Three weeks into the restoration of the North Wing of Combermere Abbey, the building is dry and secure under its massive superstructure of hundreds and hundreds of scaffolding poles and a coat of flame-proof plastic sheeting. The covering has cost a large amount of money but it is money well spent; it allows the work to continue regardless of the weather, and the scaffolding – all 70 tonnes of it – itself provides invaluable corridors round all three sides, and on four levels. It’s also a very safe way of working; if anything falls from the exterior, it falls within the sheeting, and the structure itself is so strong that wide, shallow aluminium steps are supported on the north side – so workmen aren’t going up and down potentially dangerous ladders. A further advantage is that although the builders are playing pop music on the radio – as they are required to do by ancient custom – it can’t be heard outside the plastic.

With the roof now removed completely the building resembles a massive, three dimensional jigsaw puzzle – albeit one that has been created at different times across many centuries, and one which is rotten and crumbling. Many questions are being raised by what is been uncovered, and it will be some time before all the evidence can be assessed and will have answers. One query regards floor levels; identifying the original levels of the different floors takes some thinking about, and in one area a floor seems to have been raised several feet by the addition of a number of huge beams – possibly re-used from elsewhere – simply being stacked one upon the other.

What we do see throughout is an astonishingly high level of rot. Some of the very earliest timbers are solid, but the other timbers, no matter their size or their age, are crumbling away – and have obviously been doing so for very many years. It is very common to see vertical timbers which have rotted from the base and no longer reach the surfaces they once stood upon.

Only a dendrochronology survey will finally answer the questions about the age of the different timbers, but it seems logical that the larger, older timbers in the North Wing date from the middle of the Sixteenth century. After Abbot John Massey surrendered the Abbey to Thomas Cromwell’s agents in 1539 it was granted to Sir George Cotton, but the work of demolishing the ecclesiastical buildings and the building of a private house was undertaken by his son, Sir Richard Cotton. This was complete by the middle of the mid-1560s. The new house had five steep gables on the west-facing facade, and was symmetrical. There was two more gables to the south, of which at least one was of the same height, but they were set back slightly. The house was two storeys high, but small windows within the gables suggest that there were attic windows.

Throughout Cheshire and Shropshire the structure of timber-framed houses of this period have survived very well.  In many cases the exposed timbers were crassly tarred or painted black, to give the ‘magpie’ effect which for a long time was thought to be original and authentic.  We now know that such was not the case, and sealing the timbers was a bad idea; where they were left exposed they weathered to a very pleasing dark silver colour, and hardened naturally. In many cases timbers of this age and older seem to have almost petrified, and are exceptionally dense and strong.

It seems likely that encasing the house within the gothick outer shell stopped air from circulating, and allowed damp to take hold. The horizontal distance between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth structures varies considerably. Where the newer exterior projects forward that is a deception, and it is not a reflection of the earlier building. At these points the gap between the two can be as much as eighteen inches.

A relatively small number of large timbers was used in the 1814 – 1821 re-building. Laths were then built over this frame and ashlar was applied and scored to give an appearance of stone blocks (as already noted). These laths were both thin and flimsy, and a softwood seems to have been used. Where architectural changes were made, such as where window openings were altered,  a mixture of wood and brick was used. This was not meant to ever be seen, and it is not hard to imagine that the builders were only too aware of the fact. The workmanship seems hurried at best and shoddy at worst. In some cases – such as in Tudor quatrefoils – the infilling is nothing more than mortar.

It is not hard to imagine that in the damp atmosphere of low-lying south Cheshire decay set in fairly soon. We have to remind ourselves that the ‘gothicisation’ is in fact less than two centuries old, and very many buildings of that age – built with better materials and more care – have survived very well.

There is also the likelihood of subsidence. The house is on a plateau, but from the west front the land falls away gently to the lake; at least, it does now – there was no water in front of the house in Tudor times. There were two lakes and the gap between the two was immediately to the west of the south. They were joined to create the current, 150-acre lake, in the Nineteenth century. The Tudor house incorporated the Abbot’s Lodgings – a late-medieval manorial hall in all but name – just off-centre, so the position of the Tudor house was dictated by the existing footprint of that room. The house has no cellars or foundations, and given the huge weight of the Tudor oak beams, and then the gothick overcoat, it might well have settled unevenly.

One of the gothick pediments at the very top of the house, on the west front. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect this to be made of stone!

What were designed to look like stone details were made up of layers of wood, built up to give horizontal depth. The disfigurement is from foliage clinging to the outer face.

 

This might seem like a post purely aimed at people who have a thing for scaffolding poles, but in fact it is a very exciting part of the restoration of the North Wing. It was a filthy job getting the old and rotten scaffolding down, and – crucially – no part of the Wing actually fell down while it was left unsupported. Now a huge new frame of scaffolding has been erected, complete with a pitched roof which will be covered over so that once work has begun it can continue whatever the weather. It also provides safe working conditions for the  restoration team at every level of the building, and of course the workmen can walk unhindered round all three sides of the building – which is a great advantage.

The  structure is seven stories high, and in a curious way it reflects the timber structure beneath the gothick facing. It is basically a cat’s cradle of vertical and horizontal supports, with diagonal cross-pieces to give rigidity.

