An old Lincolnshire cottage

click photo to enlarge
When this cottage was built, probably at some time in the eighteenth century, it would have been judged to be modern in style and construction and to exhibit vernacular and regional characteristics. Today it would be seen by many as quaint, "olde worlde", traditional and desirable.

I'm guessing that it is eighteenth century because of the chimney arrangement. Smaller stacks positioned on the gable ends became popular during the 1700s, replacing the single, larger, centrally-placed chimney with fireplaces at each side that were favoured in the 1600s. Of course, some older buildings were modernised in the eighteenth century by having the newer arrangement replace the older, but I don't think this has happened here. Also pointing to the eighteenth century is the symmetrical facade, the "catslide" roof at the back and the pitch of the main roof. If the latter had been steeper I'd have suspected an earlier date and a roof originally of thatch. On this cottage I'm thinking that clay pantiles were the original roof covering, just as they are today. From the slight "hump" in the ridge I imagine that the original roof timbers still feature strongly. In Lincolnshire many domestic buildings from the 1500s and 1600s had walls constructed of "mud and stud". Sometimes a building of this date features this method of building. Here however, I suspect that render has been applied over brickwork - but I could be wrong. The sloping dormers are also very characteristic of this part of England, though the sides are often rendered rather than tile hung as is the case here.

I was prompted to photograph this building, not for any distinctive or distinguished architectural or historical features - it is quite ordinary (though attractive) for its period. Rather, it was the early evening light, the tree shadows and the combination of colours that drew my eye.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 21mm (42mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/1000 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Crowland thatch

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There was a time, long ago, when thatch was the most common roofing material to be found in the British Isles. Not only houses but churches, pubs and barns could (and still can) be found with this kind of covering. As well as the reed and straw, roofs were thatched with flax, heather, gorse and broom. But slowly, down the centuries, this vegetable material was replaced by mineral in the form of stone, slate, clay tiles and finally concrete tiles. Yet thatching never entirely disappeared. Thatching is no longer local and cheap but it can still be reasonably commonly found in the areas where it was once popular, and it is still a very good insulator.

Today long straw thatch and combed wheat - both using by-products of grain production - are still found. So too is reed thatch, occasionally using native reeds from places such as the Norfolk Broads, but more often imported from Eastern Europe, particularly the area of the Danube Delta. Many traditional buildings, often from the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that were always thatched, continue to be so roofed. One or two builders offer newly constructed houses with  a thatched roof. I've seen them in Lancashire and Norfolk, both areas where thatch was popular. And, because of the demand for the re-roofing of old buildings and the occasional new-build, the craft of the thatcher continues.

Thatchers have always shown idiosyncrasies in the way they fix together the straw, reed, hazel or briar, and in the manner in which they finish ridges, gable ends and the edges of dormer windows. Many have also been keen to add individual thatch sculptures to their roofs, sometimes as a mark of who made it but often as a piece of whimsy or in response to a request from the owner. I've seen owls, pheasants, witches and cockerels decorating thatched roofs. Today's photograph of cottages in Crowland, Lincolnshire, features a thatched roof with a cat in a characteristically feline pose.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 24mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Cottage gardens

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If I lived in a cottage I'd have a cottage garden. Perhaps that sounds self-evident, but it isn't because a "cottage garden" these days means a particular type of planting and presentation rather than any just any old garden that happens to be attached to a cottage. The other day, as we walked through the village of Castle Rising in Norfolk, we passed the pair of cottages in today's photograph and, impressed by the front gardens, I took this shot.

The planting exemplifies much that I like about the cottage garden. On the right is a golden privet with a few white flowers showing. This shrub often forms an evergreen (actually "ever-yellow") hedge in older gardens but here it was a bush that in summer was offering its vivid colour and in winter would do the same, but give structure and height too. It was poking over a length of stone, brick and tile wall.The remainder of the flowers are typical cottage garden perennials, intermixed to an extent, giving a variety of colours at different heights. There are white-petalled marguerites with their yellow centres hanging over the picket fence, pink mallows, glossy skimmia with its red berries, aquilegia, lillies, orange roses, three kinds of clematis, tall hollyhocks - the quintessential cottage garden flower - and much more. Set against the brick and stone walls, with the white ornate porch, the dormers and the pantiles above, the planting makes for a picture of a typically English rural cottage.

