Heritage houses: Elham

Kent’s landscape, from downland to woods, allowed a variety of architectural styles to flourish, says Roger Hunt, many of which are on show in Elham.

Although an abundance of orchards and hop gardens led Kent to be known as the Garden of England, the county’s natural beauty stems from the diversity of its landscape. The rich topography of valleys and ridges running east-west across the county was formed when the exposed clay of the Wealden dome was eroded, leaving behind chalk, green sand and sandstone.

Through the resulting cliffs, escarpments, downs, marshes and ancient woodlands are woven a network of droveways and sunken lanes which have seen millennia of human activity. Alongside are the remains of ancient barrows, Iron Age forts, Roman villas and more than 17,000 listed buildings.

Symbolic of Kent are the circular oast houses with their distinctive conical roofs designed to dry hops for brewing beer, but these are far from alone when it comes to rich vernacular architecture. The countryside is dotted with mellow barns and farmsteads, proud village churches and simple farm labourer’s cottages and manor houses. Thankfully, the underlying geology has provided a splendid variety of good building materials so the walls and roofs are alive with local delights such as flint, chalk, mottled ragstone, timber and terracotta-coloured clay.

This legacy is evident in the picturesque village of Elham at the heart of the Kent Downs. Here, set in a valley between Folkestone and Canterbury, brick, timber framing, stone, weatherboarding and tile hanging collide in a glorious celebration of the Kentish style. Today Elham has a large number of listed buildings. Many were built using lime resulting from the local chalk pit together with products of the brick and tile works which existed within the village until the early 1900s.

ABOVE (left-right): Hear the bells ring out on Friday practice evenings and Sundays, from the parish church of St Mary the Virgin; the tile-hung pub, the Kings Arms, on The Square has served villagers for many years; an elaborate canopy shelters the door frame of an 18th-century house.

Weatherboarding and tile hanging
With timber and clay both plentiful in Kent, it is no surprise that, when it came to protecting the walls of buildings from the sometimes harsh weather, weatherboarding and tiles were frequently used. Aesthetically they provide deep texture, rhythmic shadows and colour.

Weatherboarding was originally a purely practical and workaday solution for finishing walls, particularly of timber-framed structures such as agricultural and industrial buildings like mills and barns. The timber used was freshly felled and selected to ensure that it was free of imperfections. Sawn to size by a sawyer, the elm or oak boards were left waney, with bark on one edge, and were generally fixed to overlap horizontally, originally fixed using pegs rather than nails.

Later softwood boards were used and weatherboarding became fashionable for domestic buildings in Georgian times. The boards take many forms. Some are feather edged and simply overlap, others are tongued and grooved so that they slot together. Shiplap cladding has rebates cut on each edge to enable neighbouring boards to fit over one another.

Weatherboarding was viewed as an economic cladding material so was never used on grand buildings. Elm and oak boards were often left untreated but softwoods required a preservative. Sometimes creosote was used, and in coastal districts and for agricultural buildings, tar or pitch was employed as protection; more often weatherboarding was painted white or cream.

Walls hung with clay tiles first appeared in the late 17th century. The practice is sometimes referred to as ‘weather-tiling’ because it affords protection against the elements. While plain roofing tiles frequently served for tile hanging, in many cases the lower edges of the tiles were shaped with a wide variety of patterns from fish tails to hammer heads to create decorative effects. The tiles were generally hung on timber battens and sometimes fixed by wooden pegs or later nails, in some cases directly into the mortar of brick walls.

ABOVE (left-right): Elham is surrounded by chalk downland countryside and in 1940 residents had a bird’s eye view of the Battle of Britain; a large Victorian house with continental-style shutters.

Period highlights
From medieval times trading took place in the square at the heart of Elham and in 1251 it was granted a market by the future Edward I, confirming its status as a small town and making it the main centre of trade in the area between the city of Canterbury and the port of Hythe.

Until the mid 18th century the market thrived and it became known for the quality of its leather and hides but, by around 1830, it had declined and the old market booths were made into cottages and finally demolished in 1940.

Today, two-storey brick houses front the square on three sides while on the fourth, facing the tile-hung Kings Arms, is the Grade I listed Church of St Mary the Virgin. At each corner are narrow streets leading to other parts of the village. v Elham retains many of its late medieval and Tudor buildings including the Manor House in The Row and King Post in St Mary’s Road. Both originated in the 15th century as timber-framed Wealden houses with a central double-height hall between jettied end bays for domestic and service rooms on two floors.

The Rose and Crown also contains the remnants of a 15th-century hall house but it was re-fronted in the 19th century. One of the most significant timber-framed buildings is the Grade II* Abbot’s Fireside Hotel. Originally cottages, it dates from the early 17th century. The timbers are now black, contrasting with the white of the infill panels.

Georgian architecture is also present here. The Well House is a timber-framed building re-fronted with an almost symmetrical three-bay rendered facade and has an arched shell-hooded doorway. Some 19th-century buildings, like the cottages off Vicarage Lane or the barn behind the Rose and Crown, are faced with softwood weatherboarding.

ABOVE (left-right): Weatherboarding was designed to protect homes from the driving wind and rain; Dating back to the early 1600s, the Abbot’s Fireside Hotel is now Grade II* listed.

Visit Roger Hunt's website at huntwriter.com

WORDS ROGER HUNT PHOTOGRAPHS HUGH PALMER (COURTESY OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL VILLAGES OF ENGLAND)
Featured in the September 2011 issue of Period Living