Joiners, Barrington & White Barrow NT125

Remember 1995 and the National Trust’s centenary celebrations ?

In the SW, at Corfe Castle, after 349 years, huge blocks of the Civil War demolished 11th century Keep… were slid to one side to reopen the Inner Ward gate;

The gantry built across the 80 ton Keep west wall that fell and blocked the Inner Ward gate in 1646. All visitors once had to negotiate the narrow gap over the demolished curtain wall until 1995

at Kingston Lacy, we excavated the gateway of Shapwick’s 4th century Roman fort (a surprise, it was thought to be 1st century) and the storage pits and ditches of the Iron Age settlement beneath.

The 3.5m deep inner ditch of the triple ditched 4.5 hectare 4th century fort or ‘burgh’ at Shapwick part excavated in September 1995.

Now the National Trust celebrates 125 years of existence and it’s appropriate to quote the Director -General in the opening page of the 2020 handbook.

‘On 12th January 1895, The National Trust was founded. Home to 100 members paying ten shillings each, the organisation looked after 4 1/2 acres of land at Dinas Oleu in North Wales. Our first President, the Duke of Westminster, told co-founder Octavia Hill

‘mark my words Miss Hill, this is going to be a very big thing’

He was right..’.. there are over 5.9 million members now and NT now cares for over 610,000 acres.

Although the South West cannot claim the first property or building to be owned by the National Trust it does have one or two milestone places.

For a while, this growing, fledgling, conservation charity was able to acquire one or two small significant buildings under threat.

The earliest of these, in the South West Region, (Alfriston Clergy House in Sussex was the first in 1896) was the timber framed and flint cellared Joiners Hall in St Ann’s Street, Salisbury (acquired in 1898). It dates from the late 16th century but the property, with its long thin back garden occupies the footprint of two of the 13th century merchants’ burgage plots of the medieval city.

Joiners Hall Salisbury

Then there was stone-built Tintagel Old Post Office in Cornwall acquired in 1903, over 600 years old ‘a medieval manor house in mininature’.

In the early days, the NT had nothing to do with mansions and parklands, which is strange of course because it seems to have become best known for this kind of thing. The truth being, that the organisation did not have the finances to cope with them.

This was until 1905 when Miss Julia Woodward purchased a huge Tudor mansion and estate at Barrington Court in South Somerset for the NT.

The south sides of Barrington Court on the right and Strode House on the left. Barrington is an early 16th century mansions overlying a medieval manor house which the architect Forbes found traces of during the building works of the 1920s. Strode House is a significant 17th century stable block converted into accommodation in the 1920s. Quite a new responsibility for NT in 1907.

One of the NT’s founders Canon Rawnsley visited a seriously delapidated Barrington in the 1890s and tried to persuade the organisation to take an interest. The mansion came on the market in 1904 and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) were concerned by the news that the building might be dismantled and the stone reassembled in Kent. They wanted the place to remain where it was and joined the campaign to persuade NT to acquire Barrington. The response was a request for SPAB to survey the builldings to find out how much it would cost to protect the historic fabric. The architect William Weir carried out the survey and found it basically sound.

After much deliberation, the National Trust accepted the gift from Miss Woodward in July 1907. However, it was soon realised that the amount that had been found for restoration was hopelessly inadequate, and the problem made such an impression on the National Trust Secretary Nigel Bond that even 30 years later (with the exception of Montacute House in 1931, also in South Somerset) he greeted any suggestion of preserving a large house with “We can’t possibly take it on: Remember Barrington!” (Freya Bohea, 2020, Barrington Court Conservation Management Plan,).

1907 was a key year: Octavia Hill and Hardwicke Rawnsley have already been mentioned but the third NT founder Sir Robert Hunter made his particular mark in that year. A talented solicitor and civil servant, he guided a bill through parliament which enabled the National Trust to have a unique ability. The 1907 Act allows NT properties to become inalienable, meaning that they cannot be sold, mortgaged or even compulsorily purchased by the government (without a debate in Parliament). A great asset for long term conservation …..but making land inalienable is a big, long, long term responsibility.

In 1908, holding repairs were commissioned for Barrington but to care for the building properly a wealthy tenant was required.

Colonel Lyle’s gardens at Barrington to Gertrude Jekyll’s designs.

Colonel Lyle first saw Barrington in 1915 when his architect friend James Edwin Forbes made him aware of the property. From 1921-1925 Lyle’s money (Tate and Lyle sugar) enabled the property to be re-visioned..and 100 yrs on, their work is a significant page in the story of this amazing place encapsulated in Freya’s new conservation plan for the property.

The gardens laid out in the 20s were to the plans of Gertrude Jekyll though not all of her designs were carried out.

To the south, there is a wide lawn, the intricate paths and garden bedding illustrated by Jekyll never materialised. I carried out a geophysical survey there in 2000 and found the pattern of earlier garden features (17th century?) beneath the grass, I had watched a pipe trench across the lawn and saw the layers of archaeology over 1m deep beneath it. Traces of flagstones and footings at the deepest level may have been medieval. Pottery and bone in the layers above dated from the medieval to 18th century.

The water pipe trench across the South Lawn in 2000 which yielded pottery and animal bone dating from the medieval to 18th centuries.

So Barrington was the first NT mansion and park and in 1909, the Neolithic long barrow known as the White Barrow at Tilshead, Salisbury Plain was the first National Trust property acquired specifically because it was an archaeological site requiring conservation protection. Today it is one unploughed island in a much ploughed landscape.

The White Barrow on Salisbury Plain, the earliest purely archaeological NT acquisition.

