Gwrych Castle

 

It has just been announced that Gwrych Castle in North Wales is to receive £2.2 million from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. The money will be spent to stabilise the ruins, reinserting new floors and rooms in order to bring a suite of rooms back into use. The money is the latest development in the somewhat chequered history of the house, which has most recently been in the news as the host of the series I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.

 

It is often observed that Gwrych Castle is a relatively modern creation: a neo gothic fantasy of the early decades of the nineteenth century. In fact, as I discovered on a recent visit, it has a much longer history. At the heart of the ruins as they are today is a medieval house, called Bronhaul or Y Fron, part of the Lloyd family estate. By the early nineteenth century this house had been damaged by fire, and it became instead the heart of Lloyd Hesketh Bamford-Hesketh’s fantasy creation of Gwrych Castle. Some of the fire-damaged timbers of this earlier house can still be seen in the ruins of the castle today.

 

Lloyd Hesketh Bamford-Hesketh, born 1788, was a ‘man of taste’ who set about to honour his family’s ancestry by concocting a picturesque vision of a rambling, medieval castle. He commissioned Charles Augustus Busby (1788-1834) to produce plans in 1813, and was pleased with the results. But within a few years, having inherited the property outright in 1815, Lloyd adapted Busby’s plans. He adapted Busby’s essential idea – of two wings around a central tower – but instead chose to take advantage of the local topography by setting the castle into the hillside. For materials, he quarried limestone and mined lead, and he engaged Thomas Rickman of Liverpool to create a new set of elevations. Work began in 1819 and was mostly finished by 1822. Cast iron was used to create gothic window tracery, encasing stained glass windows. The effect must have been overwhelming.

 

Gwrych remained a lived-in family home for another century or so. Lloyd’s granddaughter, Winifred, became Countess of Dundonald on marriage. She continued to make changes to the house, engaging Detmar Blow to make several significant interventions including a grand marble staircase. Winifred died in 1924, leaving the house to the Prince of Wales, who declined it such that the Church of Wales became the owner. The Earl of Dundonald bought it back, claiming his wife had gone mad. But no member of the family lived there ever again.

 

Gwrych Castle then suffered the fate that so many houses suffered in the second half of the twentieth century: ever-changing and revolving ownership, leading to eventual demise. During the war the house was used by Jewish refugees who came across in 1939 on the Kindertransport. After the war the place was opened as a visitor attraction, offering medieval jousting spectacles – it was ‘Britain’s first theme park’ according to Mark Baker. In the late 1980s the house was sold again to an absentee American businessman. During this time the structure was subject to vandalism and the wilful salvage of timbers, lead and other materials. By the mid 1990s the castle was in a ruinous state, having become a squat for New Age Travellers. Mark Baker, just 11 years old in 1997, set up a Preservation Trust with the help of his family, to raise awareness of the castle’s history. In 2018 the trust was able to purchase a lease of the castle, and begin its work to reverse the years of neglect and bring this magical place back to life.

 

I visited on a busy day in early August 2023: the car park was rammed and visitors were enjoying the experience. A magic potion event was taking place in the castle itself: a theatrical experience, taking full advantage of the Hogwarts-like setting. The holiday accommodation in the castle lodge was fully booked for the season. There were adverts for hiring the castle as an events space: for weddings or private parties. These, along with I’m A Celebrity, of course, are the means by which houses sustain themselves in the early twenty-first century.

 

 

St Mary's Newport, explained

Sir Paul Britton visited Newport, Essex, on Thursday 20 July as part of a fundraiser for the Friends of St Mary’s. Sir Paul, a former senior civil servant who is now a trustee of the National Churches Trust and chair of the Canterbury Diocesan Advisory Committee, entertained and informed us all with a fantastic talk in the church itself as part of an open afternoon.

