Stained Glass Work at Foxcroft
Shaun Castle 05 July 2007
Stained glass work to gallery window
The most prominent stained glass work at Foxcroft is to the arched gallery window over the principal staircase, with its detailed naturalistic motifs assumed to pictorialise Haverigg to which the window looks, meaning from the Old Norse, the ridge where oats are grown. The stained glass is in the tradition of Morris, Burnes-Jones and notably Holiday, who had completed his commission at Muncaster Castle just prior to Foxcroft’s construction.
Foxcroft is for sale through Lakes & Country 01228 516409.
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Foxcroft
Shaun Castle 02 July 2007
Foxcroft is a fine example of Victorian domestic architecture, gardens and grounds concealed within a woodland shelterbelt and accessed by a long sweeping rhododendron drive. Located a short distance from the Hodbarrow peninsula, and the coastal habitat of Haverigg Haws, Foxcroft has the Black Combe massif to the north, and the duned beaches of Haverigg to the south, a landscape evocatively described by the poet Norman Nicholson.
A product of late 19th century prosperity, Foxcroft was built in 1884 for John Fox, associate of William Brockbank and deputy at the family-run Bank Springs Brewery, Kirkstanton. Alongside mining and shipping interests, the Brockbank family developed a profitable brewery dynasty, owning between twenty and thirty licenced properties in the Millom area until the 1950’s, when the estate was dispersed upon the death of the last surviving heir, Arthur Fox-Brockbank.
The house is of sandstone construction under a high-pitched slate roof, with tall corniced stacks, timber work to gable ends, pitched dormer, decorative string course, label moulds, ridge tiling and finials. A red sandstone tablet to fenestration has initials JF and the date 1884.
Foxcroft is for sale through Lakes & Country 01228 516409.
William Brockbank
Shaun Castle 28 June 2007
Portrait of William Brockbank from photograph by J. Hargreaves of Millom. Original transcription published by The Whitehaven News, May 19, 1899.
Foxcroft is for sale through Lakes & Country 01228 516409.
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Regency Splendour
Shaun Castle 27 June 2007
Birkby Lodge is a fine example of 19th century polite architecture in the Regency manner, a classic composite of house, interior and gardens surrounded by its own land. Ideally located on the Solway Coast, the property is tucked into a natural prominence with expansive views west to the sea and Galloway ranges of Criffel and Cairnsmore of Fleet, and east to the Lakeland ranges of Skiddaw and Grisedale Pike.
Noted by Pevsner in The Buildings of England: Cumberland and Westmorland (1967), Birkby Lodge is believed to date from 1844, occupying a site of much earlier provenance, being the original seat of the Bigland and Beeby family. Reflecting the maritime prosperity of early 19th century Maryport, Birkby Lodge stands along the promontary of fine mansions and villas overlooking the sea built during this period by merchants, ship builders and sea masters. Thought to have been built for the Scaife family, of Bigland and Beeby descent, the property finally passed out of the ancestral line at the end of the 19th century.
The house is of rendered sandstone construction under a hipped slate roof with deep overhanging eaves. Symmetrically ‘Regency’ in massing and proportion, the three-storey, three-bay house has a part raised basement with side railing entrance, Graeco-Italian portico of unfluted Ionic columns and blank arched window recesses to ground floor. Equally ‘Regency’ in its interior, the elegantly proportioned arrangement of rooms have shuttered sash windows with fine glazing bars, ornate fireplaces, decorative stucco moulding, cornicing and drapery of classical motif.
Carefully restored and furnished in the classical repertoire, the house is augemented by restoration of the formal gardens, and complemented by an ongoing programme of new planting, opening each year to the public as an NGS garden.
Birkby Lodge is for sale through Lakes & Country 01228 516409.
Black Combe
Shaun Castle 25 June 2007
Black Combe from Millom, early 20th century postcard.
The air clarifies. Rain
Has clocked off for the day.
The wind scolds in from Sligo,
Ripping the calico-grey from a pale sky.
Black Combe holds tight
To its tuft of cloud, but over the three-legged island
All the west is shining.
An hour goes by,
And now the starched collars of the eastern pikes
Streak up into a rinse of blue. Every
Inland fell is glinting;
Black Combe alone still hides
Its bold, bleak forehead, balaclava’d out of sight.
