Villages of Britain: The Five Hundred Villages that Made the Countryside

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

SOUTH-WEST ENGLAND

SOUTH-EAST ENGLAND

THE HOME COUNTIES

EASTERN ENGLAND

THE MIDLANDS

NORTH-WEST ENGLAND

NORTH-EAST ENGLAND

WALES

SCOTLAND

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

Imprint

To Peter and Linda, Graham and Jean

Introduction

This is a book about villages and their history: how they came into being, what shaped their development, who inhabited them. The story of the village is that of the countryside itself. I have chosen five hundred villages, each either remarkable in its own right or an example of a type. Each puts a single aspect of rural Britain under the spotlight: a country poet, a way of building, an agricultural innovation, a horrible death, a rare survival, a monument to an exceptional person or event. Pursuing the stories of these villages, and of the rocks and rivers and roads and railways that gave them shape, has taken me all around Great Britain, travelling not only from one end of the country to the other, but from the earliest times to the present.

‘To the man or woman who is desirous of finding the best in this country I commend the English village,’ the poet Edmund Blunden wrote shortly after the Second World War. I share his view, extending it to encompass the villages of Wales and Scotland, too. But the village Blunden knew was a different place from the village we know today – with its four-by-fours and satellite television, its prosperity and kerbstones – and far, far removed from the flyblown middens and polluted watercourses of the medieval village, many of whose inhabitants, short of stature, old by thirty, were often misshapen by disease.

There has been a tendency, particularly at times of national stress, to see villages as part of the old and immutable order of the countryside, a root going deep into the British soul: this was the case after the First World War, when some thinkers wanted to knit the damaged fabric of the world together by reconnecting with pre-industrial traditions. But the truth is that villages have always changed. They form, they grow, they morph, they shrink, they grow again. Sometimes they disappear, the only evidence of their existence being some overgrown foundations in a copse or bumps in a field, intelligible only to archaeologists. Some have been washed into the sea.

Many English villages began as dormitories. They put roofs over the heads of the families who toiled on the lord’s fields and kept his sheep, managed his woods or dug his mines. It is rare to find the foundation of an old village documented. Few were formally planned, unless the lord had the ambition of founding a town. Some began life as a few huts in an unnoticed corner of a forest, whose squatter inhabitants managed to evade the eye of the authorities. These dwellings would have been insubstantial, but then so were most village houses in the Middle Ages: poorly built cabins with smoke from the central hearth escaping through the cracks, whose illiterate occupants probably spent as many daylight hours as they could outside.

Since these shacks were often rebuilt on the same sites, it is difficult for archaeologists to form a picture of how villages developed. Those that coalesced around a central core – often a green or a church – probably did so in response to farming practices. In the Dark Ages, the land was worked by farmers occupying scattered farmsteads. Then, in the tenth century, it would seem that the open field system began to develop. Areas of land were divided up among different families, each of whom cultivated a number of strips – some flat and fertile, some poor and hilly – while their animals grazed on difficult ground that was left as permanent pasture.

This kind of agriculture required a high degree of cooperation, with people ploughing and harvesting the same crops at the same time. The easiest thing was for farmers, smallholders and cottars (landless labourers) to live together in a village, trudging out from their vermin-infested dwellings, past vegetable patches, pigsties and orchards, to the patches of land on which they toiled. The spread of the open field system was accelerated by the Norman regime change, locking England into a feudal hierarchy, under which peasants were compelled to work the fields owned by the lord of the manor as well as their own.

Villages served different industries. On the coast, people fished; in other places – often remote and lonely moorland – they mined lead. Weaving at handlooms was a cottage occupation before the development of water-powered looms at the end of the eighteenth century. One of the few villages whose origins are documented – Bainbridge, in Wensleydale – was founded to house a dozen foresters. Iron-founding kept Sussex villages such as Burwash busy until the timber to make charcoal ran out and the industry moved North to mine iron ore and coal. They built boats on the river Wye (see Llandogo) and quarried stone at Collyweston in Northamptonshire. Bedfordshire women made lace and straw hats (see Turvey). Coaching inns, such a spectacle in the age of Pickwick, came and went, as did canals. At Lambourn in Berkshire, the training of thoroughbred racehorses still flourishes today.

Change took myriad forms. Medieval Caxton in Cambridgeshire moved to a new site to take advantage of the road that supplied passing trade. Landowners swept away villages that clustered at the skirts of their mansions and rebuilt them beyond the park gates. Or they won the lottery of life when their villages became absorbed into conurbations and land values went through the roof.

In short, villages did many things, but before 1800 most of them – like most of England itself – farmed. Until farming became mechanised after the Second World War, nearly all the inhabitants of a typical village derived their livelihoods from the land. If they did not themselves plough or herd animals or fell trees, they sold farm implements or shod horses, or made the farmer’s corduroy trousers, or dealt in his grain. The coins that chinked into the tills of the shops, for bacon, boot polish and besoms, came from the pockets of farmers and farm labourers, or more likely the purses of their wives.

Only since 1950 has there taken place the total reversal by which farming now employs hardly anybody. The great village industries of today are tourism and retirement, with much of the village population commuting to jobs elsewhere. Villages that might have supported a dozen shops in the early twentieth century now have none; people drive to supermarkets to stock up on food and other goods. Dozens of pubs close every week. Those that survive are often of the gastro variety, beyond the pocket of ordinary locals. The village has once more transformed itself. That is nothing new.

Scotland and Wales have different traditions of rural settlement. Old villages in Scotland tend to be failed burghs, such as Rosemarkie in the Black Isle, north of Inverness. Scotland barely had villages as they would be recognised in England before Lowland agriculture was ‘improved’ in the eighteenth century by enclosing commons, drilling seeds, planting turnips and attracting better tenants. Then landowners, such as John Cockburn of Ormiston, Lothian, the Duke of Buccleuch at Newcastleton in the Borders and Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk in Aberdeenshire, saw the benefit of building villages, neatly ordered and calculated to increase industry and rents.