 

Newport’s church is remarkable, he explained, not necessarily for its fittings and ornamentation – although some of them are indeed special –  but simply for its size. It is rather large for a parish church. From its beginnings it was laid out in its distinctive cruciform shape,  Sir Paul observed. We know this because the archway in the north transept dates from around the 1220s, making it the oldest extant part of the church. Adjacent to it, other large arches were probably from the 1240s – as can be dated from the distinctive nail-head patterning. Given that these large arches are at the centre of the church as we still see it today, Newport’s church looks much the same now as it did in the first half of the thirteenth century.

 

Of course, Sir Paul went on, there would also have been distinct differences between the thirteenth-century church, and the building as it has now evolved. For one thing, the roof would have been completely different. The roofline as we see it today was raised, possibly some time in the fifteenth century. The original roof would have been steeply pitched – possibly thatched. Today's much flatter flat roof over the chancel cuts through the top of the East window – showing how this roof must have been a later innovation.

 

Similarly, the West tower as it is today is a recreation of the 1850s, when the church was restored after many decades of neglect. It remains conjectural whether the eight angels that decorate the roof date from this time, or from the fifteenth century. Sir Paul felt they were probably medieval.

 

The north and south aisles were added at some point between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the roofs of the north and south transepts were replaced. The room over the porch is likely to date from the fifteenth century, as does the vestry.  There remains speculation as to the purpose of the room above the porch, but it is likely to have a relationship to the college for which the church was founded, and to the educational role played by the church alongside the grammar school (which occupied the building on the site of what is now Church House).

 

Sir Paul pointed out the other reasons why Newport church is so special. The chest in the south transept dates from the late thirteenth century, and is the earliest known example in the country of oil painted onto wood. The painting on the lid shows the crucifixion, flanked by the figures of John, Mary, Peter and Paul. The chest is a very special piece, and was loaned to an exhibition in London in the 1980s.

 

Equally, Newport’s font dates from the thirteenth century, while its lid is fifteenth century. The lectern at the front of the church is also a medieval survival, likely to date from the fifteenth century. The rood screen contains some medieval tracery too, though has been heavily restored.

 

Sir Paul observed that the memorials in the chancel were also particularly fine, the earliest dating from the first half of the eighteenth century. Another memorializes Joseph Smith of Shortgrove, who served as private secretary to William Pitt the Younger.

 

Sir Paul’s special subject is stained glass windows. He observed that the windows to the north transept contain medieval glass. Elsewhere, in the chancel, in the north and south transept and in the nave, nineteenth century glasses have been introduced.

 

On the same evening as the talk, Sir Paul gave an illustrated lecture in Church House, about the history and importance of the stained glass tradition. A packed audience came, and were enthralled by over 120 photographs, all of them taken by Sir Paul himself on his travels to churches. The event raised nearly £500 for the church tower restoration. The money will be very well spent indeed.  

 

Sir Paul’s talk inspired me to look into other facts about the church. An interesting article by Daniel Secker draws attention to the fragment of an Anglo-Saxon cross that has been inserted in the outer north wall. This may hint as to the possibility that there was a saxon church on the same site as the present-day church, which itself is built at the highest point in the village.

 

It was also a real privilege to have access to the church tower, and to take the panorama of the village from the top.

How the Country House became English: a review

 

Stephanie Barczewski, How the Country House became English (Reaktion, 2023)

 

This book is a companion to the author’s previous work, a study of the connections between country houses and the British Empire. That book posited that ‘over 1,500 houses were funded by imperial profits’, although it also proposed that, at most, 16 per cent of country houses were built by owners with direct links to imperial sources of wealth. Many more houses, however, contained collections that were imported from British colonies, or reflected imperial influence in other ways. Why then, asks Barczewski, did so few houses feature ‘even a hint of an architectural style imported from one of Britain’s colonies’? The question leads Barczewski to re-examine the history of country houses from the perspective of the complexities of the British nation state, formed over the four hundred years that form the principal period under consideration in the book.

