No pretence of other art

2011-11-14T19:11:00.000Z

HINDON WAR MEMORIAL

Traveling west from London to Exeter along the Wiltshire section of the ancient A30, one squeezes down a long chalk combe between Cranborne Chase and Salisbury Plain to the village of Hindon which straddles a crossroads of forgotten importance. With two excellent coaching inns and its avenues of pollarded lime trees, it cuts as pleasant an aspect as lowland Britain can provide.

Unusually for us we have been involved in a project of restoration instead of conservation to the memorial that commemorates those who lost their lives in First World War. It formerly stood in pride of place, gnomon like in the aforementioned off-set cross road in the centre of the High Street.

It is constructed of Oolitic limestone from the Jurassic - Portland series, most probably Portland Basebed which is widely used for war memorials around the Commonwealth. It was formerly surmounted by a lantern arrangement which was missing until reinstated by us a few days ago.

Original position complete with lantern.

Photo courtesy of the UK National Inventory of War Memorials

http://ukniwm.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/hindon-memorial/

Sans lantern in new position.

In 1943 a runaway tank of the Irish Guards failed to accommodate the memorial successfully. The resultant damage was such that after the war the decision was made to move the remnants to a safer position adjacent to the church, unfortunately the lantern was not reinstated and it was subsequently felt that it had lost some of its noble aspect.

The restored Portland stone Monument.

The restoration project was conceived by local resident, Col J Kitching who secured a grant for the works. As usual we undertook the work ourselves, in house, and it provided useful extra experience for one of our newly qualified apprentices, Adam Lavorgna. Working from a single grainy photograph we were able to provide scale drawings for the clients approval and working templates for the new sections. (Below). We even made the leaded lights and a new metal casement window ourselves to allow internal access.

The monument was treated to a lime sheltercoat that was subsequently rubbed back with hessian sacking, this filled cracks and helped consolidate the surface.

Here are a few photos showing the sequence of manufacture and fixing.

Masonry template.

Cinquefoil head

Head and mullions

First new sections fitted

All cramped together with stainless steel, prior to fixing the drip and cap.

The completed lantern.

The inscription finishes with the quote:

“Endured hardness. Faced danger. And finally passed out of the sight of men by the path of duty and self sacrifice. Giving up their own lives that others might live in freedom”.

Re-dedication of Hindon War Memorial.

How to repair an old bridge.

2011-10-05T16:57:00.006+01:00

Tales From The Riverbank

In the summer of 2003 a simple stone bridge over the Wiltshire Avon shared some of its secrets, 600 years ago one could journey from the Hindu kush via mainland Europe to Plantagenet England crossing rivers by stone packhorse bridge designed & constructed from the same pattern book as used in rural Wiltshire.

The bridge forms part of a astonishing wider complex of buildings, with its famous tithe barn and associated agricultural buildings, Barton Farm Grange formed part of a great estate owned by the powerful Abbess of Shaftesbury which spread across much of the west country. The bridge is approached from the nearby Cotswold scarp with its cornbrash geological formation (which is particularly suitable for growing cereals as the small, easily frost fractured stones near the surface provide shelter for germinating seedlings). The Abbess would have collected a tithe or a proportion of cereal from her tenants to fund the church and this grain would have been collected, processed and stored at the newly built tithe barn. It is illustrative that the quantities of grain being collected & carried would have been so large that in bypassing the existing town bridge (with its toll levied by the local corporation) a considerable cost saving would have been anticipated even after the huge expenditure of building a new bridge (although the Abbess did own the local quarries & land).

The bridge spans the river with four pointed arches. Three cutwaters were added to the upstream side in the 15th century and railings added in the19th century.

By 2003 The bridge was getting rather tired and in need of some care & repair, church repairs are our staple, however we do enjoy the additional challenge of maintaining our conservative philosophy on structures as environmentally awkward as this. The structure was exclusively used by pedestrians so Wiltshire County Council were able to adopt a more hands off approach than it usually would toward bridges carrying vehicular traffic. As is usual with projects of this nature previous inappropriate attempts at renovation had to be undone. Using an surprisingly stable pontoon system we Peeled back the layers one by one, removing areas badly damaged and jacked up by tree root growth, poor quality stonework & inappropriate modern materials previously fixed by contractors in the 1970s from a rubber dingy, (yes, its true I've seen the photos). We also removed the cracked Tarmac carriageway and dismantled the cutwaters, again to remove trees! Having previously worked extensively on the adjacent C18 Kennet & Avon Canal it was a surprise to see many similarities in construction, Why bother using lime mortars as a bedding & packing material when abundant locally sourced clay would suffice? It is waterproof, works well in compression,

Much original stonework survived in the arches as was evident by the adze marks left by the masons who had quarried the stone only a couple of hundred yards away, The fixing of the replacement stone in the barrel vaults could only commence once the resident Daubentons Bat (also known as water or fishing bats) maternity roost and their fledged young had been temporarily moved on to the surrounding poplar trees.