There were no villages at all in the Highlands until the Hanoverian government built roads to open them to the rest of Britain after the Jacobite rebellions. The traditional grouping was the clachan or fermtoun, where three or four families shared the tenancy of a farm; Auchindrain on the Duke of Argyll’s estate, where the old way of life persisted into the 1960s, has been preserved as a museum. Only the most meagre of livings could be eked from the Highlands. An early attempt to improve the economy was made by the British Fisheries Society, which built harbours such as Tobermory on Mull.

The notorious Clearances drove Highland families out of their homes so that the land they occupied could be put down to sheep. The dispossessed might be set up – on inferior land – with crofts, which created dispersed settlements with no obvious centre; each house occupied its own smallholding, and the kirk may have stood on its own, away from habitation, in a place where families from all around could converge. Attempts were also made to encourage some Highlanders to take up a different life, in fishing villages such as Helmsdale in Sutherland, albeit the landowners counted without the resistance of the people being resettled, who often would have preferred to stick with the ways they had known.

Much of Wales, a land of mountains and waterfalls, was as impenetrable as Scotland until Thomas Telford opened the road to Anglesey in the nineteenth century. The Romans reached Caerwent, in fertile Monmouthshire, but penetrated Carmarthenshire only when gold from the mines at Pumpsaint was in prospect. The castles built or repaired by Edward I form an arc around Snowdonia.

Like Cornwall, Wales celebrated local saints and preserved ancient superstitions, before being shaken into a century of chapel building by the Great Awakening of the Methodist preachers. For once, John Wesley’s powers of oratory failed to move, for the simple reason that English was a difficult language for many Welsh speakers; they trembled instead to the brimstone sermons of Daniel Rowland of Llangeitho in Ceredigion, delivered in their native tongue.

The Calvinistic spirit entered the Welsh bloodstream and stayed there, Dylan Thomas evoking the ‘Thou Shalt Not’ texts on the walls in his fictional Llareggub (based on New Quay in Ceredigion) in Under Milk Wood; to an outsider it seems to find a visual equivalent in the pinched terraces of the mining villages that are striated along the hillsides around Rhondda and Cwmbran, choral and close-knit. In the twentieth century, Wales’s inaccessible centre may have drunk at pubs called the Drovers’ Arms, remembering the cattle that would be iron-shod and driven, hundreds at a time, towards English markets (see Tregaron); but young people, wanting more excitement and money than was to be had from sheep farming on the hills, drifted away. Then the very quietness caught the eye of the Good Life generation, wanting to pursue its alternative lifestyles in privacy. Villages that had been at their last gasp inhaled deeply – in some cases, not only air.

If one of the graves in a country churchyard broke open and a Victorian villager, anywhere in Britain, rose from the dead, he would be struck by the affluence of the settlement he once knew. Cottages look much more robust, being properly maintained; no more damp or leaks. Piped water probably came in the decades before and after the Second World War, and there is now electric light. Gardens are full of flowers, not vegetables grown to feed the family.

Our ghost would find the village economy incomprehensible. In the south of England he would be unlikely to meet a farmer as he walked round a village. If his haunting took place during working hours, he might not find anyone at all. It comes as a shock to drive into Laxton in Nottinghamshire, where, by a quirk of history, the open field system is still practised. There are fourteen working farms in the village. Only one ‘stackyard’, as farmyards are called there, has undergone conversion to a holiday let. Laxton is now unique. But as recently as the 1950s, every country village would have been full of farmers and farm machinery, carts and animals, bales and byres. Farmers were likely to run the village, too. Like the squire, the vicar and the policeman, who have also vanished as full-time presences, they served as figures of authority, who, going about, discouraged misbehaviour.

These days, most villages are empty during the day. If people work, they usually drive somewhere else to do so. In pretty villages, the rest of the population is retired, and house owners may only appear during weekends and school holidays. Villages used to work for their livings; now they are often in the position of courtesans, kept for their looks by people who turn to them for comfort and recreation. Thank leisure, thank retirement, thank the motor car – all unknown in earlier periods of village history.

If we are apt nowadays to picture villages in a time warp of upright bicycles and runner-bean poles, that is because their apparent cosiness forms a contrast to the grit of the inner city or the tedium of the commuter train. In a world of ugliness, villages are pretty to look at and interesting to explore. Here stands a medieval bridge with children shrimping underneath it, there a green, and, look, that building with benches outside it is, happily, a pub.

We cling to the idea that places are ‘villagey’ long after they have been absorbed into conurbations. Gatwick Airport contains a shopping village, however deep the ancient village of Gatwick, where John de Gatewyk held a manor in the thirteenth century and Victorian punters went racing, lies beneath the tarmac. London is often said to be a city of villages, creating the paradox of greens that are really greys, made up of paving stones and road surface without a blade of grass to be seen. True villages are small enough for neighbours to know one another, but large enough for the human resource to be fairly mixed, providing enough talent to run the pantomime or summer fete, the fire brigade that does not put out fires (as in Geddington, Northamptonshire) or the guild that preserves a parlour bar (Leintwardine in Herefordshire); it can be a creative dynamic.

But as anyone who has ever lived in a village knows, the reality does not always coincide with the image. Do not occupy a village house if you want privacy. From the moment you go outside your door, your life is conducted in public, nothing escaping scrutiny or comment. People who are used to city life might not notice whatever exuberance attends closing time at the pub. But newcomers can be distressed to find that villages may not be the havens of quiet they expect. Tractors rumble through them, trailers rattling; grain driers drone their way through damp harvests. The winter mist throbs to the sound of rotor blades as the Chinooks on a nearby RAF station are de-iced. As there is a time in life for gardening, so there is one for motorbikes and heavy metal. Different generations do not always see eye to eye.

On the whole, the village is a much more comfortable, better tempered and longer-lived place than it was when Richard Gough wrote the history of his Shropshire home, Myddle, around 1700. It is not perfect. Even paradise has snakes. But one of the wonders of villages is how generations of often anonymous people have worked, incrementally, to make them more convenient to live in, and more harmonious to the eye. Their labours have made my village odyssey a delight.

