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.

Kingston Lacy: Digging the Beech Avenue

This story goes back to the early days, when Nancy and I were archaeologists employed by the National Trust’s Kingston Lacy and Corfe Castle Estates. Mr Bankes had given his land to the NT just 6 years earlier. It was the winter of 1988-89.

Kingston Lacy’s Beech Avenue heading east towards Kingston Lacy Park. The edge of Badbury Rings on the left

When driving towards Wimborne Minster from Blandford Forum, the boundary of the Kingston Lacy Estate is clear. After the village of Tarrant Keyneston, the road rises from the valley. At the crest of the slope, suddenly, the great beech tree avenue begins. Hundreds of mature graceful trees flank the road all the way to Kingston Lacy Park, a distance of 3km.

William John Bankes had them planted in 1835 to create a natural gothic arch of beauty. It is said that this was in honour of his mother Frances. The beeches are fabulous any time of year. The sunlight will flicker through October russets.. or perhaps the intense green of May. But now, with the leaves almost gone, the low sun will intensify their silhouettes and their smooth forms will create unique trunk and branch-scapes, a parade of bold pleasing patterns with glimpses of Badbury and the wider Estate farmland beyond..

On one side of the road, 365 trees … one for each day in a usual year. On the other side 366..an extra tree for leap years. All nicely aligned and regularly spaced but each using its 185 years of life to grow into its own unique natural form.

The storm of October 1987 hit the avenue badly, blew over many of William John’s trees and though most survived, many were shaken to their roots and became unstable. Many more were affected in 1990. The storms reminded the National Trust that the avenue would not live for ever. A long term plan was needed. And so it was decided that a second avenue would be planted on either side of the 1835 trees.

The fallen trees along the Beech Avenue after the storm of January 1990

In the Hillbutts Kingston Lacy Estate Office, I was shown the plans and compared the proposed tree plantings with ancient features visible on aerial photographs. The trees that had fallen in 1987 had torn up chunks of archaeology in their roots, and the planting of new trees would also destroy archaeological information. This would take place gradually as their developing roots infiltrated and disrupted the buried stratigraphic layers of information below the ground.

We plotted the known archaeological sites where they lay in the path of the proposed new planting and persuaded the Estate to allow us to dig where the trees would go.

At the west end of the avenue, there was a good opportunity to take two Bronze Age round barrows out of arable cultivation to preserve them under grass. Good conservation practice that would protect these burial mounds far into the future. It meant that there would be a short gap on the south side of the avenue, but the managers agreed to this because these mounds were scheduled monuments of national importance.

One of the barrows might be the famous Badbury Barrow where Rev Austen found many burials and a stone.. carved with daggers (see blog Badbury Barrow and Rock Art 26th August 2018).

This was our winter of 88-89, working along the beech avenue investigating the archaeological lines seen on aerial photos where the trees would go. Usually there were three of us, me, Nancy and Rob…and the Estate let us have an old white caravan to shelter in for tea breaks and store the tools.

We began at the west end with a 60m diameter ring ditch beside the Swan Way trackway. This was part of the group which included the two we had removed from arable.

The Bronze Age 60m diameter ring ditch beside the Swan Way at the wwest end of the Beech Avenue.

A JCB stripped the ploughsoil as we watched. It turned out that everything had been scoured down to the bedrock and there were furrows cut into the chalk as though a steam plough had been used to subsoil the interior of the site. However, the 1.25m deep ring ditch was still filled with Bronze Age archaeology. It measured 4.2m wide at the surface and narrowed to 1.7m wide at the bottom. Its flat bottomed ditch was once the quarry around a now lost burial mound. Debris from funerary deposits formed part of the filling, including a human hip bone and fragments of a c.3,000 year old Deveral Rimbury barrel urn…..At a deeper level were clusters of flint flakes that fitted together. We imagined someone in the Bronze Age, sheltered in the hollow of the silted ditch, making tools out of chunks of stone..

In January, our caravan was moved east to the grassland south of Badbury. Here, we started to look at a large ditch which had been part excavated in 1965. At that time, there was a bank beside it, they found a 1st century ballista bolt under its eroded edge…but after the dig, the whole thing was bulldozed flat. We found the caterpillar tracks of the earthmoving machinery etched onto the chalk bedrock…and old tin cans which once held evaporated milk… from the excavation tea breaks… tossed into the backfill.