Stone Bat boxes that contained 6o Daubenton Bats

Consecutive long evenings were spent on the pontoon with the local bat expert while he sealed roost holes & cracks (once the little critters had left to hunt for the night) this attracted the local drunks & constabulary in equal measure and ensured a regular food supply for the local invertebrates. Night was when the river really came alive, a primeval soup of midges that appeared at night lived just above the river & kept the large bat population well fed, by day squadrons of damsen & dragonflies along with the odd kingfisher would alight on the pontoon. Roosts were recreated within the fabric of the arches and batboxes were created within large lumps of ashlar which have now been successfully colonised.

Temporary formwork in the barrel vaults supported stones adjacent to replacement elements. Limpley Stoke Ground limestone was found to be a ideal match & was cut, dressed & fixed by colleagues with whom we had worked at our time at Salisbury Cathedral. The bridge was repointed & grouted using a naturally hydraulic lime mortar (NHL5), a Cotswold limestone Thames aggregate from Moreton Cullimore created a satisfying and texturally pleasing mortar, it was vital that we used a heavy duty mortar which could be guaranteed to have achieved a set properly before the winter with its frost & floodwaters which regularly rise above the bridge handrails.

Research into past surface materials of the carriageway suggested that it was originally paved with crushed limestone which was replaced with stone setts in the 19th century. The tarmacadam surface which was put on in the 1940's was replaced with hydraulic lime concrete. This has created a hard, durable surface which nevertheless allows evaporation of trapped water in the bridge after it becomes saturated. The new carriageway is also cambered to allow rainwater to run off via new Forest Marble cobbled gullies. The railings are recognised as a good example of 19th century rural craftsmanship and are in harmony with the original stonework. A new wrought iron handrail was made and fitted on the upstream side, the railings were left unpainted to allow the natural patina of the wrought iron to develop

.

In one of the Valleys feeding into the basin of the river Avon rolls the mells river, its choc a bloc full of interesting structures that have quietly survived here from the industrial revolution.The aggregates levy fund has enabled us (working with volunteers and the Somerset Industrial Archaeological society ) to begin to conserve some of these monuments, last winter for example we begun works to protect some Lime kilns. We will soon be undertaking some basic structural repairs to the voussiors & Cutwaters of the lonely & now rather sad Murtrys Aqueduct of the long defunct & uncompleted Dorset & Somerset Canal which was planned to connect the Bristol and English Channels from Bath to Poole, via Wincanton & Frome, it dates from 1796 and was planned to to carry coal and the locally produced products of Fussell's Iron and edged Tools over the Mells River.

A few hundred yards down stream sits Murtrys Packhorse bridge, essentially C14. Two of the original three slightly pointed ribbed arches, remain, the bridge was widened in 1817 but became obsolete when the railway constructed a new bridge in about 1854. Successive winters are now taking their toll and recent temporary protective works are being washed away. It awaits further funding.

Another blessed business is bridges to make
In places uncrossable after great showers
what a pity to pull a dead body out of a lake
Who was baptised in a stone font, a fellow of ours

C15 poem recorded by Leland on his travels commemorating the construction of a new bridge

Barton Farm Bridge as it is today.

Article from recent SPAB Cornerstone magazine.

2011-09-09T08:56:00.005+01:00

The electronic version of the magazine here...http://content.yudu.com/A1tw3s/cornerstonev32n3/resources/index.htm?referrerUrl=
And a review from the Guardian newspaper here..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/sep/20/bare-breasted-statue-uncovered-john-wesley

St James Priory's fine Caryatid in Bristol.

Tower St James Priory Church

When John Cabot embarked from the citte of Bristol on his little ship, the Matthew, on the first of his voyages to the New World he would have headed out from the great medieval engineering achievement that is St Augustine’s reach. Setting off, probably in 1496, in search of the brazilwood tree and its valuable red dye. he would have caught the outgoing tide west down the Avon gorge. At the other end of the Harbour cut, any visitor arriving by boat would have observed the constant ebb and flow of folk passing under the gatehouses of the new city wall and the Norman Priory Church of St James.

For those heading south through the orchards that hugged the Gloucester Road - some with carts laden with local coal, others with livestock or fleeces from the Cotswold or Welsh uplands, destined for Bristol market - the first glimpse of journey's end, in the guise of the new tower of St James' would have lifted the spirits.
In what was formerly open country, the Priory now had a new position squeezed between the line of the new city walls and the bustling Frome river. The rapidly disappearing remnants of the old city wall still existed around the southern perimeter of the monastic site, hence its curious name, The Priory Church of St James ‘Within Without’. Approaching from the northern countryside, St James would have gained a reputation as a two-faced church; the Perpendicular tower, with its plastered and limewashed east and west elevations, were economically constructed from red oxide coloured rubble and would have been easily viewed through the coal and wood smoke from a good distance away; by contrast, the south and west elevations, which face the prevailing wind, presented a finer impression to the civilized world of cut ashlar block from Dundry Hill. The church authorities were perhaps aiming to attract visiting worshippers or benefactors from the Frome, busy with traders in their curious boats capable of navigating the murderous shoals of the River Severn.

