Water and this work helped to sustain the young composer until he got a scholarship to the Royal College of Music a couple of years later. Holst, who was born in Cheltenham, spent most of his adult life in London, but always loved the Cotswolds. One of his more ambitious works is his Cotswolds Symphony, the beautiful slow movement of which is subtitled "In memoriam William Morris". Perhaps his most familiar work, though, is one that many do not realise is by him, the tune called Cranham (named for another Cotswold village) which is the most popular music for the carol "In the Bleak Midwinter". Here it is, sung by that great British ensemble, The Sixteen.* Season's Greetings to you all.

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*Or there it was. The video I originally attached to this post has been removed from YouTube. There are plenty of other versions online, though, including one from the choir of Gloucester Cathedral, here.

Hot tin roof

I’m stuck indoors writing, and with deadlines looming, getting out less and less to find new buildings to share with you. I’ve recently been describing the unlikely surfaces and forms of the Guggenheim, Bilbao, and its wafer-thin titanium cladding, which curves this way and that like an overgrown eel that’s been put through one of those apps you get for your iPhone, which distorts photographs in disturbing ways. Not inappropriately, since designs like the Guggenheim are only possible with the most advanced software, not to mention the most costly materials.

And, stuck indoors, writing, I looked through my picture files to find something to share with you, and found this: a shed in Herefordshire with a corrugated iron roof. Notice how the surface curves this way and that, like an overgrown eel that…

I know, I know. This modest length of bent metal covering a knockabout structure of assorted brickwork and decaying woodwork is hardly the Guggenheim. But its use of corrugated iron is still rather inventive, the way it starts at one end as almost a flat roof and finishes at the other as almost a vertical wall. And are those openings skylights or windows? I’m sure there’s some logical reason for the way this roof has been built. Something big and tall that had to be accommodated in the far end that didn’t quite justify the time, expense, or whatever needed to build the brick wall higher. Perhaps it has something to do with the planning regulations. Whatever its raison d’être, it made one passer-by look up and smile.

Green thoughts in a green shade

The other night I and a small group of neighbours went to visit a local water mill that has been beautifully restored. While I was walking around the outside as the evening light faded, I noticed this shed, and especially its roof, which is covered with corrugated iron – regular readers will know this is one of my favourite materials. Whether by accident or design, the corrugated covering of this roof has become home to a green carpet of moss, grass, and other plants. An informal green roof is the result.

Green roofs are quite fashionable these days. Their construction usually involves several layers of different materials to protect the roof structure from vapour, water, and roots, as well as a substrate in which to grow the plants. This one, as far as I can see, is just a sheet of corrugated metal with plants growing on it – hence my use of the word ‘informal’. It’s not going to last for ever, but this roof with its covering of greenery is a happy addition to this workshop down a secluded lane surrounded and shaded by trees.