I used the 17-40mm lens at its widest setting for this photograph and had to over come my natural inclination to step back and produce a more architectural image with "correct" verticals.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17mm
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/320
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Fenland fog

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In a talk I gave last month I was waxing lyrical about the purposes and pleasures of photography. During the course of my delivery I described photographers as one of the few groups of people who, on seeing fog from their bedroom window when waking, exclaim, "Hooray!", gobble their breakfast and hurry out into it. With hindsight I recognise that may be an overstatement. In fact, thinking about it more, I'm possibly the only person who does this! And yet, what can be more enticing than atmospheric conditions that change the face of the landscape that you know and photograph regularly, and which presents you with fresh views at every turn? I know that photographers definitely relish the falls of snow that bring about a similar kind of transformation, so I perhaps can't be the only one to welcome the arrival of a good, thick fog.

As I write this we've just had the first snow of the winter. But, as is sometimes the way, a walk in it with the camera produced nothing that I considered good enough to post here. So, back to the fog. Today's image is of a Fenland cottage out in the fields by the side of an unfenced lane, muddy from the passage of vehicles that have been harvesting the beet and brussels. Had I taken the photograph on a clear day the horizon would have featured telegraph poles, pylons, a few houses and trees. The fog transformed the scene by obliterating this clutter and left me to focus on the small building and its surrounding plot and trees. In fact it turned the image into one that could have been taken at any time between, say, 1850 and the present day. With that in mind, and to add to the soft qualities that the fog gave to the scene, I thought I'd convert the photograph to black and white.

For another shot of this cottage in last December's snow, see here.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 32mm
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/30
ISO: 320
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Picturesque pile or wretched wreck?

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What word would you use to describe this derelict Fenland cottage? Bucolic? Enchanting? Decrepit? Quaint? Crumbling? Is it a picturesque pile or a wretched wreck? Structures such as this usually provoke very polarised views. There are those who see them as a dangerous eye-sore that, at any moment, may fall on a passer-by, their appearance regarded as a blot on the local landscape, and an affront to surrounding buildings. Others find the dilapidation picturesque, a reminder of times past, a counterpoint to neat lawns, mathematically precise brickwork and gleaming plastic window frames. The fact is, such a building will usually be one or other of those things to most people. But, there are a few who will see it as both those things, getting enjoyment from it whilst regretting its demise, and also recognising the need for it tbe restored or replaced.

Those who see something to admire in decay and dereliction are often infected, to a greater or lesser extent, by Romanticism as that term came to be used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Frequently they will have an artistic bent, liking poetry, literature, painting, photography, etc. And many will have an appreciation of history and place. Of course, the photographic or painted image often adds its own veneer to a depiction of a ruin, and the selective, edited image frequently betters the reality. My wife suggested today's photograph is an example of that phenomenon, when she remarked as she looked over my shoulder at the image on my computer screen - "That looks more picturesque than it does in real life."

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 7.4mm (35mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f3.5
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

In the bleak midwinter

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"In the bleak midwinter,
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;"
from "In the Bleak Midwinter" by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), English poet

My current reading is "Between Earth and Sky: Poetry and prose of English rural life and work between the Enclosures and the Great War." This book, by Neil Philip, was published in 1984, and is an interesting anthology about the lives of the rural population during that significant period in our country's history.

The range of the selections is quite broad - traditional rhymes and songs, quotations from novelists, poems by "rural" poets and the more exalted, snippets from official and unofficial surveys of country people, and, most importantly, the voices of the rural workers themselves. Some of the writers, such as Hardy, Cobbet, Flora Thompson, John Clare, and Richard Jefferies will be familiar to anyone who has an interest in this period. However, two sources were new to me, and provide extracts that make the reader want to weep. The first is a publication called "How the Labourer Lives" by Rowntree and Kendall (Nelson, London, 1913). One of the chosen pieces describes the cottage economy of a North Yorkshire farm labourer's family. The father worked 12 hours a day, ate reasonable food at his place of work (valued at 7 shillings weekly), and took home wages of 9 shillings a week to feed, clothe, house, and warm his wife and five daughters. He drank tea at home, ate no food there, and watched helplessly as his family subsisted on mainly turnips and potatoes, with tea, milk, bread, butter and "sad-cakes". During the week of the survey the only "meat" to reach the lips of the wife and children was a cod's head that they had been given. An equally heart-rending extract comes from "The Whistler at the Plough" by Alexander Somerville (James Ainsworth, Manchester, 1852). This is based on a survey of agricultural labour originally undertaken for the Anti-Corn-Law League. In an interview a youth who describes himself as "sixteen a'most", tells the author how he works from 4 in the morning until eight in the evening for three shillings a week; how he lives in the stable loft with other lads with no heat of any sort; has a change of bedding once a year; and eats bread and lard for every meal, except once a week when he buys potatoes that the "master" allows them to boil.