This church held a longstanding tradition of presenting its best face to the harbour. When the biased southern aspect of the nave clerestory was built 350 or so years earlier it would have been possible to view the impressive blind arcading. This signature of local Romanesque architecture, where the springing point of the arch could be said to form one continual moulding, was much seen in Bristol and elsewhere in the West Country. As with the tower, this extra expensive detail does not exist on the austere north elevation, above the site of the cloisters. It is now largely obscured from view by the construction of the later south aisle (Photo below).

Bristol retains much architecture from the early middle ages. Barely a mile or so away from the cathedral’s gateways and its important chapter house, down one of the rivers that formed part of the vital trade and arterial traffic routes (now covered over with the dual carriageway of the A38), St James still stands. Built around 1139, it is the oldest and one of the most unregarded of the city’s religious buildings.

After two years of scaffolded and shrouded obscurity, the arcaded Romanesque finery of the west front can again be enjoyed. Its unique embryonic rose window (or oculus) can again look down and inspect the ants rushing to the new bus station with its clean, modern lines next door.

We were one of many contractors engaged with the HLF funded refurbishment of the church. We handled the specialist re-plastering of the external and internal walls as well as the nave and chancel ceilings, It was particularly nice to be conserving the ceiling with its riot of strapwork within the adjacent Church House. During our eighteen month stint here, we found that the church provided a glimpse through the keyhole to the lamp-lit world of pre-war Bristol.

One diary entry I came across relates the destruction of the area and adjacent church during the Blitz of 1940: "Christening of William Duncan at St James Presbyterian Church The Barton, Bristol. … Church completely burned out that night. … This evening a tremendous air raid began about 6pm – ended about midnight – Bristol was demolished in parts and fires started over a tremendously wide area. "Doris Ogilvie 24 November 1940

St James is an anonymous but miraculous Blitz survivor. Its ancient roof structure still bears much evidence of the terrible events that occurred between November 1940 and April 1941 when nearly 1300 citizens died and tens of thousands of Bristol’s old buildings were destroyed. Unrepaired areas of charred sarking board provided evidence that Incendiary bombs had burned on the roof; evidently hose wielding parishioners had somehow extinguished the flames.

Inside, the north and south arcades and clerestory are original work of the C12th, in the chancel and elsewhere there is much sympathetic Victorian fakery. The impressive timber wagon roof covering the Nave is early, but probably not Norman, as the faces of the timbers have the remains of nail holes for fixing laths it would previously have created a plastered tunnel vault. The plaster vault was taken down, and the nails removed probably in the 1860s. The replacement infill panels followed a new line between the rafters.

Right: Applying new lath and coats of haired plaster in the apex of the nave roof structure prior to plastering. Internal temperatures here dropped to as low as -11 so additional heating had to be maintained to allow the programme to move on and the plaster to achieve a set.

Outside, the upper gabled tier of the west front is built of Oolitic Dundry stone, sourced from below the lonely tower of the ancient Merchant Venturers’ Guild church that sits atop the tor-like hill of the same name a few miles out side of the city walls.

The intersecting blind arcading here and to the back of the Chancel is the other example of one of the two motifs mentioned earlier of a local Romanesque style.

The lower section of the West front was of red sandstone rubble construction extracted from Brandon Hill a few streets distant. This rubble was formerly rendered but removed in the 1860s and the decision was taken to reinstate this covering with a trowelled hydraulic lime render of the same colour as the remaining render fragments.

Compared to what was going on at that time in the rest of Europe, developments in provincial Bristol were rather low key. I am sure that the austere St Bernard of Clairvaux who wrote in 1125 about the new craze of sculptured adornment as this “ridiculous monstrosity, this shapely misshapenness, this misshapen shapeliness” would have approved of its lack of embellishment. Ironically Bernard in his enthusiasm for the 2nd crusade indirectly assisted in introducing Islamic architectural forms to Northern Europe.

Provincial or not, the sea-borne traffic to the great port would have exposed local thinkers to the influence not only of Rome but also of distant Islam in the form of these abstract architectural remnants, this influence may also be seen in a more developed sense in the scalloped opening of the famous nearby C14th North porch of St Mary Redcliffe which Pevsner felt may have been the first case of orientalisme in western architecture.

Over the centuries St James’s position by the wharf and the famous annual fair ensured that it would have continued to attract visitors and congregants. Indeed the fifteen-day long fair became so well known that that merchant ships sailing in the Bristol channel were often attacked by Turkish pirates. Attractions recorded in the C18th included a shaved monkey exhibited as a genuine fairy. I haven’t even seen one of those at Glastonbury. The area developed rapidly in the C18th and St James continued to attract souls from around the known world. One such arrival, which had returned recently from the American colonies, was John Wesley.

Prior to John Wesley building his first Methodist Chapel in 1739 (the nearby New Room), St James was Wesley's Parish church and I am sure he would have known the west elevation well as it also served as the parish church of his Horsefair Community to which in the early days of his time in Bristol he brought his members for Holy Communion. Prayer meetings were held in the Jacobean splendor of the Church house next door. The children of his Brother, Charles were baptised here and five of them lie buried in the churchyard.