The deep Bronze Age ditch near Badbury Rings which continues south to Shapwick a huge excavation. At the top below the plough soil and horizontal ranging pole you can see the jumbled soil above Nancy’s green safety helmet. The evidence of the 1965 excavation.

Below this, thousands of years of silting, with sherds of c. 3,700 year old Middle Bronze Age pottery found over 2m down in the lower silts. This was a huge construction, a sharp ‘V’ shape over 4m wide and 3.2m deep. The air photographs showed it crossing under the line of the Blandford Road, running south for 1.5km to the edge of Shapwick village and then turning abruptly west and continuing across the Estate. The bank had been on the east side of the ditch and an earthwork of this scale was surely a fortification against some unknown and forgotten Bronze Age threat in the direction of Blandford. We discussed it over tea in the caravan … alongside politics, philosophy and religion.. but came to no agreement.

The weather was kind to us and from time to time visitors came to help and asked how we were getting on.

Angus, the farmer, had noticed patterns after ploughing and took us out to show his discoveries. Here were the clear soil marks of ancient stock enclosures that had emerged that winter in his fields. We walked across the ploughsoil and picked up Roman pottery.

The soil marks of the Roman stock enclosure ditches photographed by model plane in February 1989

David, the Kingston Lacy warden showed us where he had found a Late Bronze Age palstave axe in a drainage trench beside our excavation. He introduced us to a man with a model plane with a camera fixed to it and we welcomed his offer of flying the Estate. His photos of the soil marks are some of the best we have.

We came across no other bronze metalwork but instead found a ring of posts-holes with Bronze Age pottery in the fillings. The remains of a timber framed round house complete with a porch. Its intercutting post-holes showed that it had been repaired more than once….as the timber uprights rotted and needed replacement.

One of the pairs of post-holes of the round house.

Seeing how they secured the house uprights with flint nodules rammed into the post-holes against the timber… we copied our ancient ancestors to create a stile over the fence for easy access to our caravan.

Further east… and the A-team turned up for the day. My Sunday School class, who were already veterans after two expeditions to the digs at Corfe Castle. They tackled a shallow scooped profile ditch which had the root holes from an ancient hedge beside it. The filling contained Romano-British pottery. We found three ditches like this as well as the side ditch of the Roman road to Dorchester.

One of the rounded shallow ditches (left) and small v shaped field boundary ditches (right)

Our last finds were two small ‘V’ shaped ditches which contained earlier pottery. We had found a similar ditch when we dug across Kingston Lacy’s amphitheatre the previous year (see blog ‘Kingston Lacy’s Roman Amphitheatre’ 15th February 2014). These ditches are part of the ‘celtic field system’ dating back to the Bronze Age and still visible as white ghost lines on aerial photographs after ploughing.

We had expected snow, wind and torrential rain but December to February that year had been good to us. We felt sad to load up the tools and say goodbye to the old white caravan.

Another fallen tree in 2014 with the new avenue growing beside it.

Since then, I have driven along Kingston Lacy’s beech avenues many many times times and seen the new trees growing and the old trees becoming a little fewer year by year. I rarely need to stop.. but in March I went back to the gap for the barrows beside the Swan Way. It was a meeting with Bournemouth University to plan for geophysical survey and a new research project to locate the Badbury Barrow.

The short gap in the new avenue on the south side of the old avenue where the two scheduled Bronze Age burial mounds were taken out of arable and included in a new hedged area of permanent pasture beside the Swan Way track (on the left edge of this photograph)

It was strange to be back. I placed my hand on the trunk of one of the trees.. now over 30 years old. They’re growing well…back then they were saplings, with stems less than a wrist thick… but now they are grown over 30cm across. They are well established now… all set for the 22nd century.

The west end of the Avenue forming a living gateway to the Kingston Lacy Estate with the new avenue growing either side of the surviving 1835 trees.

Trees are planted for the future… and… as I consoled myself…even William John, never expected to see his great avenue achieve its full glory.

Storm Archaeology

I had an urgent phone call at Tisbury the other day.

Looking west. Where the river meets the sea at Seatown. Golden Cap in the background.