Reading the extracts reminded me that, whilst living conditions in this country have moved on considerably for everyone since those times, there still remain people - politicians and employers - who think that it is right to pay less than a living wage for a week's work. And by living wage I mean enough to feed, clothe, house and keep yourself warm, with sufficient left over to spend in a way that makes you feel you are part of the society in which you live.

I took the photograph above on a walk through the Fenland lanes and fields. The small Victorian cottage sheltered behind the wind-bent trees and ramshackle old sheds made me think of those extracts. For much of the year a smallholding such as this is growing vegetables and flowers, and its fruit trees are flourishing. But in the colder, darker months, with the wind whipping across the open ground, the roads iced over and snow drifting against the side of the buildings it is much less idyllic, and a century or a century and a half ago might have known the conditions described above. With that in mind I prepared this sepia-tone version of my almost monochrome colour image.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 55mm (110mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Hearth, home and redundant words

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During my relatively short time on this planet I've seen words disappear from my everyday language. Take the word "aerodrome". This particularly British construction once described all the early "airfields" (a word still in use) and "airports" (today's preferred word for places with commercial flights), but is now never used except in an historical context. Or how about "palings" to describe a fence used as a boundary, and the origin of the phrase, "beyond the pale". Similarly, "petticoat" seems to have gone, not only because such full, trimmed undergarments are no longer the fashion, but also because "underskirt" replaced the word.

Looking at my photograph of the cottage at Monksthorpe Baptist Chapel, Linconshire, a building currently undergoing restoration, but still showing its old cast-iron fire with built-in ovens, it occurred to me that the word "hearth" is also becoming an endangered species. The ubiquity of central heating, gas fires and electric fires, has significantly reduced the number of open fireplaces burning wood or coal. Consequently the number of actual hearths is much fewer, and therefore the need for people to refer to the hearth is disappearing too. Phrases such as "hearth and home", and the idea of the hearth being the focal point of family life disappeared in the 1950s and 1960s, as television took over that role. And today, with the rise of computers, and other forms of entertainment and information delivery, the television is losing its place at the centre of things. Perhaps something new will come along that turns "television" into a word as antiquated as "wireless". If it draws families back together into a shared experience it will have served a useful purpose.

I took this photograph on my visit to the early eighteenth century Chapel that I have documented in another blog post here. The cottage is of an indeterminate date, but I would guess it's also eighteenth century, though the built-in stove is probably from the nineteenth century. I thought it made a good subject next to the litter of broken plaster and floor tiles, and black and white seemed to suit it better than colour.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 15mm (30mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f4.5
Shutter Speed: 1/125 seconds
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Chimneys and the picturesque

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This derelict Lincolnshire cottage has four chimney stacks, some of them leaning quite alarmingly. Four! That probably equates to an open fire in every room. It looks like a nineteenth century structure, so for much of its life coal and wood would have burned merrily in its fireplaces, offering the inhabitants visual cheer and limited warmth.

The earliest houses had a hole in the ceiling for smoke to exit, but as building skills developed a chimney to confine the smoke and make it leave the building in a controlled way became firstly desirable, then mandatory. Houses made of wood frequently had a chimney made of bricks or stone for safety reasons, and these can still be seen on such houses built during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Fireplace and chimney breasts were often a focus for decoration - arches, pilasters, brackets and mythical figures are common, as are mantelpieces for the display of family artefacts. The chimney stack above the roofline was also often embellished too: a clay pot on a stepped brick cornice for the humble dwelling; spirals, castellation, and more for the well-to-do residence.

Today, ever fewer buildings have chimneys. Indeed the day is coming when new buildings will not require, or be permitted, a source of heat that requires combustion. Consequently chimneys will probably, in time, disappear and with them the focal point of the fireplace and the finial-like finish to the top of houses. Am I alone in thinking that the photograph above would be much less interesting, less picturesque, without the chimneys? Perhaps it's an age thing - maybe younger folk don't see things that way? However, I certainly wouldn't have photographed this scene had there been no chimneys on this building, regardless of the allure of the sun breaking through the cold, foggy, autumn morning.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 13mm (26mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/1000
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -2.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On