Church houses survive all over the country as they played an important economic role as breweries for church Ales and other celebrations. Many evolved into pubs and as they funded the construction of many medieval churches, they often have older origins than their crenellated neighbour.

Inside, we had been working on a particularly fine panelled room where Colin Day, Christina and Nell have repaired the sagging coffered Jacobean, pomegranate-laden strapwork ceiling.

Jacobean strapwork plaster ceiling conservation.

In the corner of the room, is a fireplace and overmantel consisting of Doric entablature beneath a central cartouche with helm and rocaille. The uniform and camouflaging modern brown painted finish meant that I had hardly noticed the overmantle was balanced on either side by a limestone caryatid. Paint conservation work that was carried out by Peter Martindale to remove the nasty modern brown paint has revealed them to be a lush pair of rouged, cornucopia clutching C17th over-painted ladies, one of whom was bare chested. Peter’s work has also exposed the lengths that past incumbents went to protect their modesty.

Prayer meetings were and still are held in the room, and the uncovered lady must have proved quite a distraction, as not only was her exposed bosom later decorated with a rather low-cut piece of underwear a specially whittled lead cuirass was affixed to her and had sat there for many years unnoticed. May Wesley have had a hand in covering her up?

Thanks to the efforts of Sue Jotcham’s team, English Heritage and the architects Acanthus Ferguson Mann, St James has now been saved and I think all involved are proud that the St James Priory Project now has a secure future and will continue to offer support to people dealing with the problems of homelessness as well as drug and alcohol dependency. It was good to be working again with main contractors CS Williams of Taunton and some old friends at Nimbus Conservation who carried out the package of stone repairs at St James.

Frome's mysterious tunnels?

2011-07-06T20:45:00.000+01:00

A look at how geology has shaped the town.

It's nearly festival time again in our home town of Frome in Somerset. But it's not all music and art that the punters want, as the first event to sell out is always the tunnels tour. The tours are run by the volunteer Frome Tunnels Group, a loose assemblage of folks comprising mainly of Seth, Robin, Peter, Rachel, Sally and me. http://www.frometunnels.co.uk/

Vault under the Town Bridge

Frome tunnel section under the bridge.

Some visitors are disappointed that they are not confronted with the predecessor to the new tube network (Map courtesy of Messrs Morten and Johnson) as the brochure is slightly misleading when it says "Popular folklore holds that vast tunnel systems exist beneath the town." We certainly don't end up on a journey to Longleat House or the village of Mells.

But there is however much of archaeological interest to consider under the town. Most of what can be seen stems from the 17th -19th centuries with the remains of an early stone causeway to the site of the original ford across the river Frome as well as possible Saxon and Medieval remains.

The tunnels fall into several categories:

Drainage culverts and conduits, such as that draining the open culvert flowing down Cheap Street

Wells

Cellars

An ice house

Cellars cut for industrial use, such as the brewery maltings under the Lamb and Fountain

Culverts to power mills, eg the Silk Mill.

Wine vaults, under the Wheatsheaves

The evolved vaults of the town bridge (above photo).

Frome Tunnel with early medieval ashlar Quoins.

The early town clung to the southern hills above the river and watercourses down to the river were culverted and covered (Zion path) and over the centuries developed onto the plateau into areas such as Trinity and around Christchurch Street and Portway.

The topography and geology of the later areas of development (from the C17th) meant that it was fairly easy to construct a stone structure simply by extracting the brash or loose stone that goes down 3-4 metres (broken up during the last ice age) to create a cellar and then use the stone (Forest marble in these parts) to build the rubble walls of the building. The stone is also well suited for burning as lime, so mortar was available to fill the joints between the stones as well as for plastering and limewashing. If the builder was lucky enough to find the right sized stones, the could be used as roofing slates. These can still be found on some properties and are also found reused in gardens as border margins.

The bedrock is not broken up and would have been harder to extract lower down the town in areas like Catherine Hill and Stony Street, but with the right tools this resource was easily used by the many stonemasons who lived in Frome at that time.

Many of the place names around Frome that have the attachment "ground", eg Long Ground, Hill Ground or Goulds Ground are larger sites of these open air quarries.

The enigmatic Lamb and Fountain public house on the edge of Trinity, like several of Frome's pubs, has an interesting complex of cellars and is the best of the tunnels as it has a unique feature – the remains of an brick vaulted Elizabethan ice house buried deep in the bowels of the stony earth.

Remains of ancient water-reed and plaster ceiling to be found under the Lamb and Fountain.

Certainly disregard the concept of ley-lines and other such nonsense.

Some pictures pinched from the Festival Website, thanks to them.

Where's Montmorency?

2011-05-17T09:40:00.001+01:00

Just got back from a 50 odd mile row down the River Thames on a traditional skiff, three-men-in-a-boat style, skippered in a most excellent fashion by Hugh Conway Morris. It was a journey from the Cotswold home of William Morris, Kelmscott Manor, on Tuesday 24th May and finishing at his London residence, Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, on Bank Holiday Monday 30th May.