A few years ago, Humphrey had found the fragments of a granite rotary quern (for grinding grain into flour) washing out of the cliff. He had picked this up below the Seatown Iron Age site we excavated in 2015.

https://archaeologynationaltrustsw.wordpress.com/2015/07/20/burnt-mound-the-story-so-far/

Now he had spotted something else.

A recent storm had scoured the gravel from the river mouth at Seatown.. a hamlet flanked by parts of the National Trust’s Golden Cap Estate in Dorset. The sea had exposed what he thought was the site of an ancient fire…charcoal surrounded by hazelnut shells.

Another storm threatened over the weekend and he thought that the site might be covered again or washed away. I agreed to drive down on the Friday afternoon and have a look.

At Chideock, I took the narrow road down to the beach. The car park was scattered with seaweed and huge rolling breakers smashed against the beach. I opened the boot and put on water-proofs and boots and filled my backpack with sample bags, trowel, notebook and camera. The river had swelled with months of rain and I followed it a few metres towards the sea.

The grey clay exposure at Seatown Beach with black fragments of preserved wood jutting out of it

I then saw what Humphrey had spotted. Black worn timbers jutting out of a grey sticky clay. The sort of clay that excludes all oxygen and enables wood to survive for 1000s of years. The waves were pounding the gravel beach but the tide was far enough out to enable me to crouch down and look at the exposure.

There were footprints and dog paw marks across it… as it was everyone’s riverside route to the shoreline. I quickly cleaned the site up. The area visible was only about 5m long and 2m wide. it seemed to continue under the beach gravel…although it could not be seen, the site was probably much more extensive.

A close up of the clay with a black fragment of wood sticking out top right and around this little black blobs which are the hazelnut shells.

There was a jagged tree stump half a metre in diameter jutting out of the clay and nearby part of a fallen tree trunk of similar size. Around them were many hazelnut shells. I collected a wood fragment and some of the shells and looked for anything that might date the site. This clay was deep down at the river level with the sand and clay lias cliffs rising up on either side. The land had been cut sheer by the wave action that wears away this soft geology year.by year. One of many National Trust coastal sites effected by coastal erosion. I thought of Brownsea in Poole Harbour and Gunwalloe and Godrevy in Cornwall where new archaeology is revealed each winter.

But at Seatown….was this archaeology at all?.or a buried Jurassic forest many millions of years old… but would the hazelnuts survive for so long? I drove away with my samples, drawings and photos ready for some background research.

The next storm blew a field maple over in front of Kingston Lacy House in south-east Dorset. Back in 1990, a storm blew a tree over close to the mansion and revealed the site of the 12th-15th century Kingston medieval manor. https://archaeologynationaltrustsw.wordpress.com/2013/12/24/merry-christmas-kingston-lacy-1371/ .

The field maple on the north side of Kingston Lacy House tearing up remains of the demolished medieval manor house where kings once held banquets for their important guests.

I asked Dave and Gill to have a look and they reported large lumps of stone and mortar exposed in the roots. On closer inspection they saw a medieval clay roof tile and an oyster shell. A leftover from a banquet held in the house …perhaps for John of Gaunt or his son Henry IV.

Close up of the tree roots which have disturbed mortar and building rubble from the old manor house.

A few days later, Mark (National Trust Ranger), drove me out to High Wood. This lies on a hill east of Badbury Rings on the Kingston Lacy Estate. A huge beech tree, over 250 years old, had crashed to the ground.

The fallen beech tree in High Wood

As we drove across the fields, we talked again about the High Wood skeleton revealed by an earlier uprooted beech tree… that fell in the great storm of 1987.

https://archaeologynationaltrustsw.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/meeting-in-high-wood/

The rain pelted down as we wrapped our coats around us, got out of the car and walked a few yards into the wood. I was awed by this huge fallen tree. We stood under the wide root plate. No bones this time..just a lot of roots mixed with earth and chalk ripped from the ground…but near the centre, something different, the dark soil gave way to burnt orange-red clay that formed a circular area about 1-2m across. I knelt down and picked over the fallen debris. Chunks of light grey flint crackled with many fine lines. These flints had been heated in a fire. This appeared to be a hearth of some kind.

We were getting wet and had other places to see… but Dave and Gill investigated a few days later and recovered struck flakes of flint.

High Wood has been there at least since the 14th century and lies at the heart of the medieval Kingston Lacy deer park. This land has not been ploughed for many hundreds of years so a hearth might survive from the prehistoric period. I’m looking forward to seeing the finds and reading Dave’s report….