What is a village? It used to be a rural settlement capable of supporting daily life, material (shops, pub), spiritual (church) and hierarchical (policeman, squire); hamlets could not do this, being mere outliers or dependencies of other places. Now, however, there are countless villages that have no services at all, except those held in church once a fortnight by a vicar who shares the parish with eight others.

Size of population is surely a factor in the village persona, yet this is far from straightforward. A settlement of two thousand souls might seem like a town north of York, but it would, unquestionably, be a village in the Home Counties. It is easier to define a town than a village; towns have civic buildings and banks, fire stations and polyclinics, as well as a certain architectural presence. These qualities are important. I have considered some villages with populations of several thousand to remain villages, albeit ones that may look like adolescents who have outgrown their clothes, because they lack the characteristics of a town.

Throughout the medieval, Tudor and Stuart periods, a would-be town needed a royal charter to allow it to hold a market. It was more valuable to the lord of the manor to have a bustling town on his land than a sleepy village. Ambitious lords would therefore acquire charters and found towns, in the hope that enterprising tenants would rent shops, market stalls and workshops. But they did not always take off. Some towns flourished for a period, then relapsed into village obscurity.

Lydford in Devon was an important place in the Saxon period: it had its own mint and two castles, one of which served as a prison into the seventeenth century. Such glories have long been forgotten, and little stirs there now. Fordwich in Kent had the right to put condemned criminals to death, by a specially grim means; it still has the town hall in which juries sat. But the river Stour, on which it depended, silted up, and it is now nothing more than a village. There are numerous other examples. Only a pedant would pretend that they are towns.

So, I have taken a broad idea of the village. My rule has been to include settlements that see themselves as villages; that is to say, where at least some of the people who live in them, or use them, will instinctively refer to them as a village rather than a town. I have not made a distinction between villages and hamlets, since that has become artificial. I do not pretend to infallibility. There will always be people who disagree, particularly in a land that rejoices in the quirks that result from a long history. Let them.

Two general themes have struck me during the writing of this book. First is the deep-grained conservatism of the countryside. Just as modern field boundaries may follow the lines of those established during the Iron Age, so it is not unusual for villages to be established in places with which humans have been associated for thousands of years. This does not imply absolute continuity: the Saxons who came and crouched amid the standing stones at Avebury in Wiltshire did not take over a pre-existing settlement – nobody had lived there for years. But when the Roman Empire collapsed, the Saxons and the people who came after them may well have taken over the same land divisions as those associated with Roman villas. They conformed to natural features and may have been marked by structures such as stone walls and ditches that would have been laborious to move. Perhaps they survive as parish boundaries today.

It would not be the only example of continuity. Even after successive farming revolutions, Honeychurch in Devon contains the same farms as those inspected by the clerks of the Domesday Book. While, throughout history, villages have formed to fulfil specific functions, and then decayed when those functions have ceased to exist, the pattern of settlement was often set long ago.

The second theme is the narrowness of village life before the motor car. Until the Second World War, most village people trudged through a weary existence, as cramped in its intellectual confines as in its geographical ones. They were often grindingly poor, destitution sometimes being treated with inhuman cruelty. Television adaptations of rural classics do not convey the misery of it: twenty-first-century actors have grown up well fed and healthy, unlike the country folk of William Cobbett’s or Flora Thompson’s day, many of them bent, their plodding gait formed by years of following the plough as children, each foot being lifted with difficulty from the clay. Coming home after twelve hours in the fields, men would have to go out again to tend the vegetable patch that provided much of their diet. They might have walked amid the abundance of a well-farmed countryside, but they rarely ate meat. Those who could leave often did so, and the gene pool diminished. In terms of health and prosperity, the twenty-first-century village is far superior to that of previous ages.

But the affluence of the modern age has also been accompanied by loss. Gone is the sense of rootedness and belonging that were the inheritance of men and women who rarely went more than a bicycle ride’s distance from where they lived. Let us not sentimentalise. I remember exploring the Fens from 1970s Cambridge. They were notorious for the number of people who had never travelled beyond a bicycle ride’s journey from their home, not to mention the rates of incest that were the corollary of such limitations. Nobody would want a return to that era. But communities are built on settled lives. When people are forever on the move, or rarely present, they have no shared history with their neighbours. They do not know where they are.

Which leads me to a prime reason for writing this book now: the village is at a cusp. Ever greater mobility was one of the outstanding features of the twentieth century, but it seems likely that the twenty-first will put limits on how much we move around. If the fossil fuels do not run out, they will become too expensive to use as liberally as we have been doing. Will they be replaced by alternative forms of energy? Possibly. But perhaps by the time electric cars and hydrogen fuel-cell technology become widely available, a different pattern of existence will have established itself. Broadband could enable many more people to work from wherever they choose to live. That place could be a village.

In 1770, Oliver Goldsmith wrote a poem called The Deserted Village. Perhaps we can look forward to the Repopulated Village, busy with people during the daytime, employed in well-paid, outward-looking jobs. It is noticeable that villages increasingly take communal action to save shops and pubs from closing or to provide services, such as fibre-optic cable. Is it possible to dream of a renaissance of village life that would come from residents working in or near the place where they live? If so, the community might not need to rally round to protect services, because enough people would use the shop for it to stay open by itself. Rather than being a stage set, empty until the return of commuters in the evening makes the curtain rise, the village would acquire that essential extra dimension: life.

South-West England

Altarnun

Ashmore

Avebury

Banwell

Beer

Bemerton

Blagdon

Blisland

Brent Knoll

Briantspuddle

Broad Chalke

Brockley

Cerne Abbas

Charlcombe

Charlton

Charlton Down

Chideock

Churston Ferrers

Clovelly

Creed

Delabole

Down St Mary

East Knoyle

Exford

Farnham

Georgeham

Godolphin Cross

Hallsands

Hammoon

Helford

Hindon

Hinton St Mary

Holwell

Honeychurch

Ipplepen

Kenn

Littlebredy

Lizard

Lydford

Mells

Minety

Modbury

Morwenstow

Mousehole

Noss Mayo

Pilton

Portscatho

Puddletown

Rampisham

St Agnes

St Erth

St Michael’s Mount

Sampford Courtenay

Sandbanks

Snap

South Tawton

Stoke Abbott

Tarrant Gunville

Tyneham

Wedmore

Whitchurch Canonicorum

Worth Matravers

Wraxall

Zennor

Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire – each of these counties has its own identity, the buildings that stand on the surface of the land taking their character from the rocks that lie underneath. Two hundred and fifty million years ago, molten granite burst from the innards of the earth and gave Cornwall its backbone. Granite and slate, formed when mud from the sea floor was compressed and heated, make the Cornish village what it is: unyielding in the face of the elements, its homes as hard, externally, as the lives of the fishermen who lived in them.