Luckily our skiff safely navigated through the arches at Newbridge without knocking any bits of our handywork off (See below)!

We are raising funds for the SPAB's training scheme for building professionals, the Scholarship. http://www.dancescholarshiptrust.org.uk/topics/190.

I was lucky enough to participate in the SPAB's equivalent scheme for craftspeople in 1998, feel free to make a donation here as well! http://www.wmcft.org.uk/index.html

I was intrigued that on our second day we stopped for the night at a location known as Papists way.

Tyntesfield House.

2011-04-15T12:51:00.000+01:00

Today, after nearly 2 years of hard work , we will finally be leaving the National Trust's great public engagement experiment near Bristol.

Tyntesfield is a spectacular Victorian country house, remodelled by John Norton in 1864 for William Gibbs. It is an extraordinary Gothic revival, with extravagant towers and turrets. The original interior is still intact with an unrivalled collection of Victorian decorative arts and there is a sumptuously decorated private chapel built by Sir Arthur Blomfield. It is surrounded by 500 acres of landscaped gardens.

Most of the ashlar stone used for dressings such as window reveals and for the carving was originally sourced in the Bath area, and most probably from Limpley Stoke, but other varieties of Bathstone was also employed by the masons. The infill conglomerate panels are from Draycott in Somerset a now long closed quarry, much used by IK Brunel, for the colossal piers of the Clifton Suspension bridge.

In what was a really challenging contract, we were subjected to the worst winter weather for many decades and terrible Atlantic storms that were funnelled up the Seven estuary to our elevated position. Fortunately we were protected by the largest freestanding covered scaffolding in Europe.

Here is some interesting time lapse footage of the scaffolding being dismantled over a period of 14 weeks.

http://www.vimeo.com/20461262

Oh, and earlier details of the works here:

http://www.minervaconservation.com/projects/tyntesfield.htm

The Trust's approach of public engagement and their desire to keep the estate open during the works did pay dividends with, for example, many folk attending the meet the builders events and ...erm... "having a go at stonemasonry."

http://tyntesfieldhouse.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html

We also helped run courses in stonemasonry and other traditional building crafts for unemployed young people, many of whom had never picked up any sort of tool in their lives, it would have been nice to have been able to do more with them as they all benefitted enormously from their time at tyntesfield.
As this was the most complicated and varied project that we have ever been involved with, adding a few photos to this sort of blog format would not do it justice so I will post our musings and photos as they are collated over the next few weeks.

View across the roofscape of the main house to the chapel.

New Carvings.
Much of our work to the chapel and main house was at high level and not visible to the visiting public, with lots of carving and conservation work to finials, pinnacles and battlements as well as repair work to many gargoyles and grotesques. Dieter's new badger and goat can be seen at low level by the main entrance, so please have a look if you happen to be passing by (note the clay maquette in the background).

A new goat was also needed to accompany Badger, so after modelling a design in situ, (based on a surviving lamb on the opposite corner), we carved and fixed anew.

Clay, Goats and Badgers.

Awaiting fixing.

Large and recently rebuilt Pinnacle, situated on the Chapel parapet.

Key material faults and why these occurred:

The stonework on the exterior of the building has suffered with cracks caused by structural movement (especially on the veranda, south side) and through corrosion caused by water damage. In addition, water penetration has caused metal cramps holding the stonework to rust and expand, blowing out sections of stone work (see small holes on south façade). Water damage has also corroded some of the exterior metalwork (rain water goods). There has been damage to mortar by vegetation action (climbing plants on west side) as well as cracked / lost tile caused by weather and lack of maintenance. The roof damage in turn has led to water damage (rot) of timber roof supports and plaster work internally.

Bats.

Surveys and mitigation work carried out to support the rare maternity roost of Lesser Horseshoe bats in the servants quarters. Replica accommodation built for them with specially constructed entrances & exits in the roof.

The Benches.

We also repaired several old red sandstone benches (photos to come of the finished article) - the new traceried panels are a delight.

Heritage fantasy land.

2011-03-30T18:09:00.000+01:00

We have just finished a stint in the parish church of North Wiltshire's most up and coming tourist destination/film set at Lacock, with its lack of street lighting, signage, road markings and litterbins it should be a paradise for muggers, car thieves and those good folk who prefer not to pick up their rubbish or dogs doings.

Sadly the reality of theft does happen in the village when, for example, the outstanding Baynard floor brass (left) was stolen from the Church back in 2002, fortunately we found the antisocial behaviour restricted to answering too many questions as to the whereabouts of Harry Potters house, which (apparently) is adjacent to the church. What with it being the site of both the genesis of photography AND Thomas the Tank Engine, Lacock must be on some sort of ley line or something as strange events do seem to happen there, as testified by the return of the Baynard brasses, undamaged to the Church in 2004!

The big, easily spotted, treasure here is the splendidly garlanded, lierne vaulted lady chapel of 2 bays which retains much original paint as well as lots of carvings of tiny gurning faces, rabbits, lions, saints and sinners.

It is also home to a particularly fine early rococo monument to William Sherrington who purchased the adjacent abbey during the reformation, The 5 vases full of flowers at the top are a real treat.