It’s all in a name .. UPDATE

With some fresh eyes and a consensus of Mitchell 🙂 I found an Isaac Mitchell on the 1841 and subsequent censuses in Shapwick (good work Carol you spotted him as well )

Isaac (54 years old) is listed as a carpenter on all the census I looked at and on the 1851 one, which was clearer to read, he is married to a lady called Love (52 years old) and his son Dennis (23 years old) is also listed as a carpenter. It is interesting to see his mother-in-law,  called Hester Jefferies,  also lived with them  and is an amazing 95 years old!

It’s all in the name..

Close up detail of plaster work around the top of the ceiling above the marble staircase

Once again I headed for Kingston Lacy with a mission to check under the floorboards in the house. A condition survey was being carried out by Clivedon Conservation on the plaster ceiling above the marble staircase.

Douglas and Tina (National Trust paintings conservator) surveying the painted plaster ceiling

It was while looking under the floor in the third Tented Room above the ceiling that Douglas from Clivedon Conservation spotted some writing on one of the joists of the superstructure, but he had not had time follow it up further.

“James” written in pencil on the wooden joist

So as well as looking between the joists for objects lost down the cracks between the boards or hidden on purpose, I had a look at the faces of the joists to see if I could find more writing. It was difficult to get the right lighting and angle to make out the words, especially as not all the boards had been lifted. But with the help of torches and various settings on my camera I could make out one full name, a part name and a date!

The surname “Game” to go with the first name James

The complete name was James Game, followed by the name Isaac and something illegible, presumably a surname, and then the date November 25th 1837. William John Bankes commissioned Charles Barry in 1835 to remodel Kingston Hall. This work was completed circa 1841, so the 1837 date fits with work being carried out in the house.

November 25th 1837

With access to the 1840 census I thought I would look up James Game to see if I could find him in the area or on the estate. It was exciting to find someone of this name living at Hillbutts, a small group of dwellings beside the boundary of the parkland around Kingston Lacy house. But best of all, his occupation was listed as a joiner!

I think the second name of Isaac starts with an N? All ideas and suggestions welcome, then we’ll see if we can find Isaac on the census as well!

I think the surname of Isaac starts with an N, or perhaps M

The name Isaac written in pencil

 

‘Here Gen. Montgomery stayed and ate before the invasion…..’

Major Ted Applegate

Just recently I have managed to make contact again with the lovely family of Major Ted Applegate. It is always worth trying the internet every now and then when searching for a lost contact 🙂

Grace, one of his daughters, has recently sent another of her Dad’s letters written while based at the American Army hospital during WWII at Kingston Lacy. We got very excited as it was about a visit inside the big mansion. It is wonderful to get first hand accounts of our properties in the past. A fresh eye on the contents and place and we often glean important or interesting information we would never have discovered in the estate archives.

Kingston Lacy

We had gathered from other family members of staff who served at the American hospital that they were allowed up to the house and that the officers had use of some rooms in the house. But we had no real details to confirm the past memories and snippets. I have reproduced the letter below as it speaks for itself….

Ted’s letter home –

Monday 1830, 6 November 1944, England –

Dearest Margie

………………I must tell you! I had the most amazing experience today. Ten of us were invited to go thru Kingston-Lacy estate, the manor house. The agent’s kindness was great and he took us thru himself.

As you enter the large entrance hall – all the beautiful marble with fluted columns – the pieces that take the eye are four enormous deeply and intricately carved teakwood chests about four feet high and eight feet long. They are massively exquisite! Swords, pikes, daggers, shields and armor adorn the walls in profusion. The carving on the chests is Jacobean (?). There are two daintily fine French cabinets. Enormous vases stand here and there. Two steps straight ahead take you to a right angle hallway which leads to marble stairs to the left. Here is a Van Dyke painting of a cavalier – another point of interest is a chair attached to a marble cabinet in which is a balance with bronze weights marked in measurement of stone (7 lbs). You sit in the leather chair and weigh yourself. It is 17th century. As you walk up the marble stairway toward a one piece window which much be 6 x 10 feet you are struck by the enormous bronze figures lying on the stairwell ledgers looking down. They are the works of Michael Angelo! The stair makes one (180 degrees) turning and on the walls are two enormous paintings of dogs attacking a bull. They were painted for one of the Kings of France! They were a gift to the owner years ago – or the master as they speak of him.

