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After this introduction, there were three presentations on the subject of
Vernacular
Architecture
: two speakers focussed on the North West of England and the other on Wales.
Peter Messenger made the first presentation of the three.
Messenger began by expressing his sadness at the loss of Ron Brunskill and underlining the
architectural historian’s importance to our understanding of vernacular buildings. Messenger
had graduated with an MA Vernacular Architecture, from the University of Manchester,
where he had studied under Brunskill.
In his career Messenger has worked for various local authorities and other bodies: at one
point he worked on an extensive survey of Clay Buildings on the Solway Plain, for Oxford
Archaeology North, which resulted in an English Heritage funded programme. Messenger’s
presentation was entitled:
Cumbrian Vernacular
.
He started by addressing the ‘cliché’ that vernacular buildings “seem to grow out of the
ground.” In Cumbria’s there were many ‘useful buildings stones’ and the county’s vernacular
architecture had largely been constructed using such materials: since they were relatively
cheap and easy to obtain. So the buildings were built using local sandstone, gritstone and
slate that had been buried under boulder clay. This was what vernacular architecture was all
about, Messenger said, using building materials that were close at hand including the earth
itself. He referred to Brunskill’s vernacular threshold and said that there were few remaining
peasant’s houses or early houses.
Slate had been used in vernacular building: to construction the walls as well being a roofing
material.
Sandstone had been used widely in Cumbria, although the quality tended to vary and where
it was used in exposed positions on a building the material suffered from severe weathering.
The walls tended to have been lime washed, even when the sandstone that had been used
appeared to have even good quality, and this meant some of the detail was hidden. The roofs
were often stone flags and the coping stone and ridges were in sandstone.
Cobble walls were common in the centre of the county. Low House farm, in Newlands Valley,
was cited as a typical example, where the house had been rendered but the barn had not: the
barn was built out of boulders and cobble with slate used to level the courses.
In Carlisle many timber framed buildings had been constructed, in the Middle Ages. In the
14th and 15
th
century, however, there had been several fires and many buildings had been
destroyed. Some fires had been caused by Scots, but others by locals. For example, in 1392
one man had sold a house and his son felt as if he had lost his inheritance, so the son had
burned the house down.
The Guildhall had been built c1400, after a fire which had destroyed a third of the buildings
in the city. Messenger said it was the only substantial timber framed building that had
survived. Although the Guildhall was one building, the roof had been built using two distinct
methods of construction: one part had deep bays and raking queen post trusses, whereas the