Add some pots of geraniums and striped awnings and, behold, these tough little places, burrowed into the sides of their coves, become as pretty as Portscatho in regatta week. Inland Cornwall never had this makeover, for the earth had also brought forth minerals, which have been mined and traded since ancient times. Holy springs – another gift of the earth – attracted saints.

In Devon, the only county to have two separate coastlines, Neolithic farmers cut down the trees that grew on Dartmoor around 4000BC (no mean feat using stone axes; they may have chopped through the surface root and then pulled the trees over using ropes of honeysuckle vine). They have been grazed by animals ever since, creating a uniquely British landscape, almost crowded with prehistoric remains. Devon villages are thatched, or were so originally. If stone could not be found, the walls of old houses were built of cob (see Down St Mary), a mixture of clay and straw and twigs and horse dung, surprisingly durable as long as water is kept off it.

Somerset has luxuriant pastures and the watery Levels, rugged hills and rounded hills, hills that stand alone and hills in ranges. There are beaches, too, along the Bristol Channel, and the wilds of Exmoor. So much variety makes it a picture of England in miniature, intimate and often changing, its villages pegged to their combes by the square towers of their churches.

In Dorset, we find limestone being ushered into England. It provides Britain’s finest building stone, outcrops arcing up through Bath and the Cotswolds to the limestone pavements of Yorkshire. Thomas Hardy created a landscape of the imagination in his Wessex novels; the romance of history still rests on old manor houses, such as Hammoon, and the curfew bell still sounds in Stoke Abbott.

Wiltshire is the odd one out: open, and crossed by the great chalk escarpment that continues into the Chilterns and Norfolk. Chalk makes the clear streams in which watercress thrives, as well as trout. Flints occur in chalk, and Wiltshire builders sometimes used them to make squares on their facades, alternating with stone. The poet George Herbert lived in a flint-walled rectory at Bemerton. Flints meant something different to the great archaeologist General Augustus Pitt-Rivers: he studied the prehistoric landscape of Cranborne Chase, creating a museum at Farnham in Dorset, whose memory lives on in the name of the inn.

ALTARNUN

CORNWALL

Lady Nonna’s miracle cure

Witches can turn themselves into deer and hares. You might not have thought that either disguise was particularly well adapted to building work; nevertheless, it was a deer and a hare that, according to legend, carried the stones of the church being raised at West Carne to Altarnun. Night after night it happened, until the builders took the hint and transferred the church to Altarnun instead. This is a version of a common story, in which the Devil’s agents frustrate the attempt to build a church at a particular site. Often that site has a pagan history, expressed by a stone circle, earthwork, barrow or fogou (an underground structure found in Cornwall). There was indeed a fogou at West Carne.

Yet Altarnun also had ancient associations. Near the church is a holy well. There are wells and springs with special properties all over England and particularly in the West Country. Some had prophetic qualities: a glut of water from a spring at Boughton in Northamptonshire foretold doom, as did the drying up of St Helen’s Well at Rushton Spencer in Staffordshire. Several wells, when properly asked, could reveal the identity of a future husband. At North Kelsey in Lincolnshire the girl would approach the spring backwards, walk round it backwards three times then gaze into its depths to see his face. Whichever partner in a marriage drank first at the well of St Keyne in Cornwall would have the upper hand.

St Non’s well at Altarnun was, like many others, supposed to have curative properties. Mad people could be made sane if they were hit on the chest and then dunked in its waters, a process known as ‘bowssening’. Afterwards the sufferer would be carried into the church for prayers. No doubt the well was regarded as sacred before the coming of Christianity. Other churches were built next to standing stones.

St Non or Lady Nonna is supposed to have been St David’s mother, an aristocratic Welsh nun who was seduced or raped by a Welsh prince and then gave birth to a baby that was surrounded by dazzling light. There is another St Non’s well, with a statue and ruined chapel, at Caerfai in Pembrokeshire, where the event took place. It is thought that she herself came to Cornwall from Wales around 527.

The Celtic church lacked the hierarchical structure of the Church of Rome; missionaries were men or women who had attended centres of learning, and rather than being sent by the Pope, like St Augustine, operated off their own bats. They would walk from place to place, preaching and baptising in the open air at sites that were marked by a cross, lollipop-shaped and carved from the adamantine local granite, perhaps with a box of relics on top. They often chose to meld with local tradition by choosing places, such as Altarnun, that already received veneration.

Often the cross would become the centre of a monastic enclosure, occupied by holy people of austere life, living in huts. Churches emerged from these. The cross at Altarnun may date from the sixth century, conceivably St Non’s time. In the fifteenth century, stones were taken from Bodmin Moor to build the present church. The tower reaches thirty-three metres. Inside, a remarkable series of bench ends was carved, according to inscription, by ‘Robart Daye’, showing both religious emblems and domestic scenes: a man with a cauldron, a bagpiper, a fiddler and a fool.