Now we go into the library. The room is enormous and above the book lined walls are life sized paintings of the ancestors running back to 1700! Some of the books, most of them in fact, are old enormous works of art, some printed by hand! Desks, chairs, footstools are all most interesting, all very old and in excellent shape. I could have spent months there with pleasure.

Adjoining is the saloon. I can’t begin to tell you of half the marvels here. Enamel portraits of many people of the times – most, most beautiful China figurines and some unbelievably delicate. Lace over the hair, around the collars and sleeves which I felt sure must be lace until I looked at it with a magnifying glass. There were some pieces exactly similar to what you have on the way. Two Van Dykes were here.

Now into the drawing room. Twice as big – really an enormous room. (All the ceilings are beautifully painted with figures) the overhanging border near the ceiling looks as though the room as been prepared for indirect lighting. Gold leaf adorns it! Here is an enormous painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds and another by Rembrandt! Many others whose names are not familiar to me, several Dutch names. An ebony and ivory cabinet heavily inlaid with mother of pearl! It is most delicate. A book of signatures bears many King’s names, the Duke of Windsor’s, German Emperor, or Duke of Wellington, etc. etc. I can’t remember everything – museum pieces were in the greatest profusion. Every door everywhere was carved deeply and signed by – Gobelin (?) I’m not sure of the name but he should be famous.

Now into the small or private dining room. The walls are oak covered with the original leather all over. It is dark and cracked. The ceiling is most beautifully carved and covered with gold leaf! Here Gen. Montgomery stayed and ate before the invasion for two weeks with his staff! This room has many pieces about the room from Spain. It is called the Spanish Room.

Now the State dining room. It must be 40 feet square. An enormous massive circular mahogany table in the center would seat a regiment. The walls are oak paneled and the doors are two inches thick plus the carvings which are 3 or more inches bas-relief. Tapestries long on each wall and the most colorful and beautiful I ever saw.

From here we went upstairs again to the bedrooms. About 10 of these have little dressing or sitting rooms adjoining & also a bathroom – but there are no fixtures or tub or anything. The bath was made ready by the servants. All beds are four posters (10 feet). Prints and bric-a-brac of all periods adorn everywhere. Now upstairs again to the nursery and servants quarters. The corner bedrooms are adorned to make them appear as tents. Cords (wood carved) run down the seams from the top from head height they taper to a point. At the head of these top stairs is a low gate (carved, of course) to prevent the youngsters falling downstairs – the servants’ quarters are as nice as ours at home. From here we went onto the roof. The roof is solid sheet lead! The chimneys (4) are enormous and each has 8 big lead rectangular outlets, all of lead. The agent said each weighed 300 lbs.

Now to catch up a few points – a picture in the drawing room – glass encased is worth 1/4 million ($1,000,000). I didn’t hear the name of the author or painter it is Madonna with two children.

The chandeliers (4) deserve a word. Cut glass, very intricate and enormous. Each was alike in drawing room, salon and two dining rooms. They must be 8 ft high and four across. They held I guess 100 candles. How they sparkled.

Now down to the 1st basement where is the room which we would call the den where the gentlemen retired after dinner for their smoking. Paneled walls of Belgian oak, racy and racing prints and prints of beautiful horses, many hunting scenes and such – a wheeled server for liquor and wines and such was beautiful with recessed and carved receptacles for glasses and decanters, all filled with proper glasses. Then across the low ceilinged wide hall to the billiard room with a full sized (not our size) table similarly decorated. The present master has a bed here where he sleeps when he comes here. His sister sleeps in the smoking room.

Now to the kitchen. The original tables and benches and ovens are here! It is enormous, the tops of the tables are 2 inches thick and sturdy as stone. The floor is flagged with large stones. The ovens are built in the wall (new electric stoves stand beside them).

The two obelisks I spoke of previously were brought from Egypt and the cornerstone was laid by the Duke of Wellington, Napoleon’s nemesis.

Some of the doors took 3 years – for their carving – and they look it.

A total of 56,000 acres append the estate. They are taxed all but 6 pence out of each pound of revenue – the gov’t gets $3.90 out of $4.00!