Slick fingers of wind
Tease and fidget at wool-end and wisp,
Picking the mist to bits.
Strings and whiskers
Fray off from the cleft hill’s
Bilberried brow, disintegrate, dissolve
Into blue liquidity -
Only a matter of time
Before the white is wholly worried away
And Black Combe starts to earn its name again.
But where, in the west, a tide
Of moist and clear-as-a-vacuum air is piling
High on the corried slopes, a light
Fret and haar of hazy whiteness
Sweats off the cold rock; in a cloudless sky
A cloud emulsifies,
Junkets on sill and dyke.
Wool-end and wisp materialize
Like ectoplasm, are twined
And crocheted to an off-white,
Over-the-lughole hug-me-tight;
And Black Combe’s ram’s-head, butting at the bright
Turfed and brackeny brine,
Gathers its own wool, plucks shadow out of shine.
What the wind blows away
The wind blows back again.
Cloud on Black Combe by Norman Nicholson
From Sea to the West (1981)
Norman Nicholson. Selected Poems 1940-1982, Faber and Faber.
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Victorian Dower House
Shaun Castle 23 April 2007
Panelled Principal Hall with late 19th century cast iron enamelled stove in decorative fireplace surround
Park House is a fine example of mid-Victorian domestic architecture in the villa manner, popularised through the early work of John James Burnet (1814-1901).
Tradition has it that the property was built as a Dower House for the mother-in-law of the 6th Earl of Selkirk, Lord Daer, Dumbar James Douglas, of St Mary’s Isle, Kirkcudbright, heir of the illustrious Fifth Earl, Thomas Douglas, who founded the Red River Settlement in Canada, and Lady Selkirk, Jean Wedderburn, who effectively ran the north American operations of the Hudson’s Bay Company (1815 -1819). Prominent in the intellectual life of the time, friends of the Selkirk’s included Scott and Burns, both frequent visitors to St Mary’s Isle. Lord Daer had no heir, and the estate passed to his sister Lady Isabella Hope, whose husband was Hon. Charles Hope, who briefly occupied Park House in the 1890’s. Ownership of Park House finally passed out of the dynastic line in the early 20th century.
Believed to have been built between 1842 and 1866, the house is of granite construction under a hipped high-pitched double slate roof with sweeping dormers, high chimney stacks, rusticated quoins and label mounds to fenestration. Rectilinear in plan with a projecting asymmetrical wing at right angles, the massing has two fully unified front elevations, and with the absence of ornament, a design more villa than country house.
The original layout has a simplicity and clarity of proportion, being a classic composite of principal public and private bedroom accommodation off a central spinal hall to ground and first floors, complemented by garret service accommodation to second floor and secondary service quarters, liberally interspersed with closets. Later additions include a two-storey service tower of brick construction with weatherboarded outshut to east elevation.
The house retains much of its original fabric, including panelling, sashes and fireplaces.
Park House is for sale through Lakes & Country 01228 516409.
Two informative essays on Lord and Lady Selkirk in Manitoba, The Quest for a Usable Founder: Lord Selkirk and Manitoba Historians, 1856-1923 and Lady Selkirk and the Fur Trade, are available online from The Manitoba Historical Society.
New Naturalist Series
- Galloway and the Borders
Shaun Castle 22 April 2007
NN’s distinctive dust-jacket design by Robert Gillmor
Conceived during wartime, the New Naturalist has provided expert accounts of Britain’s natural history for 60 years. Each volume in the series is a themed exploration of one particular subject, encyclopaedic in its breadth of knowledge, and beautifully illustrated with colour plates.
The latest volume Galloway and the Borders is a fitting tribute to its author, Derek Ratcliffe, who died shortly after completing the manuscript in 2005.
Ratcliffe’s first-hand account of this relatively unknown region is startling in its observations, at once a lament for the wealth of nature lost in our lifetimes, a celebration of a beautiful upland landscape, and an attempt to conserve it, in a rapidly changing climate.
Drifting masses of cumulus casting shadows over vast desolate hills carpeted in heather, block screes of grey granite and broad watersheds and peatlands—these are the abiding images which have made Ratcliffe’s images conservation icons—many of which liberally illustrate this volume, none more so than the images of vast waves of conifers breaking over the uplands of Kircudbrightshire.