ASHMORE

DORSET

Dancing round the village pond

Any village with a half-decent claim to being coupled with the adjective ‘idyllic’ has a pond. In the Middle Ages and later, it would have been an essential part of the village economy, used to raise ducks and geese, water cattle and wash the wheels of carts; women who nagged their husbands might be dunked in the pond in an act of particular humiliation. By the time John Saunders wrote his novel Martin Pole in 1863, ponds were beginning to offend Victorian sensibilities, as places where horses cooled their legs and ‘very young kittens, or very old cats’ found their last resting place. But even a very ‘commonplace piece of water’ seemed to remember an earlier period, ‘a time when, framed with its blue forget-me-nots, it was a fitting mirror to reflect heaven’s face, in all its thousand and ever-beautiful changes’. This is perhaps the aspect that most strikes the present age, aware of the importance that patches of water, surrounded by unsprayed and unkempt greenery, have for wildlife. Village ponds have taken on special importance following the huge loss of ponds to the countryside following field drainage in the late twentieth century.

The pond at Ashmore is understandably a source of pride. You wouldn’t have thought there could be a pond here, given that this is the highest village in Dorset. Hop over a couple of stiles (or drive up the road) and be amazed: before you is the grand, little-populated sweep of Cranborne Chase, a landscape for which we must thank the billions upon billions of tiny sea creatures whose shells, floating to the seabed a hundred million years ago, made the billowing chalk hills (at a rate of one centimetre every hundred thousand years). Chalk makes thin soil; the fields, scattered with flints, soon dry out. Water is quite literally worshipped.

On Midsummer’s Eve, the villagers of Ashmore perform the ancient ritual of Filly Loo, culminating in a dance in which they join hands as they circle the pond. Folk characters appear; a man comes down the road dressed as a tree (this is the Green Man, seen throughout England in church carving and pub signs). There is a horn dance by six men wearing antlers. These elements of the folk tradition occur in other places (Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire has a famous horn dance, for example), reflecting the ancient desire to conjure fertility out of the earth. The antiquity of Ashmore’s Filly Loo (a West Country dialect expression for uproar) is not known, but it seems to have come down as an authentic echo of the pagan past.

The pond forms a neat circle, and the village has gathered itself round it. This is a monochrome sort of village, built from the materials that lay to hand: notably the greenish-grey stone called greensand, mixed with grey black flints (perhaps laid in bands) and a few orangey-red bricks. Most of the dwellings in the heart of the village are thatched. It is clearly a village that people have loved. The bus shelter is a splendid structure, hexagonal in form with an arcade of solid oak. Beside the pond, someone has put a limestone bench, beautifully carved with mottoes, such as ‘Reflect A While’ and ‘Ancient aquifer’. It is not, however, an ancient aquifer that feeds the pond; this is a dew pond, filled with rainwater. Just now the tide is out: water has seeped away to the point that the ducks are beginning to look nervous. In 2008, the village began the task of raising £25,000 to put it right.

Ashmore: that icon of village England, the pond.

AVEBURY

WILTSHIRE

In the footsteps of the ancient past

The village of Avebury crouches amid the ancient stones that thread through and around it, much like the habitations that once clung to the monuments of Athens and Rome. Modern villagers, going about their daily life, tread the same ground as the people who used the henge many millennia ago – as do the visitors who come to admire the stones, or enjoy a drink at the Red Lion pub. Distant past and workaday present interlock. It is a conjunction to stop anyone in his or her tracks and inspire reflection.

The henge at Avebury was erected over a six-hundred-year period, beginning around 3000BC. It is an astonishing size – more than ten times that of Stonehenge – and bears witness to the extraordinary exuberance of monument-building that took place in Wiltshire during the Stone Age. A mile to the south stands Silbury Hill, the great dome of chalk that Neolithic people heaved, using antlers for tools, out of the ground beside what is now the A4. To the north-west of Avebury henge, Windmill Hill was banked up and inhabited during the fourth millennium BC; it became the site of some of the many burial mounds in the area, the most notable being the Long Barrows at East and West Kennet.

Used for millennia, Avebury henge had been abandoned by the Roman period. It was the Saxons who started to colonise it as a village. Now the village street, running from church to pub and beyond, rudely bisects the stone circle, itself being crossed by the B4003. Except for the church, partly chequered with flint, later builders preferred lighter and more perishable materials to stone; the thatched cottages and brick terraces look cosy but transient beside the bulging grey permanence of the monoliths.

To Alexander Keiller, born in 1889, the village was an intrusion. The heir to a marmalade fortune in Dundee, Keiller could indulge his interests and passions, which included skiing, racing cars, photography, witchcraft, criminology and sex. Archaeology came to fascinate him after the First World War. After visiting Avebury for the first time in 1924, he bought Windmill Hill to prevent Marconi from building an aerial mast on it. He began a series of excavations both at Windmill Hill and along the West Kennet Avenue, a line of standing stones that leads from the henge. From 1937, he began excavating the henge itself, uncovering stones that had been lost beneath the bracken and trees, and re-erecting them in their original holes. Taking a lease on Avebury Manor, he joined the ranks of the restorers who were transforming the manor houses of southern England into the visual equivalent of romantic poetry, releasing the spirits of history that had been locked up in them by insensitive alterations*.

As for the village, Keiller wanted none of it. Some houses he succeeded in demolishing, relocating their inhabitants to nearby Avebury Trusloe. Then came the Second World War; work stopped and was never resumed. Avebury the village survived to continue its whispered dialogue with Avebury Henge.

*See Hammoon, Hemingford Grey

BANWELL

SOMERSET

Not Noah’s Flood, but another one

In 1824, George Henry Law, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, was in a state of excitement. A cave had been discovered at Banwell, on the edge of the Mendip hills. Its existence was previously unsuspected, and it was on his land. The cave contained an immense quantity of fossilised animal bones. To the Bishop, this was conclusive proof of the truth of Noah’s Flood.

Then, the Mendips were still a mining area. Lead had been extracted since the Roman period, leaving the ground corrugated by the grooves left from surface works. In 1757, miners in search of calamine, an ore needed to make brass, broke into a cave at Banwell, where a spectacular display of stalactites had been formed. Dr Francis Randolph, the vicar of Banwell, realised its potential as a tourist attraction, by which he could raise money for a charity school. Accordingly he arranged that a more convenient entrance should be provided via another shaft. It was while digging this shaft that the bone cave was discovered.