I don’t want to bore you but I wanted to tell you about this. It is all so very interesting to me & I wish you could see it. You would love it. I’d never get you away.

In the library are all the old keys to Corfe Castle, some as long and heavy as my forearm. Many other old relics of Corfe are in the second basement beneath the first but he said he couldn’t take us there. There are 27 bedrooms not counting the servants’ quarters

Here I have done all this writing and no work done so I will have to get busy, my love. If you don’t mind, Mother would probably enjoy reading about these things. I am getting writer’s cramp & can’t make my pen behave – I have been hurrying to get to my work.

How about sending me a couple of pairs of cheap cotton gloves to protect my hands from this coke & coal I have to handle? Did you say you had sent me some nuts? West is going to London next week and will take my film to be developed, then I’ll send it to you.

I love you my dearest, but I wonder if you have read this far. Goodnight and kiss my girls for me – I kiss you in spirit my love – and in person. Again someday I hope – soon.

Always your faithful – servant! and husband,

Ted

Thank you once again Grace and family for treating us to such a wonderful insight in to life during the war on an English country estate.

 

 

Open the door

The north side of Kingston Lacy House. Designed by Roger Pratt for Ralph Bankes in the 1660s. Revamped for Henry Bankes by Brettingham in the late 18th century and then done over again by Charles Barry for William John Bankes in the early 19th century.

We often get called in to check everyday repair work inside our great mansions, electric cabling, loose flagstones or finding where water is getting into the building. This kind of watching brief (monitor and record) gives us a chance to look beneath floorboards and behind paneling, it provides an opportunity to see how the buildings were put together and more importantly any changes done through time.

At Kingston Lacy wiring and ceiling checks are being done in some of the rooms with just a few floorboards being lifted. Having found scraps of  original wallpapers and notes left by previous workmen during work like this in the past we were called in to record anything we could see.

Floorboards lifted in the Saloon at Kingston Lacy

In the saloon we found that a lot of the material between the joists had been removed in the past with just a few wood shavings and the odd nail left behind. The most interesting areas were accessible via the doorway, with just enough room to dangle my camera into the void and between the joists. I set it to do 10 shots on the self timer setting and hoped for the best. This technique is a good way to see down and along voids, it had produced good results in the past at Chedworth roman villa when checking for hypocausts and wall alignments.

View along the hypocaust at Chedworth Villa in room 5b

We were not disappointed an odd metal concertina like heating system, a large vaulted void, Pratt bricks from the original mansion, (now encased in stone) and an intriguing door mechanism.

The metal heating system on the left

A vaulted ceiling of a room below the Saloon at Kingston Lacy, the plaster can be seen oozing between the lathes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two metal bars part of a cleaver mechanism

The Saloon is entered and connected to other rooms  by double doors, the lifting of the floor boards revealed how they opened exactly together, even when just pushing gently on only one door. This would help servants when carrying trays open the doors without putting the tray down or needing someone to help them, also when entering or exiting the room with swishing skirts ladies could move effortlessly through the doorways.

It works by using what look like bicycle chains and smooth cogs, a simple but effective mechanism.

The chain and smooth cog, with a metal rod up into the door

There are more planned surveys to be done at Kingston Lacy in other rooms, I wonder what awaits to be found under the next floorboard………….

 

Hearth & Home 545 Kingston Lacy

Buildings archaeology tends to be less straightforward than dirt archaeology. Standing structures in 3D are not sealed beneath the ground. You have to work out whether the thing you are uncovering is an original piece of the building, in its right place, or part of an older building moved and recycled from somewhere else.

Fireplaces are good evidence. Usually the massive inglenook fireplace has been infilled by a nest of smaller and smaller fireplaces as fashions, usage and the technology of heating changed. These days it’s all the rage to open up and expose the original large fireplace again and this unseals evidence of the everyday lives of the families who lived there centuries before.

The centre of a building is the hearth. It’s where the warmth is. Where the meals are cooked. The 4500 year old Neolithic houses recently found at Durrington on the Stonehenge Estate had hearths at their centres.

The dark circle in the middle of the white rectangle is the hearth in the centre of the 4500 year old house excavated at Durrington Walls in 2007

The ordinary medieval cottages at Kingston Lacy would have had open hearths with the smoke seeping out through the thatch, but by the 16th century some would have had two closely set roof trusses to catch the smoke and direct it out through a vent ( a smoke bay). By the early 17th century, when brick was becoming more common in Dorset, cottages were getting fireplaces.