Sherrington monument -1566

Less easily seen up at Clerestory level, we discovered that many quarrys in the leaded lights are inscribed by various trades who have worked on the church, the earliest that we found was from 1717.

George Carey, plastered and painted this Church, May 5 1817.

We asked Ironart of Bath to make some handrails to match in with existing Victorian work, which they did with their usual degree of brilliance. Here is their blog piece about the project:

http://www.ironart.co.uk/wp/?m=201102

http://www.minervaconservation.com/projects/churches.html

Exposed flesh from the time of King Billy

2011-03-16T20:26:00.000Z

It is nice to have had a recent high profile feature in the SPAB's magazine, "Cornerstone". Its about the repair of a precious remnant of mercantile Bristol that survives on the ground floor of the C17th church house of Bristol's oldest religious building, the Church of St James Priory. It sits, a blitz survivor, squeezed between the Romanesque finery of the west front with its oculus and blind arcading and the anodyne, brick clad modern bus terminal with its giant art clock that succeeds only in achieving a twice daily telling of time.

Church houses survive all over the country as they played an important economic role as breweries for church ales and other celebrations. Many evolved into pubs, and as they funded the construction of many medieval churches they often have older origins than their crenellated neighbour.

Inside, there is a particularly fine panelled room where we have been repairing the Jacobean-style, pomegranate laden strap-work ceiling . Tucked away in the corner of the room is a fireplace and overmantel consisting of Doric entablature beneath a central cartouche with helm and rocaille (a shell with foliate forms, origin of the word Rococo, literally shell-rock).

I had hardly noticed that the overmantle is balanced on either side by a Bath-stone caryatid. Conservation work to remove the nasty modern brown paint by the conservator Peter Martindale has revealed them to be a lush pair of rouged, cornucopia clutching and bare chested C17th over-painted ladies. Peters work has also exposed the lengths that past incumbents went to to protect their modesty

Prayer meetings were and still are held in the room, and she must have proved quite a distraction, as her exposed bosom was later decorated with a rather low-cut piece of underwear.
This was John Wesley's Parish church and I am sure he would have known this room well as it also served as the parish church of Wesley's Horsefair community to which in the early days of his time in Bristol he brought his members for Holy Communion. St James is where Charles Wesley's children were baptised and where five of his children are buried in the churchyard. I wonder, could he have had a hand in covering her up?

St James Priory Bristol, Cornucopia clutching Caryatid or painted lady with protective Lead Cuirass.

Later still, someone fitted her out with a rather robust defensive cuirass, wrangled from a piece of lead, which fits a treat. It certainly offers her a degree of protection from both the occasional lustful glance and radon gas, although it can also slipped off easily if someone fancied a quick peep while no one was around, but reassuringly, I don't think it had been removed for many decades.

The Strap-work ceiling of 1700

Nell and Christina consolidating the ceiling.

Steam trains will return.

2011-03-04T18:05:00.003Z

Mass dial on Porch

Near the military market town of Warminster in Wiltshire, on the south side of the Wessex mainline connecting Bristol Temple Meads and Southampton Central, sits Dilton Marsh railway halt. I am pretty sure that John Betjeman penned his well known poem of the same name after a visit to the nearby redundant church at Old Dilton. Did passing passengers ever see him? A solitary figure perched on an isolated GWR bench, his trilby at a jaunty angle dispensing the drizzle down his nose after he had ambled the few hundred yards back across the fields. For there, cosseted by the walnut trees sits the church of St Mary, which Betjeman finds in his Guide to English Parish Churches one of the most atmospheric in Wiltshire. It sits on the edge of the Biss brook, a feeder for the Bristol Avon and fuel source for the three long-gone wool-processing mills that manufactured the renowned broad cloth. The approach by car is a tarmac-ed ancient hollow way - an accident black spot if the lane were any busier as the north aisle wall towers abruptly and directly on the road distracting unwary passers-by.

Betj was attracted to places that capture and bind inward emotions and at St Mary’s the evidence of this attraction for many folk over many generations is plain to see. The fourteenth century walls of rubble (but coursed) forest marble show remnants of a thrown roughcast render finish. Evidence of an earlier church exists with the porch of the 1230’s and lots of reused bits of carved stone built into the walls. The north aisle was added in the fifteenth century. After a perambulation around its fairly unremarkable exterior, noting the slender iron cross on the top of the spire with its strange “flute like openings” one enters via the former priest’s door into the chancel. First impressions are of the schoolroom balcony on the first floor, whitewash and the communion table moved back at some distant time to the position of the altar. This feels like a house for meeting with more than a memory of dissention and the rest of the church’s area is crowded out by box pews from the time of the Georges and boasts a triple-decker pulpit with tester. It was noted that the congregants sang in a primitive style, so maybe its not just the fine interior that seem destined never to change.

The pews here are the stars of the show. They became increasingly popular with the rise of the sermon as the main act of worship making it a piece of furniture common to most English churches where,

"Unable to remain holy in thine presence we wilst cloister ourselves from thee" The gallery north of the chancel was once used as a schoolroom and contains a fireplace, which is the only nod to modernity of comfort; even now the church is powerless.

