Hampton Gay: Small Place, Big History

Hampton Gay is one of those unusual and fascinating places where railway, canal and river all meet, to indicate every possibility of progress and prosperity. But these days, Hampton Gay is a hamlet down a simple track, a few cottages, a church, and several shapes in the ground which are all that is left of former dwellings. A major feature is the ruined 16th Century manor house, now a scheduled monument, which answers to any description such as "picturesque", "haunting", "eerie" or "evocative". 

The Manor

We took a few hours on the last day of 2019, to explore this place, walking from the nearby village of Hampton Poyle in December half-light. The idea was to visit the ruined manor, but also to pay small homage to my grandfather, who spent a couple of years with his wife and growing family, as a cowman here just before the Great War

Like many villages nationwide, Hampton Gay's population was more numerous in medieval times. Post-Black Death, the decline was almost complete by 1428 when the village was exempted from taxation because it had fewer than 10 householders. 

But there was always the mill. And the development of the wool trade. These two elements to the growth of Hampton Gay were the source of its prosperity from the 16th Century, until a series of 19th century disasters overtook the village and brought it to its current incarnation, a place of memories, but also of contemplation and a livelihood for a few families in the current, prosperous-looking households.

Economic and Social History 
Hampton Gay had a water mill on the River Cherwell by 1219, when it became the property of Osney Abbey. It was converted to a paper mill in 1681, working with the converted corn mill at Adderbury Grounds, 12 miles upstream of Hampton Gay. The mills originally produced pulp, and from this, the paper was made in batches by hand until 1812. 
Then in an upgrade, Hampton Gay mill was re-equipped to manufacture paper mechanically and continuously. Then even more development and prosperity came in 1863–73 when the paper mill was rebuilt with a gasworks, steam engine and other machinery. 

But then, a disaster: in 1875 the mill was destroyed by fire. But it was restored to production in 1876, and further to this, in 1880 it had both a water wheel powered by the river and a boiler-fed steam engine. Production rose to about a ton of paper per day. 

The Mill and the Manor
The tenants running the mill during these upgrades, were a J. and B. New. With the manor house nearby gradually going past its prime, it was divided, and the New partners became tenants of one side. However, by 1887 - coincidentally with the terrible fire which ripped through the manor in that year - the News went bankrupt and the mill and associated property were sold to settle unpaid rent. 

The Manor
The Barry family built the manor house in the 16th century. Their money came from wool, and the fortunes of the manor and its upkeep followed the pathway of the demise of the wool trade with the development of the Northern cotton mills. And so, the manor kept its Elizabethan style until the 19th century, but by 1809 it was in a state of neglect, and well past its former glory. 

And so it was, in the 1880s the house was divided, and its final demise came in that fire of 1887. The house has never been restored and remains an ivy-clad ruin. 

Enclosure and Agrarian Revolt
In the mid-16th Century, with wool still a major source of wealth, the Barry family enclosed land at Hampton Gay for sheep pasture. In 1596 Hampton Gay villagers joined those from Hampton Poyle to join a revolt against the enclosures. 

The rebels planned to murder members of the landowner family and then to march on London. But the plot was foiled, and five ringleaders were arrested and taken to London for trial, and one was sentenced to death. But the Government of the day also recognised the cause of the rebels' grievance and determined that "order should be taken about inclosures...that the poor may be able to live". Parliament duly passed an Act to revert the land enclosed since 1588 to arable. The problem of enclosed land, of course, reared its head again in the late 18th century, but by then the focus of prosperity in Hampton Gay had firmly switched to the mill. 

Rail Disaster
The Oxford and Rugby Railway, built  in 1848–49 ran between Oxford and Banbury and adjoins Hampton Gay. The nearest station at Kidlington was closed in 1964, but the railway remains open as the Cherwell Valley line.

The Shipton-on-Cherwell train crash, one of the worst accidents in British railway history, occurred near Hampton Gay on Christmas Eve 1874.  Workers at the paper mill in Hampton Gay assisted the injured, and the inquest took place at Hampton Gay manor.
Full details appear in an Oxford Mail retrospective here. 