Among the mud, sand and rocks on the floor were what a report in the Philosophical Magazine described as ‘an enormous quantity of bones, horns, and teeth. The thickness of this mass has been ascertained, by a shaft sunk into it, to be in one place nearly forty feet.’ Bones were soon being taken out for examination by the basket load. They were similar to bones that were found, commonly at the period, poking out of the hummocks of graveyards, although the fact that some of them came from a great and extinct species of bear declared them to be of ‘antediluvian origin’. Arctic hare, reindeer, wolf, arctic fox, wolverine and bison were among the other species.

A local man called William Beard started guiding visitors around the cave, taking money on behalf of Dr Randolph. He organised the bones into neat piles. It developed into a full-time job; he acquired the semi-humorous title of Professor, and renamed his home Bone Cottage. The Bishop, meanwhile, was developing his grounds with follies, among them being a cottage orné and an observation tower that gives a panoramic view of the surrounding landscape; an Osteoicon was built for the display of the choicest bones. The Bishop was, of course, wrong in his assumption about the bones. The Natural History Museum dates them to the last ice age, around seventy thousand years ago. A flood probably explains how the bones got into the cave; they were washed there as the glaciers melted.

BEER

DEVON

Cinema history in a modest venue

Congregational chapels in fishing villages rarely hit great architectural heights, and that at Beer is no exception. ‘Tall and flint-faced’, as it is described in The Buildings of England, just about does it. But an unexpected treasure lies inside. This less-than-Ritzy building contains an important relic of cinema history: the earliest Wurtlitzer organ in the country.

The heyday of the Wurlitzer coincided with the golden age of the movies as a form of mass entertainment. Rising from beneath the floor at the beginning of the performance, the organist already at the keyboard conjuring sound pictures from the hidden pipes, the instrument became part of the Gesamtkunstwerk that was the cinema-going experience. It had been conceived, however, for the silent screen, by the Englishman Robert Hope-Jones. An amateur church organist, Hope-Jones, born in 1859, was a complicated man, secretive and possibly mendacious about his inventions, which had been greatly assisted by the knowledge he had gained as chief electrician with the Lancashire and Cheshire Telephone Company.

To begin with, he developed an electrical action for conventional organs, allowing the pipes to be at any distance from the keyboard. Seeing the need for an instrument to replace the pianos and string trios that had provided an acoustically unspectacular accompaniment to films since the dawn of cinema in the 1890s, he extended the range of sound possibilities. A new stop was the Diaphone, described in David Baker’s The Organ as ‘a reed stop of very pure tone’, but so loud that it was also used to make foghorns. The Tremulant, imitating the vibrato of strings, was much used, as well as a range of special effects. The object was to create a ‘unit orchestra’, in which the whole gamut of orchestral sounds could be produced by a single performer. Hope-Jones crossed the Atlantic and started his own Hope-Jones Organ Company, but it failed and he took his own life in 1914. Not long before, his patents had been taken over by the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company in North Tonawanda, New York. The Mighty Wurlitzer, as the instrument was invariably known, was born.

The Beer Wurlitzer is not a particularly elaborate theatre organ, having been bought by Provincial Cinematograph Theatres in 1924. They installed it in the Picture House in Walsall rather than a big London cinema. But the vogue for Wurlitzers passed, and this one was rescued by a private enthusiast in 1955. In 1958, the Sweetland Organ Company of Bath moved it to Beer, alas without its percussion and special effects. ‘But,’ to quote the church’s website, it ‘is more than capable of giving a very good account of itself in the performance of light music, as well as accompanying the church services every week, as it has now done for fifty years.’ Who knows? One day it may be restored to its original specification ‘if space in the organ chamber permits’.

BEMERTON

WILTSHIRE

Teach me, my God and King

It is easy to picture George Herbert, the metaphysical poet, in the rectory at Bemerton, opposite the modest church – and many people since Izaak Walton wrote the first ‘Life’ have done so. It could be misleading. Herbert spent only three years as a clergyman here before his death from consumption in 1633. Before that, he had shone in a brilliant academic career at Cambridge University, where he became public orator – a position that could have led to a starring role at court. Briefly he was an MP. Although Bemerton was, and still is, a little place, the living that Herbert occupied, thanks to the intervention of his distant cousin the Earl of Pembroke at nearby Wilton House, was Fugglestone with Bemerton, which took in part of Wilton, then a small town, and stands on the edge of Salisbury, of which it is now an outlier.

Nevertheless, it was at Bemerton that Herbert revised and shaped his prose book The Country Parson (or A Priest to the Temple) in which he set forth his ideal of the quiet, self-sacrificing life of a secluded divine. ‘Country people,’ he observed, ‘live hardly.’ The country parson was therefore to avoid being greedy; he was to avoid alehouses and drinking; his clothes should be sober and clean. He was to preach constantly: ‘The pulpit is his joy and his throne.’ Ideally he would be unmarried. This was not Herbert’s own state, because he had married Jane Danvers, a cousin of his stepfather and apparently a buxom, clever lady, shortly before taking the living in 1630.

Country parsons with wives should expect three things of them: good teaching of the couple’s children and maids; practical knowledge of homely medicine; and prudent housekeeping. He prescribed a parsonage that would have looked like some of the Dutch paintings of the time, with ‘very plain’ furniture, ‘but clean, whole, and sweet; – as sweet as his garden can make; for he hath no money for such things, charity being his only perfume, which deserves cost when he can spare it. His fare is plain, and common, but wholesome. What he hath is little, but very good.’ The parson was to be a supporter of ‘old customs, if they be good and harmless’, because ‘country people are much addicted to them’.

One of his duties was to maintain his church. He had to make sure that it was sound and watertight, with windows, floor, seats, pulpit, desk and communion table in good repair, the whole place being ‘swept and kept clean, without dust or cobwebs’. On feast days it should be decorated with green boughs and scented with incense. Before coming to Bemerton, Herbert had already been installed as prebendary of Leighton Ecclesia in Huntingdonshire; the expectations of him there were not onerous, since he was required only to preach an annual sermon and that could be done through a deputy, but he paid for the rebuilding of the church, fitted out with a pulpit and reading desk (of the same height to symbolise that the sermon was not mightier than the Word of God). He similarly restored the church and rectory at Bemerton. According to Walton, he had the poem ‘To My Successor’ written on a tablet and installed on a chimney mantle in the rectory:

If thou chance for to find

A new House to thy mind

And built without thy Cost

Be good to the Poor,

As God gives thee store,

And then, my Labour’s not lost.

Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding, Cambridgeshire and friend, the poet George Herbert, shown in a stained-glass window of 1934 in Bemerton church.

BLAGDON

SOMERSET

Controversy over a bluestocking’s school

In the late eighteenth century, Hannah More was a celebrity. Her play Percy was received with rapturous applause in 1777. The literary world was small, and she knew most of it. ‘Hush, hush; it is dangerous to say a word of poetry before her,’ Dr Johnson said. ‘It is talking the art of war before Hannibal.’

During the 1780s, however, she began her metamorphosis into Horace Walpole’s ‘Saint Hannah’, increasingly drawn to evangelical religion, while at the same time disenchanted with London society. The daughter of a teacher in Bristol, she moved to Somerset, first to Cowslip Green and then to Barley Wood, where she built a cottage in 1801. To give herself a sense of purpose, she founded a series of charity schools, which would bring religion and some literacy to the ‘poor barbarians’ of the Mendips.

‘Miss Hannah More, something must be done for Cheddar … If you will be at the trouble I will be at the expense.’ The speaker was William Wilberforce, MP, evangelical and anti-slavery campaigner. Making a tour of Cheddar Gorge, his carriage packed with the necessaries of a good picnic, he had been appalled by the poor he had encountered, dwelling almost as cavemen. He dispensed money, for which their gratitude was pathetic, but continued to worry about their souls. This account was written by More’s sister, Martha, whom she called Patty. While Hannah blew in with gusts of energy and grand ideas, Patty had the patience and quiet determination of a good teacher.

The Mendips did not provide promising raw material for scholarship. Gentry were few, and the farmers ‘drunk every day, and plunged in such vices as make me begin to think London is a virtuous place’. The Church of England clergy took the tithes but ‘neglected’ their flock. Visiting poorer houses to drum up pupils, the Mores were dismayed to find only one Bible, which was used as a stand for a geranium pot.

The first school was opened at Cheddar in 1789, an inauspicious year for experiments, given events on the other side of the Channel. But it soon had three hundred pupils, who were taught to read the Bible and the catechism. During the next decade it would be followed by schools at Shipham, Rowberrow, Sandford, Banwell, Congresbury, Yatton, Nailsea, Axbridge, Blagdon and Wedmore.

The Mores have been accused of patronising their alumni, and attempting to impose alien cultural values on them – which rather ignores the children’s freedom not to attend. Modern educationalists are more likely to note the project’s fundamental conservatism: it was not expected that education would help the student to get on, other than by ‘habits of industry and virtue’. Instead, expectations had to be managed so that the educated child would not later feel discontented with his or her lot.

The school at Blagdon ignited a national controversy when the schoolmaster was accused of holding Methodist meetings and extempore prayer sessions, an attack on the role of the established Church. The French Revolution had made any kind of radicalism suspect. The vehemence with which Hannah was denounced by High Churchmen was searing. She was forced to retreat to save her other charitable works; the school was closed. Nevertheless, Blagdon and the other schools, some of which continued into the twentieth century, drew attention to the need for education in poor communities; the Church of England’s National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, which took up the reins until the Education Act of 1870, was founded in 1811.

See also Painswick

BLISLAND

CORNWALL

John Betjeman’s favourite church

Many Cornish villages are named after their patron saints, but not Blisland. Perhaps it is just as well; locally the saint in question was known as St Pratt. This was a corruption of St Protus, who, in the dedication of the church, is joined by his reputed brother, St Hyacinth, both of them having been martyred during the persecutions of Emperor Valerian in the third century. Blisland was supposed to have been called after the joyousness of the location, which may be fanciful but suggests how names (as Tristram Shandy’s father maintained in Laurence Sterne’s novel) can influence personality.

For Blisland is a serene and lovely place, its swelling green equipped with children’s swings and overlooked by houses, built of the local moorland granite but, for once in Cornwall, on a comfortably prosperous scale. A notice for the village show has been drawing-pinned to a pole. Down the road, a frilled umbrella shelters a shelf, attached to a ferny bank, selling rhubarb and Swiss chard at a pound a bag. When the shop closed, villagers opened their own in a disused shipping container and ran it for seven years, until a wooden community centre of unexampled glory was built, with ground-source heating, photovoltaic panels and rain-water recycling to make it as green as a moorland tussock.

‘It has not one ugly building in it,’ John Betjeman remembered in First and Last Loves in 1952. He had first cycled there as a boy, from the family’s holiday home by the sea. Straining up hills and careering ‘heart-in-mouth’ down into the next valley, he slowly left the stunted wind-blown trees of the coast and emerged into the richer landscape on the edge of Bodmin Moor. St Protus and St Hyacinth, carved with such labour out of the iron-hard stone, epitomised everything that he felt, throughout his life, a church should be. ‘Sir Ninian Comper, that great church architect, says that a church should bring you to your knees when first you enter it. Such a church is Blisland.’

You reach it down the slope of the graveyard, past early Victorian slate headstones lettered as though they were circus posters, in a caprice of different fonts (did they inspire the neo-Victorian typography for Betjeman’s Shell Guides?). Outwardly, beneath its square tower, the church spreads its skirts, with a couple of aisles lined up in parallel with the nave. It keeps itself low, crouching near to the ground, but need not worry about blowing away in the storms: some of the granite blocks from which it was built are as big as steamer trunks. Open the door and the interior has all the funny quirks that bespeak centuries of love and care; one of the nave columns leans so rakishly that it had to be propped up by a wooden beam in the fifteenth century. But, needing a beam, the congregation ensured that it was carved with mouldings and roses.

