Tuesday 6 February 2024

Historic Architecture in Hooton Pagnell I

 
The mediaeval village cross

After All Saints church, the next oldest building in Hooton Pagnell is Hooton Pagnell Hall, which dates back to the C14 but has a C18 rear wing, a front of 1787 and was extensively restored 1894-1904 by Julia Warde-Aldam, with considerable embattlement of the house. 
 
The Arts and Crafts style gateway to Hooton Pagnell Hall

It is set back from the road behind the impressive Arts and Crafts style gateway and surrounding walls, dated 1914-1920 and designed by Granville Streatfeild for Julia Warde-Aldam, with the only view of it being of the C14 gatehouse from the churchyard. 
 
The C14 gatehouse to Hooton Pagnell Hall
 
Leaving the churchyard, I set off to find the first of the remaining 19 buildings in the village that I wanted to photograph for the British Listed Buildings website and immediately found the Grade II Listed late C17 Falcon House, formerly the Falcon Inn, which is built with Permian dolomitic limestone rubble walling and a stone slate roof. 
 
Views of Falcon House

Opposite these are Holly Cottage, again with a stone slate roof, along with a 6 bay, 2 storied house that has stone slates for the eaves and a red pantile roof, a pattern of building materials that is very common in vernacular buildings on the Magnesian Limestone escarpment. 
 
Holly House and a house next to the church

Across the B6422 from Falcon House is the partly rough-cast rendered Grade II Listed Ivy House and Corner Cottage, which Historic England describes as probably C17 with extensive C19 alterations, which presumably includes the renewal of the roof with Welsh slate. 
 
Ivy House and Corner Cottage
 
Continuing along the B6422, which runs up to the top of the escarpment via two doglegs, between Falcon House and Ivy House, I noticed the first of many small outcrops of the Cadeby Formation, which form the foundations of boundary walls and houses and then stopped at Wheatcroft House – another C17 house with extensive C19 alterations. 
 
Wheatcroft House
 
I hadn’t been taking that much notice of the physical characteristics of the building stones, but in the converted agricultural building next to Wheatcroft House, the limestone is quite yellow and reflects the high sand content of the lower part of the Cadeby Formation in this area, which at nearby Watchley Crags is underlain by the Yellow Sands Formation.
 
The converted farm building next to Wheatcroft House
 
From here onwards, the well preserved linear plan of the village becomes quite obvious, with each property allocated a narrow plot set perpendicular to the main street, with a back lane providing rear access to the plots set parallel to the main road – a feature that I had also encountered at Palterton in Derbyshire. 
 
An aerial view of Hooton Pagnell

This linear plan was well established in many villages across Doncaster, by the mid C19 century, with these settlements also frequently included a church of medieval origin, most usually with the earliest phase dating to the Norman period. Looking at the 1854 to 1948 editions of the Ordnance Survey map, there seems to have been very little change to the village. 
 
Ivy Cottage

The early C17 Ivy Cottage is built with ashlar masonry and mullioned windows and was restored in 1898 with a Welsh slate roof, but I could only get glimpses of the late C18/early C18 barn that lies approximately 20 m south-west of it. 
 
Old farm buildings on Doctors Drive
 
Passing a couple of other disused farm buildings on Doctors Drive, I returned to the main road and went to look at the mediaeval village cross, which was probably near a market place or village green at the centre of the village that has since been built over. 
 
The village cross

A plaque on the wall to the rear of the cross, whose stepped base appears from my photos to have incorporated a small outcrop of limestone, states that a market charter was granted by Henry III to Sir Geoffrey Luterel in 1253.
 
A plaque next to the village cross
 

No comments:

Post a Comment