The Church
Hampton Gay had a parish church by 1074, with restorations and additions during the 13th Century.  It was completely rebuilt in 1767–72, though the architectural style is somewhat piecemeal and unprepossessing. In the context of the current state of the village, it has its own charm and is a reminder of busier and more fortunate times.



Epilogue!

Why did I record this here? I guess only as a small homage to my Grandfather, and his time here which I first learned about, as most of us with Ag Lab forebears do, from research into family ancestry. 

Edwin Betterton at Hampton Gay 

. Here is his image, from a larger photo of his father and brothers, in the Oxford Journal Illustrated August 30th 1916.  

Edwin Betterton August 1916

Naunton Dovecote, Glos.

In another of those dull wintry days which seem to be the norm this season, we took a trip out across the Gloucestershire borders with no particular aim in mind. We saw the signpost to Naunton on the A436 past Bourton-on-the-Water and decided to take that road. And so by serendipity we chanced upon the Naunton Dovecote, a site I had not known about,  but one which repaid a visit, especially as the light lifted awhile and the sun shone on the ancient stonework to create an inviting scene to explore awhile.

A notice-board has the following guide to the past and present incarnations of this quite special place by the river.

The Naunton Dovecote is reputed to be 15th century in origin but sadly there is no documentary evidence to confirm this.  Its architectural style suggests that it was built in the early 1600s but only dendrochronology would be able to establish this with any certainty and the tests carried out to date have been inconclusive.

Whatever its age the Naunton Dovecote is an important building, being Grade 2 listed and an Ancient Monument. It is typical of the stone-built Four Gabled style of dovecote and is particularly large, having 1,175 nestholes. Inside, the bottom tier was filled in during the Second World War to prevent the chickens, which were housed there, laying their eggs in the back of the nestholes! Most dovecotes had this adaptation made when brown rats became a pest around 1750.

Nestholes

There are 903 open nestholes now form the basis of a nesthole sponsorship scheme. Donors who have made gifts to help purchase and restore the building. Additionally, friends of the Naunton Dovecote Trust have sponsored some of the nestholes inside the building.

View on arrival

Ownership of a dovecote was limited to a privileged few in earlier times: in this case to the Lord of the Manor of Naunton. The young “quabs”  were farmed as a luxury meat for the table and their by-products (known as guano) were considered the finest fertilizer known at the time.

A dovecote was also something of a status symbol for the Lord of the manor and so tended to be in a prominent position and built to the highest standards of the day.

In those days also, the pigeons feasted freely on the surrounding crops - whether or not they belong to the Lord of the Manor. This caused hardship and bad feeling among the peasant classes.

The Naunton Dovecote is unusual in that it lies in a Valley by a river and is, fortunately for the general public, visible from all around. Dovecotes were normally built on prominent ground so that the pigeons could keep an eye out for predatory hawks.

The Louvre or Lantern at the top of the building was designed to allow the Doves in and out, but not the hawks, who could not negotiate the vertical flight pattern needed to enter and leave. The Louvre of the Naunton Dovecote was redesigned when it was restored in 2001 as there were no visual images remaining of the original arrangements.

When corn became very expensive 1794 to 1918 the dovecotes fell into disuse and many of the 20,000 dovecotes originally recorded in Britain fell down or lost their original features by conversion to other uses.

Not so the Naunton dovecote which, because it lay by a river, was converted to a mill for grinding corn for animal feed. The door was moved from the east elevation facing the manor to the South a window or doorway was built in the North elevation and a 1 storey extension on the South side covering the door was built. It was dug from the river into the Western side of the mill and the large wheel was driven by the force of the water.

The most recent project, completed in July 2018, included excavating the head race where the water entered the lean-to on the Western side, and this can now be seen by visitors.

 in 1952 due to a decrease in the volume of river flow and thus pressure, the wheel was removed and the dovecote was used to house cattlemen's chickens and pigs for general agricultural purposes.