 

The country house as a cultural form, Barczewski concludes, is less a British invention than a particularly English construct, which happens also to be manifested, in different ways, in Wales and Scotland.  The book seeks to reassert the Englishness of the country house, while always emphasizing the complexities and contradictions implicit within such a proposition. The argument unfolds over a series of themed chapters. Early chapters look at the way so many houses in England had violent origins, as domestic architecture formed from the shells left at the Dissolution of the Monasteries. A further spate of violence was seen in the Civil Wars of the mid-17^th century, during which numerous houses were besieged, ransacked, and sometimes razed to the ground. One of the underlying themes of English house building, however, was a desire, over time, to erase signs of the turbulence and disorder from which these houses. Similarly, landed families could sometimes successfully disguise allegiances previously held during the religious divides of the 17^th century, or find that ‘gothic’ architecture previously associated with catholic cultural expression was back in fashion as a manifestation of ‘English’ cultural affiliation and hegemony.

 

One of the striking arguments made by the book, the focus of the fourth chapter, is that the ‘British’ country house is a cultural mirage. There was never a British tradition of house building. Rather, country house architecture developed on distinct, though occasionally overlapping, lines in England, Wales, and Scotland. There is little to connect the baronial houses of Scotland, Barczewski contends, with country houses in lowland England. Their development followed distinct trajectories, such that the notion of a ‘British Country House’ is simply a geographical shorthand rather than an aesthetic category. Meanwhile, distinctly ‘English’ architecture went through successive evolutions in the 18^th and 19^th centuries: Palladianism, Baroque, Neoclassical, and Gothic Revival, before settling in the early 20^th century into a comfortable (and comforting) vernacular revival. The more solidly ‘English’ houses became, the more they erased any sense of the imperial roots that some of them, undoubtedly, had.

 

But architectural styles had ceased to evolve by the early 20^th century. “The international modern style made little impression in England, and the few new houses that were built after 1920 were generally small in scale.” Thereafter, the country house ceased to have any credence as a cultural form, becoming instead captured by the proponents of heritage nostalgia, including the National Trust. This nostalgia has proved profitable for some – Highclere Castle has gone from “a cash-hemorrhaging white elephant to a cash-register-ringing profit machine” – but the nostalgic view of the country house has limits, as recent controversies over the National Trust’s attempts to expose the colonial and imperial connections of some of its properties have shown.

 

Barczewski has developed a complex and interesting argument, drawing on a great sweep of mostly secondary literature. She creates maps and graphs that demonstrate the spread of particular country house fashions over time, and uses the temporal and geographical distributions that they create to weave a nuanced and multi-layered narrative. The book is very well written, and will be much pored over for years to come. It is an important addition to country house studies. 

 

I can see two potential flaws in the book, however. First, the idea of a ‘British Country House’, which Barczewski takes so much to task, is arguably something of a straw-man. Britain is a complex place, where no-one takes seriously the idea that a country house nestled deep in the South Downs, say, has anything much to do with a baronial castle in the Scottish Highlands, beyond both being domestic residences of larger-than-average-size. It perhaps takes a North American author to spend an entire book to tell us that England, Scotland, and Wales are distinct territories, even while they come together to form one, if not two, collective (and contested) identities (Britain, and the United Kingdom). However, Barczewski is absolutely right to shine a spotlight on England, as the part of the UK that remains serially under-investigated.

 

Second, the book’s analysis largely comes to an end in the 1920s. There is no room here for a reference to John Martin Robinson’s The Latest Country Houses (1984), written in response to endless publications in the 1970s and 1980s announcing the end of the country house. Robinson argued that, in fact, new country houses have continued to be built in new and innovative styles. Barczewski, however, doesn't really take this into account. She seems to think that every privately owned house represents either “old money” or the object of desire for “rock stars, corporate CEOs and footballers” (p304). As a result the country house is ‘frozen in amber’ as a cultural form: “a part of the nation’s past but no longer of its present.”