In the same year Leigh Woods was gifted to the National Trust to protect it from housing development from rapidly expanding Bristol. The Iron Age hilfort of Burgh Walls Camp was levelled at this time but Stokeleigh Camp at Leigh Woods remains a fine earthwork with amazing views out over the Avon Gorge.

LiDAR survey carried out for National Trust by Arc Heritage showing the Iron Age hillfort beneath the trees of Leigh Woods protected by National Trust from the expansion of Bristol since 1909.

The 1910 acquisition of parts of Cheddar Gorge was to protect this extraordinary landscape from the advances of carboniferous limestone quarrying. Much the same as Piggledene near Avebury where the sarsen stone deposits were being worked over and removed for building stone until 1908 when this sliver of land was purchased by National Trust.

Similar needs for conservation have created the National Trust Estate over the last 125 years…. part of the Stonehenge Estate in 1927, Chedworth Roman Villa 1924 and the Cerne Abbas Giant in 1920.

In this the centenary year of the Giant acquisition ….we will attempt to date him… so watch this space.

‘

The Badgers of White Barrow, Salisbury Plain

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a badger in want of a home will plump, like as not, for a scheduled monument.

White Barrow the National Trust’s first property acquired solely for archaeological conservation 1909.

In 1909, White Barrow on Salisbury Plain was the National Trust’s first ever acquisition of land solely for its archaeology. It is a rare and well preserved Neolithic long barrow, used as a burial place about 5,000-5,500 years ago. It lies along a track outside Tilshead on the road from Devizes to Shrewton in Wiltshire.

In 1909, White Barrow was in danger. New farming demands meant that Salisbury Plain, after millennia of being used only as sheep pasture, was rapidly becoming ploughed up. Therefore, White Barrow was bought by public subscription for £60 to prevent it being destroyed.

Aerial photograph of White Barrow on Salisbury Plain showing it as an island of unploughed pasture in a sea of ploughed arable land.

This special place is now an isolated island of archaeology and nature conservation in a landscape that has been heavily cultivated over the last 100 years. The long barrow looms like a whale-back from the landscape 90m long and 50m wide and over 2m high. There are wide ditches on either side where the chalk was quarried over 150 generations ago to make a sacred monument to house the ancestors of the local farming community.

The new badger sett created on MoD land a few hundred metres from the White Barrow

A refuge for wildlife, of wildflowers and orchids… and so it was that a family of badgers checked the place out and saw it as a great place to raise a family. They selected the sheltered southern ditch with its soft silts which were easy to burrow into.. However, as time went on the family expanded and the sett got larger digging through the archaeological deposits. Visitors picked up flint tools and Neolithic pottery chucked out in the burrow spoil. The badgers seemed to ignore completely the legislation that states quite clearly that it is illegal to dig on a scheduled monument without government consent. Diplomatic immunity I suppose, because badgers are a protected species and White Barrow is also a site of special scientific interest for its wildlife.

Something had to be done.. and so it was that Simon the ranger, Graham the rural surveyor and Martin the archaeologist met on top of White barrow and looked at the mess. The badgers had trashed an area of the ditch and lower mound over 25m long and 3m wide and they were heading for the east end where the burial chamber lay. Could we put a badger proof fence around the site? This had been tried elsewhere in the past and once the fence was breached the fence was useless. How about armour plating it …. and so it was decided.

Simon and Mike laying the chain-link fencing across the long barrow mound apart from the badger sett area.

However, not that simple. The badgers needed a new home and the NT land was all designated. A summit meeting with our Ministry of Defence neighbours identified a suitable area a few hundred metres away. Badger surveyors made sure it lay within our badger community’s territory and the new sett was built with chambers and burrows with Rosie our archaeologist standing by to make sure no new archaeology went unrecorded.

Then English Heritage sent a crack team of geophysical surveyors to record the site before it was meshed because it would not be possible once the cover was put in place. This demonstrated that at the wider east end, the burial chamber was clearly visible and the badgers were not far off.

The notice explaining the badger re-homing work after the main barrow had been fenced.

Simon bought the chain-link and unrolled a silver cover across the barrow.. apart from the sett area where fencing was placed around the burrows. This had a number of two-way gates place within it. Our badger adviser made sure that the work took place in late summer so that the badger families had grown up.

Trails of honey-coated peanuts then led the badgers to their new home and for a few weeks both setts were available but then the gates became one-way gates and the badgers stayed in their new accommodation.

One of the two-way gates that allowed the badgers to go backwards and forwards from their new home following trails of honey-coated peanuts.

Time to level the spoil from the burrows and complete the protection of the burial mound. A group of archaeology volunteers were recruited as part of a National Trust working holiday and we borrowed archaeology sieves and frames from Wessex Archaeology. This enabled the archaeological artefacts disturbed by the badgers to be collected before the spoil was spread across the barrow.

Levelling the spoil from the burrows to enable to rest of the chain-link fencing to be laid.

Once the work was over, Simon got us permission to take a twilight tour of Stonehenge and we sat in the middle of the inner trilithons as the sun went down talking of Tess of the d’urbervilles and the spirits of the dead…

The volunteer archaeologists on a working holiday sieving the badger spoil for prehistoric flints and pottery.

In the following weeks the fence was taken down, the area was covered in chain link and the grass grew. Now, 16 years later the badgers are safe in their new home and the White Barrow is grazed by cattle. The chain-link has settled into the turf but you know now that its archaeology is protected against future badger families in search of a des. res.

White Barrow with its protective cover hidden which has settled into the turf. The cattle graze there unknowingly and the badgers are in their new home.