The currently ruined turbine house by the sluice was built in 1929 to supply electricity to the Manor House. One recent project included repairing the turbine house as a ruin, removing and reinstating the turbine machinery and digging out the first section of the head race exit leat from the building. Again, visitors can now see these features which lie beyond the dovecote building by the river.

Turkey: Cappaddocia – Near Goreme

 

 This spectacular landscape was relatively unknown to UK-based travellers in the early 1980s, when these pictures were taken. At the time, there were very few hotels, with tourism restricted by the extremely limited hospitality infrastructure. I was working with a company which was offering specialist art- and religious tours, attracting people who were interested particularly  in the huge underground cities in this area (esp. Derinkuyu to the south) and the many underground churches, richly decorated from as far back as the  10th  century and earlier.  There is beauty and edginess here in equal measure, as we think of whole populations disappearing underground in the event of threat.

As landscapes go, it is all breath-taking and other-worldly. These days, mass tourism has arrived ( mea minima culpa!) , and I would have to  go back knowing that the moments of wonder I experienced here in those visits is likely to be forever compromised. But I think I would be willing to give it a try.

Photos © David Betterton 1983

Image ©  https://www.goreme.com/goreme-open-air-museum.php 

Image ©  https://www.goreme.com/goreme-open-air-museum.php 

Image ©  https://www.goreme.com/goreme-open-air-museum.php 

The Church at Kilpeck: Random Observations

During a day on the Welsh borders near Hereford, I made a visit to the famous church at Kilpeck. A place I had visited before, the last time perhaps 20 years ago.

The church is dedicated to St Mary and St David – although this St David a local St David and is not the patron saint of Wales. The church at Kilpeck is quite fascinating. To my mind, this church deserves absolutely, the obvious attention it has enjoyed over time. It repays repeat visits. I do not think any similar example exists anywhere in the UK of a church with such an extraordinary mix of Celtic, Saxon and Viking art all vying for a place in the visitor's imagination.

Rooted even further into the past, there is an example of the Manticore, a mythical beast out of Persia, via India, brought to northern latitudes by the Celts over time. It is a beast with the head of a man and the body of a lion, and momentarily I wondered whether W.B.Yeats thought of the Manticore when in his poem "The Second Coming" he writes:

             somewhere in sands of the desert  

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,  

Is moving its slow thighs,

The Manticore

Some discussion of this can be found  here .

The South Door with Tympanum

The Marticore sits broodingly on the left-hand pillar of the exquisitely-framed entrance to the church, amidst a plethora of exotic iconography. These carvings derive from the Herefordshire school of sculpture, a 12th Century group of artisans, whose work is visible in several other churches nearby. Despite its overtly religious nature, Herefordshire School work also has a playful, occasionally bawdy approach.

The motifs – no less than 89 corbels - which populate the four sides of the church are a fascinating example of this art, and they have attracted debate, intrigue and deep interest over time. Here are a few samples:

Lovers or Wrestlers?

A Pig with Protruding Tongue?

Hound ( intelligent and loyal) and 
Hare (representing faith in God and not the self)

Much has been written about these images, and the official website of Kilpeck church is a mine of information and detail, with a downloadable guided tour. Full details are here  

Corbel No 28: The Sheela Na Gig

In general terms the presence of the Sheela Na Gig in church architecture attracts, one could argue, more than its fair share of comment. For me, two fragments grabbed my attention, in the set of brochures and other literature laid out for visitors. 

The first one was the reproduction of a letter from a Mary Rose O’Reilly PhD of the University of St Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. I make no further comment, but record only a recognition of a valid interpretation. After all, what do we really know? She writes:

 “a number of scholars and researching comparative iconography in (especially)  Ukrainian and Central American weaving and needlework are inclined to relate the Sheela figure to a recurrent symbol of women giving birth. (Ukrainian girls until recent years embroidered a similar figure on long draperies which were part of their trousseau – drapes which were held onto by a woman during childbirth). The figure represents, then, not fertility in the lascivious aspect, but a patroness of women seeking an open womb, an easy delivery. P.S. I add this for whatever corrective it may be to the male view that the figure has to do with women vis a vis men, whereas more likely its significance was entirely within women’s culture".