 

There is very little attempt by Barczewski to examine any more deeply the reality of country house ownership in Britain in 2023. There is no reference to Historic Houses in the index, an organisation representing over 1,400 country houses across the UK. To my knowledge, none of the 1,400+ owners of these houses is a footballer or a rock star. A proportion of them are indeed ‘old money’, sometimes they are families who have lived in the same house for more than eight hundred years. Others have had less length of tenure, perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, perhaps not as much as this. A small proportion are indeed ‘new money’, who have used fortunes made in business to buy and restore historic properties, injecting them with much needed new capital. In such ways, the English country house sustains itself, and continues to do so, as it has throughout history. Just 300 of the 1,400 properties are open to day visitors. The majority make their money in other ways: events, hospitality, weddings, concerts, accommodation. There are more than 1,400 different strategies in fact: every house is unique. But Barczewski tars them all with pretty much the same brush: they are today, largely, nostalgic embarrassments, destined never to live up to the glory days of when they were first built, back when Britain (or was it England?) ruled the waves.

Tales from the Commons

 The patch of ground that we call the common in my home village in Essex is a low-lying area of grassland next to the railway station. It is much used by dog walkers as well as for impromptu games of football (when these are allowed). In normal times, it is the venue for the summer fete, featuring a dog show, a bouncy castle, and cake stalls.  

 

Were this land ever to be fenced in and built upon, the loss for my village would be devastating. A vital piece of accessible green space (albeit one that often floods in winter) would be gone forever. But this open land has never been threatened with enclosure. Indeed, it only exists because of enclosure. These few acres were carved out from the village’s pre-enclosure meadows to form a recreation ground under the terms of an Enclosure Act of 1856.

 

Enclosure in this corner of Essex was never more than a tidying-up exercise, bringing order to the tangled skein of rights and obligations that overlay the landscape. The complexity of the pre-enclosure landscape here means that my village was even used as a case study in Oliver Rackham’s monumental history of the English countryside.

 

Recent books have depicted enclosure as something else altogether. Guy Shrubsole in Who Owns England? (2019) describes enclosure as ‘a land grab of criminal proportions.’ It’s a powerful narrative, which fuels the outrage that many feel at the unequal distribution of landownership. It is also almost entirely untrue.

 

The commons were never ‘owned in common’ before enclosure in the way that Shrubsole and others have assumed. After all, it was the very absence in English law of any concept of property that was owned in common that led to the invention of the National Trust in 1895.

 

The underlying ownership of land was never really the issue at stake during enclosure, even if the subsequent consolidation of landholdings was arguably its consequence.  Commons were privately owned places over which certain other people – the commoners – also possessed use rights. Commoners were those members of the parish who had a stake in the open fields – the right to farm strips of land, or to graze livestock. Common rights were themselves forms of property, and enclosure, in its Parliamentary sense, was the legal process by which the commoners were compensated for the loss of their rights when the open fields were divided into individual plots.

 

For the most part, enclosure was a largely bureaucratic exercise. Across many counties in England, enclosure either never happened at all (because land had been held in severalty since time out of mind) or was tolerated with barely a hint of opposition. Examples of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century enclosure protests – such as the famous anti-enclosure riots at Otmoor in Oxfordshire in 1830 – are conspicuous by their relative rarity.

 

Historians have long debated why there appears to have been so little direct opposition to enclosure, even if resistance to it was more frequent than has sometimes been assumed.  Undoubtedly the landowning class had the weight of military and political force behind them. But the fact also remains that enclosure was a legal event, conducted with a degree of transparency and with the tacit if not overt approval of many of those involved.

 

Without question, enclosure in lowland England was damaging for the poorest in society. Those people possessed nothing at all, beyond the informal discretion to occasionally take firewood or a rabbit from the common. Because these rights were purely customary, they were not recognised as common rights during the enclosure process. Once enclosure had taken effect, less open land was available for the landless to eke out a living. The flight to urban centres began.