People worked out various ways to use the heat from the fire to get various jobs done. When an inglenook is opened up there is usually more than a fireplace. There may be hooks to hang meat or other things on… A small alcove perhaps for keeping salt dry, perhaps the remains of a mechanism for turning a spit and very often a bread oven and if you’re lucky its iron door, complete with catch still in place.

• An oven built into a fireplace on the Killerton Estate, Devon. The detached iron door has been left in the oven

I had tea with an old couple in their cottage at Corfe Castle about 25 years ago. They still had their bread oven and told me how their parents burnt the gorse on Corfe Common to make ‘blackstock’ this was harvested by the tenants of the Corfe Castle Estate to burn in the bread ovens. When the oven  was hot enough the ash was raked out and the bread could be baked.

Last week I went to 545 Abbot Street on the Kingston Lacy Estate. This was one of the last cottages on the Estate to be repaired up to modern standards. It has been a long process to find the money to repair all the hundreds of cottages across the Bankes Estates.

545 Abbot Street before work started. The brick infill was probably originally wattle and daub traces of this survive inside.

It is an early 17th century timber framed building, originally infilled with wattle and daub but this was largely replaced with bricks  in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the centre of the building  is a large brick structure containing a massive infilled fireplace. When I first went there in 2014 there was a 20th century range built into the blocking.

The infilled inglenook fireplace at 545 with the range inserted.

When I revisited, the original fireplace had been exposed. Not one but two brick bread ovens side by side but on the left another opening with a circular void continuing up to the first floor. At this level, the blocked entrance to the chamber could be seen cutting through the original wattle and daub screen infilling the roof truss there.

I’d only seen one other of these features at Kingston Lacy: a cottage at Tadden where the void turned out to by a curing chamber. This was a good way to preserve bacon by smoking it next to the fire. The meat was cut up into joints and hung on a rack from the first floor placed on a tray which would allow the smoke to circulate evenly. There are recipes for the smoke, burning ash or oak was usually favoured and perhaps a few juniper berries mixed with sawdust to improve the flavour.

The surviving wattle and daub infill on the first floor  of 545 above the inglenook. Cut into the collar are two inserted posts for a door into the curing chamber which was later blocked.

But was it a curing chamber? It might have been for drying corn either for milling into flour or for seed corn for the next crop. Another possibility  is that it was used as  a kiln for drying barley as part of the malting process to create beer. All these processes have been found in fireplaces across the West Country. Tony is making the archaeological record as the building is repaired and he will hopefully find the evidence that will give us the answer.

So the family living here in the 17th and 18th centuries were small-scale farmers and these tenants would have grown cereals in the open fields and kept livestock in the paddocks around the cottage. It is described as ‘house garden yards and orchard’ on the estate map of 1774 but at that time the land belonged to Sir William Hanham. The Bankes family bought it a few years later. The small farms were uneconomic and during the 18th-19th centuries they were absorbed into larger farms and the multipurpose fireplaces gradually went out of use..

I hope the new National Trust tenants enjoy their new home. They probably won’t be smoking bacon though.

 

 

 

 

 

Kingston Lacy South Lawn Day 4: Getting to the bottom of it

The formal garden shown on William Woodward’s map of 1773. Traces of the pathways dividing the four lawns can be seen as parch marks and the geophysical survey but the semi-circular feature has not been detected during the surveys

We know about William Woodward’s map of 1773 showing the formal garden. This design might have included elements of the garden made for the house when it was first built in the 1660s.

From a plan of Kingston Lacy Park and Garden dated 1849, only 20 years after the obelisk was erected. The lawn is much the same today although the 17th century stable block on the right hand side of Kingston Lacy House was demolished and moved to the left in the 1880s (it’s the restaurant now).

The garden was radically changed in the 1820s and it has looked much the same ever since but there are other things here which we can’t explain.

In spring 2013, Andrew, Nigel and I walked across the South Lawn discussing the Kingston Lacy park and garden conservation plan. For many years they had noticed strange brown patterns in the grass during dry weather.

A pencil sketch of the 1773 garden over the present garden with the geophysical survey features drawn onto the plan. The house is at the top of the drawing and the obelisk at the bottom.