The second fragment was this, from an older brochure describing the corbels.

[A female exhibitionist  goddess (Sheela-na-gig) with huge bald head, puny diminutive body and long arms which pass behind the legs to open the grossly beautifully enlarged vulva (Fig 78) . This represents low morals. female creative power ]

Indeed, more power to that person who made these revisions, one might say.

Encounter Near Cefn Coed : A Memory

This picture by Van Gogh, painted in 1890, two months before his death, appeared in the recent (May 2019) Van Gogh and Britain exhibition at Tate Britain. It is called “At Eternity’s Gate: Sorrowing Old Man” and was made in the institution at St. Remy de Provence. 

At Eternity’s Gate: Sorrowing Old Man

At the exhibition, it appeared below a paraphrased quotation by the artist, written in 1880. The paraphrased quotation  was:

“You may not always be able to say what it is that confines you and yet you feel I know not what bars … and then you ask yourself Dear God, is this for long? Is this forever? Is this for eternity?”

The word “bars” triggered in me a memory of a ditty I wrote 45-odd years ago now, where the word “bars” also appears. The ditty follows below.

Encounter Near Cefyn Coed

Cefn Coed Hospital is a mental health facility in the Sketty area of Swansea, Wales. It is currently managed by the Swansea Bay University Health Board.

A man was a joker and wandered the park
And he met with a stranger, alone
He asked, in a hurry, in the lateness and dark
For a hint of the secrets he’d known

He should have been wiser, but nevertheless
His mind was the kind that would roam
The reason was hard, it was everyone’s guess
He’d not come from a broken up home

“Won’t you tell me, my friend” he said as he stopped
“What you’re doing out here in the night?
And can you explain why your hair is all cropped
And your coat isn’t buttoned up right?”

“It’s not easy for me,” the other replied
“To show you the place I have been
All my life I have tried, to finish the ride
On an endless and circular dream

I was born in a pain, as I think, I don’t know
I cannot remember so well.
These strange things you see I had hoped would not show
They belong to another, you can tell?

Now I amble alone all over the earth
Though my wisdom would reach for the stars;
And all because of a difficult birth
Which has put my whole world behind bars.”

A man was a joker, and wandered the park
And he met with a stranger alone
He learned in a hurry, in the lateness and dark
How secrets are a burden, once known

Swansea: May 1973

The Rhapsody of Time Passing

Today I thought about time measured objectively by a watch or clock, and the uncertainty behind the act of observing the device. , I always marvelled at that strange experience of looking at a wrist watch, and how the second hand briefly appears to go into reverse when we check  for the time. A common experience I think, but with much to educate us on how our physiology is not always giving us the right - or rather, any consistent - conduits to reality.

An approach to the problem is to consider this: if the arrow of time moves from past to future in units of days, hours, seconds, nanoseconds and so on, is there any smallest unit beyond which time can be divided no further? And if there is such a smallest unit, does the essence of time consist in the flicking by of such units like the beads on some vast cosmic abacus? (This image, and this idea is entirely lifted from the remarks of a good friend with whom I discussed the subject).

And if time proceeds thus – as my friend pointed out - then two big questions arise: What happens within the units? and what happens between the units?   That moment between the decision to observe the time, and to consciously identify its measure, is a place where it is possible to believe in a dimension which is outside of both time itself, and is indecipherable by the time-bound mind of the individual.

Some of these thoughts have been prompted through a recent reading of a new critique of T.S. Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night”. This poem is the one which describes an arc of time in which a flâneur is wandering the streets with an ostensible purpose: to get to his numbered apartment at the end of his wandering. 

