Events for OBR members: still places left on these two events!
Friday 17 May Recording Day at The Stables, Cogges Manor Farm. Trial Time Team-type event, as the venue will be open to the public while we are recording, notice board updated regularly with progress, findings. E-mail flyer will be circulated, or email secretary@obr.org.uk to register interest.
Saturday 8 June Education Day: Down on the Farm at Cogges Manor Farm looking at the range of buildings on site, includes an introduction to measuring and recording a simple building. Open to OBR members and public. 10.00–4.30, £30 including lunch, booking through Cogges, www.cogges.org.uk, tel. 01993 772692, e-mail: ops@cogges.org.uk.
what's in our newsletter, The Oxon Recorder, issue 53:
Scotch Notches Further thoughts and questions
OBR trip to Hook Norton Brewing, tasting, eating, touring
More Lost Buildings Could this be a rare church house?
Italy October 2012 The first ever OBR overseas field trip
OBR reports Clarification of copyright status
Important new books on Vernacular Buildings Local buildings, local authors
A Taster from the OBR trip to Hook Norton, Saturday 6 October 2012:
Assembling at the Brewery, we were divided into small groups for a guided tour and beer tasting. The tall building illustrated (photo: Heather Horner) was built at the end of the 19th C to facilitate the progression of processes using gravity, so to reach the top there were lots of stairs for us to climb. We admired the fine horizontal steam engine for pumping local borehole water to the top of the tower is still in situ, and in good working order, though sadly economics preclude its regular use.
Over lunch at the Sun Inn, we were introduced to our guide Donald Radcliffe for the afternoon walking tour of the village. And it technically is still a village, even though it stretches for a mile from east to west. We started our tour in the former market place opposite the large medieval church, moved south into Down End, across a stream which marked a manor boundary into Southrop, skirted the village via East End, viewed the giant piers which formerly supported a railway to the north, and returned along Chapel Street and High Street to the church.
This circuit embraced many of the features of the village, the ‘Ends’ representing the open aspect of small greens and squatters cottages, the railway representing the 19th C industrialisation of ironstone quarrying which was roasted locally and exported by rail, and Chapel Street representing the long tradition of dissent in the village, with up to six different sects having meeting houses at various times.
One feature of the small greens were the ‘tites’, water supplies in the form of springs. Groups of cottages have evolved around these sites which occur at hollows in the landscape. The geology has evidently affected the topography of the village as well as the economy, and a wide variety of stone types are evident in the buildings, much of it extracted in the immediate neighbourhood of the building. The earlier cottages frequently used an attractive decorative banding of ironstone and mudstone, and a deposit of ironstone full of fossil shells added textural interest in many walls.
Local vernacular features included half-round external stair towers, tiny windows high in the gable end to light an attic space, and thin horizontal glazing bars in cottage windows.
Download the newsletter here, issue 53.
OBR's objectives
- - advance education and promote research on the buildings of Oxfordshire
- - encourage the recording of buildings
- - create a publicly accessible repository of records
What we do:
- - provide practical training in building recording
- - publish a newsletter
- - develop an archive of building records within the Oxfordshire Record Office
- - help and encourage local history societies and groups
You can help:
- - add your records of historic buildings in Oxfordshire to our archive and make them accessible for research purposes
- - tell us about historic buildings where recording work is needed – for example if the building is under threat or is undocumented.