The ribs of the roofs, like upturned hulls of ships, were also carved. As for what Betjeman regarded as the pièce de résistance, let the Poet Laureate himself reveal it: ‘Walls white, sun streams in through a clear west window and there – glory of glories! – right across the whole eastern end of the church is a richly painted screen and rood loft. It is of wood. The panels at its base are red and green. Wooden columns, highly coloured and twisted like barley sugar, burst into gilded tracery and fountain out to hold a panelled loft.’

‘Incongruous’, Pevsner sniffs, in his Buildings of England volume, of this contribution from the 1890s, when the little-known F. C. Eden restored the church. But the colour and gilding, the saints and theatre made a direct appeal to Betjeman’s spirituality through his aesthetic sense. Struggling with faith, he wanted architecture to overpower his doubts and open, for the moment that he experienced it, a window onto eternity. Blisland did it for him.

Shrine to home produce and honesty at Blisland.

BRENT KNOLL

SOMERSET

Geese hang the fox-in-a-mitre

The only seating in an early medieval parish church was made of stone; congregations either stood or kneeled during worship, the only exceptions being made for the old or infirm, who ‘went to the wall’, where they could find a hard bench. From around 1300, counties that were rich in woodwork – principally East Anglia and the West Country – began to introduce seating. It was a sign of affluence. Until then, all parish occasions, including markets, took place in the open space of the church nave. A church that was rich enough to install benches had also to build a hall for other activities. Benches came to Brent Knoll in the fifteenth century.

Bench ends were often carved, as were misericords, the shelves on the underside of tip-up seats in the choirs of monastic churches, on which monks could obtain the ‘mercy’ (in Latin, misericordia) of support during the many services they were obliged to attend. Both kinds of seat adornment are an insight into the medieval mind, surviving from the times when every surface of the church (windows, walls, rood screen, font cover, pulpit, chantries, tombs) was decorated to tell a story or point a moral.

Misericords rarely depict religious scenes. Perhaps it would have been thought sacrilegious to sit on a sacred image, or perhaps the position was so low in the hierarchy of an intensely decorated church that carvers were allowed to let their fancy dictate themes. About half of those that exist around Britain are decorated with plants or leaves, the rest a variety of everyday scenes or fabulous creatures. On benches, the most common ornament is a poppy head, a finial that might resemble a fleur-de-lys but had nothing to do with poppies, the term being derived from the French poupée, a puppet or figurehead. The panels at the ends of the benches might be carved with linenfold. Occasionally bench ends bear religious scenes or symbols, and this is the case at Brent Knoll.

But there is a twist: three of the panels make it clear what the congregation thought of the church hierarchy placed over them. They show a fox dressed as an abbot. This in itself would have appealed to the medieval imagination, representing one of those inversions that could occur at any moment in a precarious and unstable existence. Villagers knew all about foxes. There was, furthermore, a tradition of using them to make satirical fun of authority, as in the medieval Roman de Reynard (adapted by Chaucer for his ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’), where Reynard the fox is brought before King Leo the Lion for trial, being freed on condition he goes on a pilgrimage.

A worse fate is suffered by the Brent Knoll’s fox in abbot’s clothing. In the first scene, he is shown holding a pastoral crook from which hangs a fleece – so much for his care of the flock. At his feet are three pigs wearing monks’ cowls, symbolising the greed of the monasteries. In a lower panel, two apes are roasting a pig on a spit as an image of gluttony. The second scene shows the fox in irons. One of the apes has ousted him, and is rousing some geese to rebellion. The story continues in the lower panel, where the fox is now in the stocks. In the third panel the fox is hanged, to the delight of two watchdogs, who bark in approval.

The Brent Knoll fox is generally identified with the Abbot of Glastonbury, although it is not clear quite why the villagers were so cross with him. We may not know the exact details of the case, but the message, half a millennium later, is unmistakable. Abbots stink.

BRIANTSPUDDLE

DORSET

Social engineering under thatch

Sir Ernest Debenham was a remarkable patron. The grandson of the founder of the Debenhams department store and drapery business, he had been educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, before entering the family firm around 1900. In London, his progressive ideas about architecture were demonstrated by Halsey Ricardo, who created a colourful palace for him at 8 Addison Road, rich with opulent mosaics. In Dorset, where he began acquiring a large agricultural estate in 1914, the note was different: white walls and wavy thatch. Debenham again commissioned Halsey Ricardo, but here he wanted the enterprise to demonstrate the principles of self-sufficiency in a progressively scientific context. The hamlets of Briantspuddle and Affpuddle were transformed for the workers who would be so supported. They became a visionary combination: half local style, as beloved of the Arts and Crafts movement, half social engineering.

The estate had been formed in the 1680s, when William Frampton of Moreton bought three manors and consolidated them into one holding. Until the Debenham era, it had sustained a scant population living in a small number of cottages. By the time Debenham was able to start his contribution, the First World War had intervened. The first phase consisted of twelve cottages and a model farm, known as the Ring. Instead of the traditional cob or rammed earth technique used to construct the earlier dwellings, a cheaper, more industrial method was favoured: concrete blocks. They were covered with plaster, but the mechanical shape of the blocks is still apt to grin through – they are known to this day as Debenham block.

Nevertheless, the style was otherwise drawn from the locality, though perhaps heightened by Ricardo, who clearly enjoyed the sculptural possibilities of thatch (dormer windows were given peaked coverings resembling helmets). A number of thatched dairy buildings built to rationally circular plans (allowing lorries to turn) were built across Britain during the inter-war years, the Ovaltine Model Dairy at Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire being the most famous; Briantspuddle has one of the first.

‘The first consideration when conditions became more normal [after the First World War] was the provision of suitable housing accommodation for the workers,’ an estate brochure observed in 1929. In order to keep the workforce happy – and, by implication, productive – social facilities, such as the village hall, were built. Professor Boufleur, head of the Cirencester Agricultural College, advised on progressive agriculture. Milk was brought from the dairy farms around the estate to be tested, separated and bottled in the Ring. At a time when tuberculosis was still spread through dairy products, and before pasteurisation had become standard, Debenham led the way by installing a fully equipped laboratory to analyse the milk. Self-sufficiency also required the estate to generate its own power, which