On the way, we are given time checks.  But we are also given a stream of unconscious memories filtering and surfacing in his mind. The poem sets up a juxtaposition on the one hand between objective moments - " 12 o'clock ", "half-past one", etc: and on the other hand a subjective flow of memories which by definition are elastic, qualitative, time-indeterminate, coming from, as it were, "nowhere". And so also a juxtaposition of "habit" and "dreams" where time has two (at least) separate qualities. 

I learnt from reading Jewel Spears Brooker's 2018 critique on Eliot, that Eliot wrote the poem after becoming disillusioned with the teachings of Bergson, whom he briefly championed, and whose lectures he attended in 1910/11 in Paris. The tension between pure consciousness and the challenges of a time-bound, time-dictated existence is palpable in these lines at the end of the poem.

      The bed is open; the toothbrush hangs on the wall,
      Put your shoes by the door, sleep, prepare for life.

      The last twist of the knife.

Bergson’s lectures in Paris in 1910–11 featured a concept of ‘pure duration’, contrasting it with the rigid demarcations of the clock. In ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, written in 1911, the clock time is announced at regular intervals and again, there is a tension and a discrepancy between those objective markers of time and the speaker’s experience of pure duration in these lines:

     Twelve o’clock.
     Along the reaches of the street
     Held in a lunar synthesis,
     Whispering lunar incantations
     Dissolve the floors of memory
     And all its clear relations
     Its divisions and precisions,
     Every streetlamp that I pass
     Beats like a fatalistic drum  

The progress of time through the deep of night drives Eliot’s speaker forward like a ‘fatalistic drum’, through ‘Half-past one’, ‘Half-past two’, ‘Half-past three’ and finally ‘Four o’clock’.

By contrast, the speaker’s consciousness points backwards, as every new thing he encounters takes him back though linked associations, to painful, difficult or banal memories. 


For Eliot, in this poem, the ‘divisions and precisions’ of the clock, its ‘clear relations’, conflict with a human consciousness which can only exist from retrospective constructs, insulated against fresh experiences by a time-bound crust of memory. No “pure duration” here. 

Bergson’s optimism that this artificial construct of clock-time, or time as an arrow, could be cauterised and dissolved in the experience of pure duration, is refuted in Eliot’s rhapsody. There is a much more pessimistic reality here, with the speaker’s thoughts ushering him robotically and despairingly forward, with no sense of a dimension where a creative peace might exist.

Raphael: Massacre of the Innocents

 Coincidentally, the day before the 100th anniversary of Paschedale, we visited the exhibition of drawings by Raphael at the Ashmolean Museum. These cartoons were well-described by experts who now know in great depth, how they emerged from various iterations on the paper by use of electronic screening and scanning processes.

Raphael: Massacre of the Innocents

Most affecting for me in terms of subject matter was No 70: a line drawing of "Massacre of the Innocents", the subject being the attempt by Herod to destroy all the male children in Bethlehem in an attempt to destroy the infant Jesus. The image had sharply defined short lines building up to the shapes of limbs, hands, arms and a composition of dramatic action which defied easy analysis. Simply speaking, a stark build-up of an emotional drama, made more vivid by the sense of an event encapsulated in a scratched-out moment of incompleteness, snatched out from a moment in time.

From the exhibition description: A woman is running towards us, mouth open in a scream, a baby cradled in her arms. The violence around her seems to part and give passage through the slaughter. What the open pathway through the heart of the horror really gives however, is a heartbreaking visual connection between our eyes and her pain. To look into that terrified face is to feel the full pity of her plight. It is impossible not to be gripped by an overwhelming compassion.

Paschendale Remembered: July 29th 2017

New every morning is the Love.
Paschendale remembered in the News:
It has been a hundred years since, but
There is the danger of the flaccid mind
As if those horrors were left behind.
Tell this to the people of Mosul,
Tell this to the people of Yemen.
Let us not be fed with too-comfortable methodologies
To tickle the sentimental core.
                                                                  - DB July 2017