 

In upland parts, meanwhile, commons served different purposes altogether. Here, great stretches of hillsides had only ever been held for common grazing. Manorial courts resolved squabbles between farmers over the uses and abuses of the commons, and many of these courts survived even into the twentieth century. This did not alter the underlying reality: that common land was privately owned property over which certain other people shared common rights of access or use.

 

The myths of enclosure are widespread. They get more powerful with every retelling. George Monbiot’s recent report for the Labour Party, Land for the Many, insists (p61) that ‘Common land was where the majority of the population once lived and worked’. As non-sequiturs go, it takes some beating.  Commons after all tended to be those marginal parts of a settlement where the land was of too poor a quality to be incorporated into the open fields. 

 

The idea that enclosure was a criminal land grab sits uncomfortably with the fact that 5,200 acts of Parliament were passed to make it happen. Far from being criminal, enclosure was a thoroughly legal process, conducted in the full gaze of public scrutiny. After an enclosure act had been passed, enclosure commissioners would be appointed to descend on a parish and begin the process of sorting out who got what so that lines could (literally) be drawn on the ground. This process often took several years to resolve, which is why the enclosure award in my village (1861) postdated the enclosure act by five years.  

 

John Clare’s influence runs deep. His melancholy lines remind us of the very real losses that enclosure caused, especially for those customary users of the commons who could claim no legal stake in the process. But Clare was a labourer not a farmer, and enclosure ultimately was about improving the efficiency of agricultural production. Enclosure was not the English equivalent of the Highland Clearances.

 

Progressive thinkers are right to reclaim the idea of the commons as a powerful metaphor for rethinking how our present society might be organised differently in the future. But it is worth bearing in mind that different stories can also be told about the history of the commons and their enclosure.

 

  

The Union Workhouse

Workhouses were once ubiquitous elements of the local landscape. These severe, penal-looking establishments, built in the years following the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, replaced the use of cottages and other vernacular buildings as the dispensaries of relief under the Poor Law Act of 1601.  The 1834 Act compelled parishes to group together in Unions, with a single (usually large and imposing) workhouse, able to deal with the increased number of paupers seeking food, lodging and work.

Bill Hardy, an expert on the Bishops Stortford Union Workhouse, came to talk to our local history group recently. As Bill said, workhouses were so common a sight that many families will still have a workhouse story to tell. I am no exception. A close relation of mine was brought up in a workhouse in the early decades of the 20^th century (his own family having been the administrators of such an establishment in a Kent village).

Once you were admitted to a workhouse, it became very difficult to break free. The monotonous daily routine tended to breed a reliance on institutional support and maintenance. All ages were catered for: old and young, able-bodied and infirm. Families would be admitted, but then brutally split up by funnelling the adults into separate men’s and women’s quarters, with boys and girls also grouped separately after they reached the age of seven.

The Bishops Stortford Union workhouse was an imposing brick-built establishment and still stands today. It was built in 1836-37, to a hexagonal design by WT Nash.  (To the north, the Saffron Walden Union had already built a similar-looking workhouse a year earlier, to accommodate 340 inhabitants.) Workhouse residents were required to wear uniforms. Boys’ hair would be cut short, to reduce the risk of infestations. Residents would be sent to work in local fields, or given other mindless tasks to perform, such as walking on treadmills or picking oakum.

Tramps would seek overnight relief here, burying their possessions beneath nearby hedges where they could be retrieved after they were turfed out in the morning (they were not permitted to return within seven days, so would walk to the neighbouring Union for another night’s board and lodging.) Like many such places, the Stortford workhouse eventually became an infirmary (at the turn of the twentieth century). In 1936 it played host to the marchers heading to London on the Jarrow Crusade. Eventually it became a community hospital, until its closure in 2004. It is now divided into residential properties.