Whilst Ratcliffe casts a broadstroke over the region, his real strength is illuminating the particular, whether its a ground nest of peregrine, a rare pyramidal bugle, a stonecrop on shore shingle, a waxwing in search of berries, or a young golden eagle feeding small young - the region is brought to life in all its affirmative diversity.
Published by HarperCollins
£45 (hardback) £25 (paperback)
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Victorian Lake House
Shaun Castle 15 March 2007
Last property on left
Tucked into the picturesque Ullswater Valley by Glenridding pier, Crag Close is a classic slate-stone house with characteristic gabled elevations, rusticated quoins, projecting courses of through stones and cylindrical chimney stacks in the vernacular manner. As its name implies, Crag Close is set against a backdrop of terraced rock and fellside, with garden planted to RHS standard, elevated viewing point to Lake, and entertaining terrace off principal accommodation.
The house is fully restored and immaculately finished.
Crag Close is for sale through Lakes & Country 01228 516409.
Threapland Hall - Terra Contentionis
Shaun Castle 16 January 2007
An evocative site of medieval provenance, Threapland Hall occupies a fold in the lay of the land above the village green, appearing from its Anglo-Saxon name of threap, ‘to dispute’, to have been at some early date a ‘bone of contention’, the terra contentionis. Although the nature of the original dispute is unknown, it is cognisant that the Manor of Threapland emerged as a ‘capita’ or residence of strategic import in the ensuing wars with Scotland, being associated first with Alan, lord of Allerdale and Ketel, his steward, and later, Michael de Hercla and William de Mulcaster, in the reign of Edward II. Granted to Henry de Malton in 1316, the manor passed through various prominent families, including the Skelton’s in 1392, the Salkeld’s of Whitehall in 1623, the Gregs of Mirehouse, to Roger Williamson Esq. in 1767. Affirming its status, Jackson’s ‘A Reminiscence of Threapland Hall’ was printed in 1694.
Threapland Hall is believed to date from the early 16th century, with probable origins as a fortified tower house, though the extant hall is more likely to be of transitional type (Perriam and Robinson, The Medieval Fortified Buildings of Cumbria, 1998). The rectangular form of deep roughcast walls, three storeys in height and connected at each level by a newel staircase set within one corner, and a garderobe at the other, is consistent with the period (Brunskill, Traditional Buildings of Cumbria, 2002).
As early as the 18th Century, Threapland Hall appears to have lost its manorial eminence and became a tenanted farmhouse, its remaining 167 acres being let then finally sold by Roger Williamson Esq. in 1802, passing thereafter through the farming families of the Holidays and Slacks until 1931, and marking a typically accretive period of alterations to the earlier hall. The medieval and Tudor hearths, fireplaces, doorways, windows and garderobe were blocked or concealed, and roughcast walls rendered. Further remodelling included the addition of a two storey wing and staircase tower during the 19th century. By 1967, the pre-eminence of the hall was lost and unrecorded in Pevsner’s Buildings of England: Cumberland and Westmorland.
With new ownership, the hall has been subject to thorough and sensitive restoration, revealing much of its original form. Of particular note, interventions to the fabric have recovered the previously sealed arched fireplaces to sitting room and kitchen, a Tudor fireplace and garderobe closet to second bedroom, and a Tudor doorframe with ribbed mouldings to master bedroom. Interventions to the roughcast walling include reinstatement of previously blocked window apertures to elevations and recovery of a former entrance to ground floor through retraction of partial banking.
Landscaped gardens, separate bank barn dating from the 16th century and a former coach house complete the picturesque complex.
Threapland Hall is for sale through Lakes & Country 01228 516409. Links to this post
Cast Iron Decoration
Shaun Castle 15 January 2007
The aesthetic value of cast iron decoration in the Victorian period, illustrated in the context of Tallantire Hall [A Grade II Listed Lamp-Post, posted May 16, 2006], is given the full survey treatment by E. Graeme Robertson in Cast Iron Decoration. A World Survey. An authoritative work of reference, Cast Iron traces the flowering of ironwork forms in the 19th century, and compiles the variety and richness of cast iron decoration, its national variations, its relationship to architecture, and its contribution to the aesthetics of buildings.
Cast Iron Decoration. A World Survey by E. Graeme Robertson and Joan Roberson.
Thames & Hudson. Published May 2007. £35.00 ISBN 978 0 500 232545
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