We decided to try to find out what they were and carry out a geophysical survey of the lawn in July as part of national archaeology festival. We plotted the parch marks, walked up and down with the resistivity and gradiometer survey machines and in 2014 Paul brought the ground probing radar from Bournemouth University and added to the ‘non-invasive’ information.

The resistivity survey plot of the South Lawn. The blue band right of centre is the path and obelisk. Kingston Lacy House lies just beyond the top edge of the survey. The red block of colour marks the position of our trench on the left side of the circular feature picked up on the survey and seen as an earthwork on the ground.

The patterns were mapped but they do not correspond with any known garden. Were they really garden features? They seem to blot out the 1773 mapped garden design and are crossed by the 1820s path to the obelisk. There seems to be a very limited time frame to fit this potential design into.

Beyond historical evidence there is only archaeology…so we dug this week’s trench, just a small one in a very large lawn, to test a place which is clear on the geophysics and visible on the ground.

One of our chunks of brick and below it the two fragments of post-medieval pottery we found, typical white ware and blue and white wares of the late 18th to early 19th century. Below them, the black blob is a late prehistoric piece of pottery over 2000 years old.

We found the lawn soil overlying a surface with lots of black clinker, the odd iron nail and bit of brick. Just a thin skim above a deeper soil but it was always moister towards the obelisk path. That’s where the water stayed during the heavy rain. That’s where the soil was deeper mixed with fragments of lime (was it reused as a garden bed? lime to make the neutral acid soil more alkaline?). The soil overlay a 250mm deep mixed clay deposit filling a curved edge cutting through the natural sand.

The slot across the natural sand and clay filling of the feature. The photo shows the edge of the pond, the soil difference between the clay filling and natural sand is clear.

The earthwork on the surface reflects this clay-lined feature which the rain water wouldn’t soak through. So our reasonable interpretation is that this was a pond and part of a garden that we have not found a documentary reference for. None of our maps show it.

So here is a story to fit the evidence. At the end of the 18th century, Kingston Lacy was re-designed by architect Robert Furze Brettingham for the then owner Henry Bankes. A new house deserves a new garden and perhaps this is shown by our geophysics and excavation..except Henry’s son William was given an obelisk from the Island of Philae in Egypt so he persuaded his father to create a garden for this extraordinary possession and the newly designed garden was swept away..

However, such formal gardens indicated by our geophysics, with a small pond like the one we found, would not be at all fashionable c.1800, a more open landscape/picturesque style might be expected so an alternative story is that the pond is earlier than the 18th century brought closer to the surface by the landscaping out of the 18th century garden in the 1820s…If we had found a good date-able piece of pottery or a white tobacco pipe bowl in the pond clay filling we would have been able to provide a more definite date for the feature.

Some of the flint from the South Lawn. The top grey chunk has been worked but then burnt in a fire. The other flakes also date to the Neolithic or Bronze Age. They probably haven’t moved far but were disturbed during 17th-19th century gardening work.

The prehistoric pot fragments and the burnt and flaked flint show that there were people living here long before Ralph Bankes first commissioned Kingston Lacy House in the 1660s, before Henry de Lacy’s medieval manor of the 13th century, before the Saxon royal farm, before the Roman town at Shapwick and even before the Iron Age hillfort of Badbury Rings.

The end of the excavation, the trench backfilled .

KL Lawn Day 3: The house, the obelisk and the gardens

Day 3 was probably the most changeable. The winds were the strongest, the rain the heaviest and the variations of sunlight and cloud most extraordinary.

The inclement weather gave some great brooding clouds and bright sunlight moments.

No point putting the gazebo up and the interpretation table was blown over and we decided to weight the legs and leave the pictures in a vertical position. We resorted to the scaffolding around the obelisk for shelter.

The storms across the south lawn kept blowing the table over so we weighted the legs with a shovel and mattock and Matt talked through the layers of historic gardens with the drawings in a vertical position.

The trench kept collecting water so quite hard to keep it in a photograhicable condition but things got a little better by the end of the day Matt and Rohan cleaned the surface and we could now see that the multi-coloured clay was the filling of a feature cutting through the sand. Our circular earthwork with a raised island in the middle was indeed a pond not shown on any map but clear on the geophysics.