Barrington Court and Holly Farm: Money and Fire

Well preserved building archaeology can be found in quiet places. Frugal places where little fuss is made…. families come and go.. the home is kept water tight but apart from that.. small practical changes as the years stretch into centuries. Generations of evidence will accumulate ..gradually… like dust settling on rafters.

National Trust Vernacular Building Survey for Holly Farm completed in 1987. The NT aims to record all of the visible historic architecture of its cottages, farms and outbuildings in this way.

But…fire and money will to sweep the evidence away.

We are in the roof of Barrington Court in Somerset. Dan, the Conservator, Robert the Buildings Archaeologist and I.

A Tudor mansion built between 1538 and 1552.

The mid 16th century Barrington Court (on the right) and the late 17th century grand stables converted to accommodation in the 1920s (on the left) known as Strode House after the 17th century family who commissioned it. The two linked by a 1920s corridor.

In 1907, it was the first large house to be saved for the nation by National Trust. In the 1920s, it was leased to Colonel Lyle (of Tate & Lyle sugar) and he repaired it and turned it into a country home. During his building project, he linked Barrington via a corridor to Strode House…..the huge neighbouring brick stables, built in the 1670s, which he converted into a comfortable residence.

Lyle’s transformation of Barrington also created a home for his collection of carved timber panelling… gathered from many derelict buildings in Britain and beyond.

Adding confusion for the archaeologist… a challenge.

Both the Strode House and Barrington Court needed roof repairs and the three of us had assembled to determine the level of archaeological recording and conservation work required during the repair.

‘Any new service trenches planned for the project?’

‘Probably not’…. so, little chance of spotting anything of the previous medieval house which was glimpsed by Forbes the architect during the 1920s overhaul of the building.

We stood in the hall and grand staircase. The architecture looked like a screen-set, something out of an Errol Flynn movie. Dan opened a panel and revealed a giant iron key.

The dancing hall and staircase created for Colonel Lyle in the 1920s

‘ This adjusted the sprung floor of this room’ he said ‘like Blackpool Ballroom.. for dancing’

Nothing truly Tudor visible here. We ascended the stair and Robert spotted a small door half way up. ‘Garderobe’ he said and reached across the landing and looked inside. ‘still has the loo seat!’ The insertion of the stair had broken through a first floor Tudor room of some status ..which once had its own facilities.

At the top of the stairs, we walked through a doorway into a huge empty chamber, still with a fine Tudor fireplace. The yellow brown Ham stone surround was intricately carved and was decorated with painting.

The painted Tudor fireplace in the first floor chamber. The decorative column on the right is original but the unpainted stone on the left is a copy. How much of this decoration is in fact Tudor?.. we will see.

‘It’s been partly covered and then exposed again’ said Robert. ‘These timber dowels would have fixed a wooden screen. The mock red and white marbling, blues, greys and blacks including traces of gold leaf on the carved flowers .. this could be original’

Detail of the painted fireplace showing red and white marbling.

A historic paint specialist would be employed to record this potentially highly significant survival. We imagined the whole room decorated in this lavish way…. 500 years earlier.

However, the main point of the work was to make the place water-tight.. so we were in the roof…. and as we walked along the galleries we became increasingly disappointed.

The attic galleries of Barrington Court turned out to be largely 1920s repair with imported panelling

Robert shook his head. ‘Modern… saw marks… that one’s Tudor but in the wrong place.. I reckon Colonel Lyle’s builders took most of the old roof off, left a few original bits and pieces and used some of his collection of old carved wood to make this part of the building look Tudor’.

Barrington Court was badly neglected when the National Trust saved it …much of the structure was in a poor state.. but.. we had seen adzed and pit-sawn timbers forming partitions on the lower floors.. so not all was lost.

We would call in a dendrochronologist to check whether secure dating was a possibility in these less altered parts of the building.