Bill was one of a team of local history researchers who delved deep into the public records, in particular the correspondence of the Poor Law Commission, formerly located at Somerset House. Four thousand documents were separately digitised and transcribed by Bill and the rest of the team, ensuring that the names and lives of those associated with the workhouse were properly recorded for posterity. The results of the work can be interrogated on the National Archives website.

You can see the Bishops Stortford Workhouse by looking at the satellite image on Google Maps. The hexagonal design is clear, with three blocks forming the radial spokes at the centre. This provided for six separate yards into which inmates would be sent for exercise. It does all look somewhat like an alien imposition. It might almost be a spaceship dropped onto the landscape, like that satellite image of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, sitting in the yard of a film studios in Surrey.

Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills

Not having been before, I didn’t know quite what to expect when I joined my local history group on a visit to Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills recently. I had heard of the site, where gunpowder had been made since the 17th century, but was otherwise slightly in the dark about what went on there. The visit was a revelation. 

The first surprise was just how big the site is. It is reached by a turning off the A121, opposite a McDonalds and a branch of TK Maxx. The presence of the site is announced by a roadside board, but first you must travel through an estate of recently built executive homes. You start to wonder if you are heading the right way, but eventually the road ends in a car park, and the gates of the complex are revealed. 

This innocuous entrance manages to conceal a site of 175 acres in total, which would once have been even larger (before the housing developments). The whole site is effectively an island, bounded by the River Lea and various of its tributaries. The site is low-lying and no doubt prone to flooding, but water was central to the industrial activities that took place here. 

There had been mills here for many hundreds of years, associated with the monks of Waltham Abbey itself. An early 17th century mill was adapted for making vegetable oil, and then at some point again, and certainly by the 1660s, converted to the manufacture of gunpowder. 

The tour of the site began with a video, on show in the permanent exhibition hall, which explained the 9th-century Chinese origins of gunpowder: a mixture of saltpetre (potassium nitrate, 75%), sulphur (10%) and charcoal (15%). Water could also be added to enable the gunpowder to be formed into blocks or cakes by means of screw presses.

The mills at Waltham Abbey were owned first by the Hudson family, and then the Walton family, who eventually sold to the Crown in the 1780s. The military use of the mills was associated at first with Lieutenant-General Sir William Congreve, who oversaw the expansion of production. Gunpowder was a useful propellant, since it generated sufficient power to fire a bullet or rocket, without being so great as to explode the device from which the ammunition was fired. 

The gunpowder produced at Waltham Abbey played an important role in the wars with France, and also influenced American gunpowder production. The line in the US anthem ("The Star-Spangled Banner") -- "...the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air" -- is a reference to the Congreve rockets that were used in naval and military assaults at this time (invented by Sir William's son). 

Gunpowder continued to be manufactured at Waltham Abbey into the 19th century, and was used in the Crimean war and later the Boer war, as well as for large-scale civil engineering such as the building of the railway network. Steam-powered technology replaced the use of the water-driven mills. The second stage of the mills’ life was connected with the development of cordite as a replacement for gunpowder from 1889 onwards. Cordite, an admixture of guncotton and nitroglycerine, had the benefit of being smokeless, and became the primary produce from the Waltham Abbey site during World War One. Thereafter, other explosives produced at Waltham Abbey included TNT and RDX, used in the bouncing bomb in World War Two.

The third phase of the site’s development came after 1945, when it served as the Explosives Research and Development Establishment, or ERDE during the Cold War. Here, rocket technologies were developed, right up until the site was decommissioned in 1991. 

Still owned by the Ministry of Defence, the gunpowder mills site is now largely run by volunteers, some of them former members of staff from ERDE days. We were taken on a trailer ride across the site, which is heavily overgrown in parts. Nestling among trees, scrub and ponds are semi-derelict remnants of each of the three phases: 18th-century powder mills, 19th-century cordite-mixing plants, and 20th-century research structures. The buildings often showed signs of their high-explosive purposes: they would have solid blast walls built next to them, or be built in shapes (such as the E-form) that were considered better for minimising the effect of accidental explosion. 