We have been asked why the Georgian facade, which is ‘only’ two hundred years old, shouldn’t be stripped away completely, to reveal the late-Tudor structure beneath.  That is of course a fascinating thought, and it would great to see an x-ray image of the four hundred year-old building. It would probably look very much like the 1730 painting of the Abbey –  which can be seen by clicking here – but there would have been major structural changes. The windows have been enlarged, particularly on the first floor, and the roofline, which consisted of five gables on the west front, has been regularised.

The larger answer to the question is that each phase of the Abbey’s life is a crucial part of its history, and the Nineteenth century re-facing is as important as the Sixteenth and Seventeenth century  structure. It is a development; a continuous work in progress going right back to 1133 – just like the history on England, indeed.

The North Wing seen from the lake side. It will not be long before this entire facade is once again a single, glorious sight.

Looking  from the north; the gable in the scaffolding can be seen. As can the portaloo (not listed, to the best of our knowledge).

Seen from the north west. No one thought to count how many scaffolding poles have been used.

Looking east, with the lake behind us.

From the north east. The main entrance to the Abbey is on the left. The three gothick arches are all that’s left of the Ballroom Wing which Viscount Combermere had built for the visit of the duke of Wellington in 1819. The Francis Frith photo below, taken in 1906, shows the Wellington wing on the extreme left, so it seems that the three extant arches are the original early-Nineteenth century windows – complete with piers around the central archway, which formed the gothick arch above the first floor.

Towards the end of February 2014 (on a rare sunny day, after six weeks of rain) the North Wing was largely denuded for the first time in more than half a generation. This provided an opportunity to closely examine the structure of that end of the Abbey, and study the relationship between the five hundred year-old timber structure and the late Georgian gothicisation.

Taste had changed a lot in the two hundred years between the reigns of James I and George IV, and what had once been of the northern English vernacular tradition, and would be considered utterly charming today, was out of date and no longer suitable for polite society. Architectural fashion wanted to look much further back than the late-Tudor and early Stuart reigns – to a tidied-up reflection of the styles found at the height of the Middle Ages.

An opportunity to photograph the North Wing in its full nakedness was missed when the old, rotten scaffolding was taken down, but of course the new scaffolding had to be erected as rapidly as possible. It doesn’t hide the facade anything like as much as the old, shrouded scaffolding did however. The photo above is of the north face of the North Wing, where the decay is most obvious.

When the old timber-framed, late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth century, house was gothicised in the early Nineteenth century, a very basic lath frame was built around the older structure, supported by larger timbers where required. The laths were made of softwood, and the whole thing looks as if it was done in a hurry and to a budget. Baron Combermere (as he was at the time) began the gothic overcoat in 1814, but a large amount of the work was carried out in his absence, between 1817 and 1820,  while he was the Governor of Barbados and commander of the British forces in the West Indies. One wonders if the work was approved in his absence. Ashlar was then applied directly over the laths. The decay in the original timbers probably began fairly on, and had become catastrophic by the middle of the Twentieth century. The Wing was abandoned by the family in 1952, and the long Wellingtonian North Wing was demolished in 1975.
The deeply-set arches on the west face were created by stepping out the surrounding areas, and these stand away from the original timber face by some eighteen inches or two feet (as can be seen on the pictures above). This created sizeable, completely enclosed, cavities. There is very little structural relationship between the two facades.

A full-height brick pier on the northern face of the North Wing seems not have been keyed to the brickwork of the main structure at all. There may be some keying further in, but you can put your hand in this gap and find only mortar.

The ashlar was geometrically scored (rather well) to give the impression of the building either being made of stone blocks, or at least faced with them. This is a complete deceit. Where the ashlar has fallen away, mostly due to weather conditions but not helped by movement in the main structure, the fact that it most resembles a set – as in a theatre or a film.

This area of the east-facing wall shows, to the right of the drainpipe, is where the join between the main house and the Wellington Wing was bricked up. The photograph would have been taken from within the ballroom before 1975. The 1970s bricks meet the much older bricks, seen on the left. Subsidence within the North Wing has probably caused the crack to the immediate left of the downspout. The plastered area on the right has been scored to take a new facing of ashlar to match the early-Nineteenth century material.

All is now revealed regarding this little run of south-facing, extended quatrefoil gothic windows, high up on the south-facing return of the north wing. The tryptych looked like stone from a distance, but it is in fact wood – and very badly corroded wood at that. As you can see, a piece of iron has been inserted below,  at some time – across an original oak beam – to reinforce what was probably an already difficult situation.

This is a run of once-matching windows on an opposite face (north-facing). With the scored ashlar giving the impression of being stone, it is easy to be fooled into thinking that the fenestration is stone too.

The ashlar was applied in two coats directly over both brickwork and timber lathes. It is around 10 mm thick, and the first coat was more thickly applied than the second, outer coat. Water trapped in this coating might well have started rotting the lathes soon after application.

The reverse of this sample shows that the ashlar clung well to the brick. When this piece came away it didn’t fall from the outer surface but brought some of the brick and a considerable depth of the mortar with it. it now makes a good paperweight.

A selection of shots from the short visit of Orbital Pictures to the Combermere Abbey. It shows the restoration project underway.