At the end of the tour, we went into the cellar and looked at the foundations. There was a corridor at a strange angle which formed a corner. The quoin stones here were unlike those of the building that towered above it.

‘Perhaps part of the medieval house’.

Time for lunch and Robert grabbed a roll of drawings from the back of his landrover on the way to the property office in Strode House. Robert unfurled the black line drawings across a table as the kettle boiled.

The inked in survey drawings of the archaeological recording which took place to salvage the information from the ruins of Holly Farm.

Rare these days, but beautiful: hand crafted Indian ink technical pen drawings. The reassemblage from the ashes of the evidence. Holly Farm on the Kingston Lacy Estate.

In May 2021, a spark from a flue lit the thatch and suddenly…. timber-framed Holly Farm burned. The fire brigade could only save the shell of the building

By the time I got there… a few weeks later, the surviving walls were held up with scaffolding and the burnt interior was a heap of fallen charred rafters, purlins and beams.

Robert had worked with the builders and used his forensic skills to work out how old this building was and how it had functioned.

Tree-ring dating showed that the earliest phase of Holly Farm made it contemporary with Barrington Court… though its occupants were worlds away in the social hierachy.

Holly Farmhouse was the home of a yeoman farmer and his family. Customary tenants of Kingston Lacy, part of the Duchy of Lancaster.

In contrast, the Earl of Bridgewater Henry Daubenay occupied the newly built and huge ‘E’-plan Barrington. He’d ordered the old family home knocked down and had the cash to commission this symmetrical wonder. Very much the latest thing back then.

Like Barrington, there are likely to have been previous houses on the site of Holly Farm… and the timber framing gave this away… a piece had been reused from an earlier building. Most of the dendro dates were 16th and 17th century but one of the corner posts was from a timber felled in 1245.

The next set of drawings enabled Robert to talk through the fireplace technology of Holly Farm.. the beating heart of the building. The fire had stripped back the layers of later centuries of adaptation to reveal the large inglenook fireplace. A bread oven on one side, salt drying alcove at the back and on the other side a brewing vat.. and above it ..and accessed from the first floor… a curing chamber. The hooks, where the meat was hung, were still in place.

Robert will unite the structural evidence with the documentary information and complete his report which is the archive and archaeological essence of all that remains of Holly Farm.

Holly Farm after the forensic removal of the burnt collapsed evidence of the building

After lunch, Daniel led us into the attic of Strode House. Huge plain chunky trusses…very late 17th century…. and with assembly marks in numbered order. Colonel Lyle had not needed to replace these…This roof was largely intact.

‘Elm’ Robert tutted… ‘not much chance of dendro-dating these’

My phone went off … the central heating had stopped working….. I gave my excuses, wished them a Happy Christmas and left.

We would do our best to understand the surviving evidence, to fill in the gaps… but at Barrington Court… it was money…. and at Holly Farm…. it was fire…. which had swept… much of… but not all ..the archaeology away.

Uvedales, Corfe Castle from Town House to Poor House

Old stone towns have ancient houses. This is certainly true of Corfe village in Dorset. A picturesque place dominated by the craggy ruins of Corfe Castle.

Much of Corfe belonged to the Bankes family who gave it to the National Trust in 82.. including Uvedales House. As you enter East Street and cross the bridge by Boar Mill you would be forgiven for missing it. There are far more dramatic views to be enjoyed by looking up to the castle.. and Uvedales is beside a busy road and next to the disused public lavatories.

Uvedales House on East Street, Corfe Castle. The large windows have the letters IV and HV carved into the stone on either side. Henry Uvedale.

Cross the road and look on either side of the two big windows. On the first floor are the letters H on the left and V on the right and on the ground floor I and V.

Back in 1774, the historian John Hutchins described painted glass windows which once told what these letters stood for.. but the windows have long gone. They included the coat of arms of local landowners the Uvedale family and the arms of the ancient borough of Corfe. John Uvedale was mayor of Corfe in 1582 and Henry became a churchwarden.

