Building Stories

I've been meaning to write for a while about buildings in this part of the Borders. We went to Pembridge yesterday for some organic cider and I asked the cider man - who was trying to get us to drink lots of cider from big glasses - about the small barn they sell the cider from. I mentioned some time ago that the 'shop' is a dark wood and brick building reeking of apples and alcohol, the wood worn smooth and silvered with age or animals. Thirty years ago it was a granary a few miles away but had become redundant. The Dunkertons wanted something suitably quirky, practical and agricultural, so they bought it and took it apart, beam by beam, and rebuilt it at the cider mill. The old wooden beams are nearly all original but the brick infill was another rescue job, a skip or two full of what look like early Victorian bricks which they used to pack between the beams and struts. The building looks as though it has been there forever and is far older than the more modern cider mill buildings behind it.

Driving home I realised that the older more wobbly black-and-white buildings here look as though they have grown out of the ground. Pembridge has a long street of these elderly and unsteady houses which lean together for support. My favourite pub here is the New Inn in Pembridge, proudly dating from the 1300s (although the more sober county archaeologists could find nothing older than the 1600s. Still...) It sits on an island site with the old village market hall behind it, a lumpy growth of black and white buildings built over and rebuilt over for at least four centuries. It always makes me think of Tolkien's pub The Prancing Pony in Bree, a restaurant and hotel and village alehouse and stables all in one, the old centre of village life. And this morning we saw a cottage for sale that was probably at least three or four hundred years old. It was originally three farm cottages that were knocked into one house many years ago. They would have been two-room cottages, one ground floor and one upper room. The original beams had been painted thick black over the centuries - apparently a Victorian idea to repel woodworm - and curved sensuously through the white rooms. The house smelled faintly damp, like a cottage on the first day of a holiday.

The history of these buildings is buried beneath later additions, but many of these ordinary cottages - like this one, perhaps dating from the 1760s - have old hearts which have been added to over centuries. It makes me realise again how old commonplace rural human landscapes can be.