The economy-minded Georgian congregants at Dilton consolidated their stock of old medieval benches, enclosing them with boxes; here a section of ancient rood screen, there some paneling saved from some local dwelling. The oak panels with elm seats and floorboards form a true harmonious concoction. Doors with locks (the keys having long disappeared) witness their installation at the expense of the congregants, and there is much contemporary graffiti that may point to their ownership. (pic).

At Dilton it is easy to look deeper, its oak and limewashed stone provides a base for short messages and curious cartoons, masons marks and autographs. Other graffiti artists can be seen elsewhere here. Harold Cypher (an American soldier) and some of his pals penciled their names above a door arch just a couple of weeks before D-Day. What were the internal emotions of this man when he recorded his presence here for posterity? Did Harold survive the war? Yes, I believe he lived in Pennsylvania but unfortunately he died this summer, just a few weeks before we discovered this. It would be interesting to know more about him. Email enquiries to folk in the United States with the same unusual surname name on Facebook have not yet been successful! (Below).

When the church closed at the turn of the last century the care and repair was undertaken by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, and in 1933 and 1952-3 the society carried out extensive structural repairs which were completed in 1958, (I suspect that the current gritty ministry of works type cementitous repointing was done at this time).

Today St Mary’s is cared for by the hard-pressed Churches Conservation Trust, which is sadly weathering a stormy period as a result of the Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review.

Over the last few phases of Quinquennial works here we have got to know St Mary’s well, working with Michael Drury of St Ann’s Gate, Architects of Salisbury.

St Mary’s is a true marshaller of antiquity but also of brown rot and weevils. This summer we have, amongst other maintenance jobs, been tackling the effects of damp and ongoing rot to the bases of the box pews. The big problem is water ingress, as a photo of 1905 testifies, St Mary’s has never had any gutters nor, more importantly, an adequate Stone slated barn type eaves detail to throw water clear of the building. Consequently timber pew bases against wall areas were damp and decayed by brown rot and probably cellar rot (Coniophora puteana). Weevils feed on this early stage mulch and thus compound the decay. Underneath the pulpit there was a large body of decaying timbers of different ages suggesting a long history of problems. Application of chemicals to kill the fungus would not destroy mycelium (the “roots” of the fungus that absorb nutrients) as they are within the rubble walls and could be seen behind the more modern plaster when it was removed.

John Wilson (our archaeological carpenter) and I have taken large areas of the internal floor apart, reduced earth levels and removed fungal fruiting bodies. With the new drains and guttering mean we hope to have reduced moisture levels enough
to deny the rot its food source without the use of chemical treatments.

The time spent on our hands and knees here have been rewarding in many ways. Here is the evidence list of the lost past found under the pews: pins, marbles, clay candle-holders, pins, pins, pins, pins, musket ball, desiccated rat, more pins, buttons, teeth, one copper coin, sections of clay pipe, bits of pot, nails, one shark’s tooth and an ammonite suture.

The village moved with the advent of the railway leaving St Mary’s isolated in a small hamlet. One would think it has only been a less visited place in its more recent history but many stop here: ramblers, locals, ancestor-seekers, and most would understand Larkin when he writes,

‘Though I've no idea what this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, it pleases me to stand in silence here.’

St Blaise conservation, St Blaise Builders, St Blaise dorset, st blaise repair.

Digging with the De la Beches.

2011-02-16T23:03:00.000Z

Aldworth’s ‘Sleeping Giants’ are a pampered bunch, probably more so now than at anytime in the past 650-odd years of their "supine stationary voyage". The addition of radiators fixed to their plinths and tomb chests certainly adds to their short-term comfort but not so to their long-term survival.
We passed by this comfortable part of chalky Berkshire to cost some work there (the usual problem of leaky roofs leading to corroding metal fixings in stonework) but for once had not read the Pevsner entry before arriving. Pausing momentarily for eyes to adjust to the gloom of the porch, then giving the door a shove we stumbled in over the raised wooden threshold, and the slowly developing two coloured January light lit a post-Black Death medieval mausoleum that caused us to stop short.

These memorials to the De La Beche clan are unique in England. In the north and south aisles six recumbent effigies relax under two architecturally cohesive canopy triplets with unusual birds mouth cusping. In the central arcade lie the two centrally-heated tomb chests. It is worth stopping here to admire the swaying drapery of the lady and the armour. Sir Nicholas De La Beche sports a bascinet and his arms are enclosed in hinged plates, all faithfully executed in Oolitic limestone.
They have been rather beaten about, most probably during the civil war when the Giants’ nicknames are recorded as John Long, John Strong, John Ever-Afraid and John Never-Afraid. Legend has it that John Ever-Afraid was buried within the blocked-in flint walls of the church to escape the devil who would claim him if buried either withoutor within. Cromwell’s Act of Parliament decreeing "the demolition of monuments of idolatry and superstition” caused the curate here, Thomas Longland, to resign in despair from St. Mary's when he witnessed the resultant damage.