We heard of how the workers at the site had to take special care with their clothing. Matches and anything else that could cause a sudden detonation were strictly forbidden. In fact, the fear of contamination by dirt meant that workers often had to change into special clothing, including leather boots known as ‘Waltham Abbeys’. They would be instructed to work patiently and carefully, and to walk slowly and to avoid any action that might cause a sudden spark. There were fatalities at the site from time to time. Those workers involved in mixing acids for cordite were told to jump into the nearest water if the acid ever spilled on them. We heard of one worker, required to monitor temperatures all-day long, who was given a one-legged stool to sit on, to deter him from falling asleep on the job.

The future of the site is somewhat uncertain. After all, what is to be done with a group of largely derelict buildings, tucked away on an abandoned wetland site? Waltham Abbey has similarities with a site such as Orford Ness, also decommissioned in the early 1990s and now maintained by the National Trust in a spirit of ‘curated decay’. At Orford Ness, the history of 20th century military research vies with the conservation of a particularly rare form of shingle and the plant and animal life that is associated with it. At Waltham Abbey too, nature is slowly intruding to become the more dominant feature of the site, now that the leather-clad workforce has disappeared. In the middle of our trailer tour, we caught a glimpse of a group of fallow deer, their large antlers just visible to the naked eye as they sheltered from the sun under a clump of alder trees. 

Waltham Abbey Gunpowder Mills can be visited in the summer months on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Special tours can also be booked through Invitation to View. 

Bartlow Hills

A landscape palimpsest worthy of the name is at Bartlow in Cambridgeshire, near to the northern Essex border. Here, the Victorians drove a railway line through a Roman burial ground laid out in the first century AD. The railway itself disappeared in the 1960s, not having anywhere near the longevity therefore of three of the Roman mounds, the central one (at 13 metres) the largest of its kind in northern Europe.

 

Victorian railway tunnel cutting into Mound 5 at Bartlow Hills

Whatever possessed the Victorians to think that this was a good spot for a piece of transport infrastructure? Not long before the railway arrived the mounds had been excavated, revealing a treasury of finds: containers of cremated remains, lodged within wooden chests that also included vessels of food and drink, flowers, box leaves, incense and traces of blood, wine and milk mixed with honey. The finds were taken to Easton Lodge in Essex, the home of the Maynard family, but the fire of 1847 that destroyed the Elizabethan mansion  at Easton also destroyed the majority of the artefacts (though some examples still survive at Saffron Walden Museum).

Mounds 4 and 7 at Bartlow Hills

Perhaps the removal of the treasures inclined the railway company to think there was no harm in driving a train track and tunnel through this most ancient of sites. There were originally eight mounds in total, and traces of a few more survive on private land adjacent to the three that still stand today. These three are now held in guardianship by Cambridgeshire County Council, meaning that the mounds are fully accessible for public visiting. It is well worth climbing the stairs on the largest of them, to take in the view from the top.

The footpath leading to the mounds begins in the churchyard of Bartlow church, itself well worth a visit because of the remnants of its elaborate wall paintings. Three of these survive too, details of late 14^th-century decorative paintings depicting St George’s dragon, the weighing of souls by St Michael, and the bearded face of St Christopher. The church is one of only two round-towered churches in Cambridgeshire, and it is said that King Cnut ordered it to be built after the Battle of Assandun, when the Danes were triumphant over the English army of Edmund Ironside. (Sadly there is no evidence to support this theory, and the exact location of the Battle of Assandun remains unknown.)

St Michael, weighing souls, Bartlow Church

St Christopher, Bartlow Church

St George's Dragon, Bartlow Church

Bartlow Church, Cambridgeshire