Many people have lived in the house since then. Its walls contain diverse stories and have been altered infilled and repaired over the centuries. The building is having a 21st century conservation refurbishment at the moment and needs a buildings archaeologist to record what is revealed as it is opened up.

Buildings archaeology is a specialised skill. Clues within walls, within roof structures under floorboards and beneath the ground as new service pipes and drains are laid.

Buildings like Uvedales have been repaired and adapted over 100s of years. Here a modern fireplace in the east sitting room of the central ancient Uvedales stack is only the latest in a nest of fireplaces which, like Russian dolls, have filled up the space within the the original inglenook.It can be seen emerging from under the wallpaper.

I met Bob there a few days ago.. to walk round the house with him and to find out what he has discovered as earlier phases of Uvedales have been revealed beneath layers of wallpaper and modern additions.

What do you trust? Is that 17th century doorway where it began or has it been shifted from somewhere else. Read the clues. It’s not like buried dirt archaeology, the evidence is not sealed but chunks of building can be moved and reused.

The oldest parts of the house lie in the central stack with large inglenook fireplaces on the east and west sides. The west side is the most interesting. Underneath the modern layers was found a fine stone fireplace, probably earlier 17th century, but this had been inserted through an earlier fireplace. The later fireplace may have been salvaged from Corfe Castle following its capture and demolition by the Parliamentarians in 1646. Dendro analysis of part of the roof dated it to the 1650s. This evidence demonstrates extensive repairs to the house following the Civil War. Much needed, the village had been badly beaten up during the two sieges of the Castle in 1643 and 1645-6.

On the west side of the stack another fireplace which has been opened up to reveal a 17th century fireplace cutting through an earlier (probably 16th century stone fireplace). Removing the wallpaper and plaster has revealed a bread oven on its left side and a blocked doorway and buried flight of steps to the first floor.

In the 17th century, Uvedales House became the property of the Okeden family and by 1732 it was known as the ‘Kings Arms’. The Bankes family archive includes records of licence agreements. These list the alehouses allowed to trade in Corfe Castle. There is a detailed map of the town drawn by Archer Roberts and dated 1769. It shows the ‘Kings Arms’ and by this time it is owned by John Bankes.

The peeling of wallpaper uncovered a bread oven opening and left of this a blocked door and beyond a flight of stairs(very Enid Blyton) The steps had been covered in building rubble and as they were exposed, the wear marks of numerous feet on the timber treads could be seen. This change of stairway layout probably took place when, in 1796, Mr Bankes agreed to convert the building to a Poor House.

In that year, the overseers of Corfe’s poor agreed to take Mr Bankes’s house’and put as many poor in it as could comfortably be lodged’ the whole place was divided up into accommodation units and there are still little fireplaces inserted throughout the building and steep narrow flights of stairs.

On the second floor, the spaces beween the joists were found to be filled with sand. Insulation? sound proofing? It had been there for at least 150 years it seems because the latest coin found in the sand was 1838.

Up on the 2nd floor, I met the builders repairing the joists and cleaning out the sand between them. Strange to find sand there but perhaps it was for insulation or sound proofing. Whatever.. the excavation became interesting work because coins kept turning up. It seems that over the years, various occupants had lost loose change between the cracks in the floorboards. The earliest was a florin of Charles II (1660s-80s) and the latest a penny of William IV (1838).

The coins sifted from the sand dated from late 17th to early 19th but mostly George III.

The 19th century census returns show Uvedales packed with labourers and men on low wages who were employed to cut clay on the heathland between Corfe and Wareham (great clay…it got shipped up to Staffordshire for Wedgewood’s potteries). By the 1850s, East Street was known as Poor Street. Quite a come down for the wealthy Tudor Uvedales’ family home.

Over the years the tenements were merged and became larger… and now the house is being rearranged again for its new 21st century occupants.