The big problem is the corroding 19th Century tie bar that spans all three canopies on the north aisle; the iron has expanded and had a bad effect on the capitals and springing points of the cusped arch tracery. They need to be propped with a fixed scaffolding, the fractured stone removed and to receive some careful dentistry to remove and replace the corroding bar with stainless steel. The clock was ticking for these damp, cracked, overheated and mutilated stones but funds are being raised locally with barn-dances and hog-roasts for the repair and ongoing conservation work that is urgently needed.

It has been useful to have developed a working relationship with another ancestor of the De La Beche family, who seems to pop up at all sorts of odd corners of old England. One such is on the other side of the chalk uplands of Salisbury plain at Vallis Vale in Somerset.
An alpine feel prevails here in this valley. Paradise is sullied with the usual old shopping trolleys, the ferrous remains of a once thriving quarrying industry and the creepy motion of golf balls, which do not float and make a slow seaward journey bumping along at the bottom surprising the crayfish (once native, now Signal). The brook flows quickly through deeply incised rocky valleys, hung with ancient woodlands clinging to the thin calcareous soils that hereabouts cover the valuable Carboniferous limestone and a surprising geological unconformity. As its not really suitable for building, the rock (as opposed to stone) has long been extracted for road building. In the dim past it was crushed by hand and used for lime production for building, as a flux for the production of iron at the nearby Fussels Ironworks as well as for sweetening the many fields up on Mendip that have acid soil.

Vallis Lime Kiln

A more English place or place name would be hard to imagine, but Vallis derives from the Norman French for falaise or cliff. The lime kilns here are peppered down the valley but working on a couple of them for a few sodden winter weeks lead to a chance introduction to this later De La Beche.
These Victorian lime-kilns are roughly constructed cylinders, built into the side of a hillock with large chunks of rock, and well-mortared with a coke /ash based mix. Coal from the Somerset coalfields fired the flue. At the base of the pit there is a stokehole, through which the fire was lit, fed, and the ashes and lime extracted. I don’t think that the kilns have been fired for quite a few decades but interestingly we found a large moss-covered spoil heap of lime left over from the last firing. You need not think too hard about the source of our repair lime. Cavities were maintained in the core of the kilns for the resident greater horseshoe bat population.
Just behind these kilns, where our Portaloos were situated, a quarry face exposes thegeological unconformity discovered by Sir Henry Thomas De La Beche in 1846. In the usual geological sequence, layers of sedimentary rock are laid down in chronological order on the surface of the earth, like the pages of a book, but here in Vallis pages have been ripped out of this chronology and are missing through faulting and erosion, leaving a gap of 170 million years in the geological record between the lower Carboniferous limestone and the inferior Oolitic Bath stone.
Sir Henry was the first director of the British Geological Survey, appointed in 1835. He was a close friend and benefactor of Mary Anning, probably the most well known and successful of fossil collectors, who he had known from his childhood upbringing in Lyme Regis. Henry became a keen fossil collector and illustrator and wrote groundbreaking papers on ichthyosaur and plesiosaur anatomy which have proven to be, surprisingly, very useful.

Heading even further west to the moors of Somerset, Muchelney Abbey possesses an exposed Saxon crypt that has an unsurprising tendency to fill with water in the winter. Splitting Blue Lias slabs newly arrived from the quarry over in Somerton for a drainage culvert renewed my interest in the observations of Sir Henry. A particularly large and expensive slab seemed to fit well with the other sections but was on the thickside It was not therefore a wholly pleasant surprise to find a fresh fossilised reptilian shoulder blade "disencumbered from its earthly shroud", as the £80 stone would have to be cut and much reduced in size to extract the prize specimen for the hallowed shelves of the Zimsonian, and a replacement slab obtained at short notice.

The earlier interest in Sir Henry prompted a visit to the Philpot Museum in Lyme Regis (which has been recently been carefully restored) to identify the shoulder blade to be that of a young Plesiosaur.

In order to raise funds for his friend, the now impoverished Mary Anning, De La Beche made a painting, entitled "Duria Antiquior - A More Ancient Dorset" (see below) which was reproduced as a lithograph. This was the first artist’s impression of deep time and it illustrated Mary Anning's finds including Ichthyosaurs, a Plesiosaur and Dimorphodon. The Philpot has a great exhibition on at the moment entitled “Mary Anning and the Men of Science,” a highlight of which is the re-creation with lifelike models by local schoolchildren of the 1830’s lithograph . The child in the reader will enjoy the coprolites (I will spare the reader a photo of the coprolites in my collection) emanating from a rather startled-looking plesiosaur knowing its time has come.

Coprolites= fossilized dinosaur poo.

http://www.minervaconservation.com/articles/monument_handbook.htm
http://www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/exhibitions-and-events/current-exhibitions/mary-anning-and-the-men-of-science

Bath stonemasons, Stone-masons Bath, Stonemasons of Bath, Stone masons Bath. stonecarving Bath, Stone carvers Bath, Stonemasonry Bath, Stone cleaning Bath Bristol, Stone masons Bristol Clifton.