Heritage Houses: Hawkshead

The historic town of Hawkshead in Cumbria, peppered with atmospheric 17th- and 18th-century buildings, is built to withstand all that winter can throw at it. Roger Hunt describes how traditional building materials, such as stone and roughcast render, make interiors as cosy as can be.

Cumbria is a giant’s land. Carved by the earth’s forces and the glaciers of the Ice Age, mountains and valleys come together in a rugged, watery embrace. This is a landscape of drama and romance where the buildings stand with an air of solid dependability. Reflecting the vernacular, they are composed of ancient materials left in the wake of the great ice sheets.

Although predominantly a rural landscape, industries once thrived in Cumbria. Quarries provided stone and slate, much of it exported around the world. The presence of limestone saw lime-burning for use in buildings and agriculture on a large scale while, from beneath the fells, copper, lead and iron were extracted.

In the 15th and 16th centuries numerous defensive pele towers (pronounced ‘peel’) were built when raiders from across the border with Scotland were menacing the area. Unique to the north of England, these small square or oblong stone buildings were designed to withstand short sieges and had walls up to 10ft thick. Defences of a different kind were used in the village of Hawkshead. Here the narrow alleyways or ‘ginnels’, some today still with their cobbles, were constructed to defend the village from marauders.

ABOVE (left-right): In the Middle Ages Hawkshead was a centre for sheep farming and flocks grazed on the windswept pastures of the Cumbrian fells; This sundial at the old Grammar School was erected in memory of Edwin Sandys who began its construction in 1585.

Standing at the head of Esthwaite Water, the small town of Hawkshead today seems far removed from such times; but the ruggedness of the landscape and the lowering skies are echoed in its sombre, grey, slate roofed buildings. Below the roofs, many of the walls show the raw limestone or slate-stone of their construction; countless others are clad in white or colourwashed roughcast which brings a freshness to the tangle of streets, squares and yards which thread between the closely packed buildings.

Traditional walling textures
Decay and a tendency to hack off the coverings of old buildings means that many original coatings of roughcast have been lost. In his book, The Pattern of English Buildings, Alec Clifton-Taylor illustrates this with a reference to the late-15th century church at Hawkshead that, in 1875, had its roughcast overcoat ‘heartlessly stripped off’. He explains that: ‘Its rubblestone walls formerly bore a covering of roughcast, which was whitewashed, so that Wordsworth, in 1788, was able to picture ... the snow-white church upon her hill.’

ABOVE (left-right): Residents of Hawkshead are familiar with the warren of cobbled streets, one of which is named after the village’s most famous son, William Wordsworth; A local house with a roughcast exterior render.

In the Lake District roughcast is sometimes known as ‘wet-dash’ and in Scotland and northern England as ‘harling’. It was often used to cover poor quality stone, brick or other materials and is composed of lime and sand mixed with pea gravel and thrown on the face of the building. It was commonly used in exposed locations on the west side of the country as its increased surface area serves to maximise evaporation and protect against driving rain. Roughcast is traditionally applied or ‘cast’ by hand. The ingredients are mixed together to a sloppy, porridge-like consistency and thrown on using a dashing trowel in an action akin to hitting a tennis ball. It provides the ideal breathable coating for a solid walled structure and, when finished with a limewash, has a sublimely different aesthetic to its modern cement render and paint counterpart.

The limewashed roughcast finish is also a dramatic contrast to the unrendered, locally quarried light grey carboniferous limestone and darker grey to purple and near black hues of the slate-stone. These stones are laid in courses with large quoin stones at the corners.

ABOVE (left-right): The office of Hawkshead solicitor William Heelis, who married Beatrix Potter in 1913. It’s now a gallery dedicated to Beatrix Potter; The lush pastures of the low Cumbrian fells, which become more inhospitable as the land rises.

Meanwhile the texture of the walls is further enhanced by the deep shadows between the courses since the stones appear to be laid dry because the lime mortar is deeply recessed in the joints. A further detail of these walls is the protruding slabs of stones placed to act as ‘drip’ courses above windows and doors to prevent rainwater ingress.

Village highlights
The town centre of Hawkshead is a conservation area, encompassing streets such as The Square, Flag Street and Red Lion Yard. There are some 42 listed buildings to admire, mostly dating from the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and many are owned by the National Trust. Often they are on irregularly shaped plots, or have to accommodate the alleyways, so some have cutaway corners, external staircases or overhanging upper storeys.

Occupying the highest point in the village is the Grade I listed church of St Michael and All Angels. With wonderful views it was founded in Norman times, and was restored in the Elizabethan era.

The old Hawkshead Grammar School, Grade II* and now a museum, stands at the foot of the path up to the church. The school was founded in 1585 by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, and was rebuilt in its present form in 1675. It has seen a number of headmasters in its long history, one of whom was the brother of Fletcher Christian, famous for his part in the mutiny on HMS Bounty.

At the village’s heart is a public square and the town hall but Hawkshead’s earlier history is linked to the founding of Furness Abbey in 1123 when it served as an administrative centre. All that remains of the Abbey’s estate today is the 15th-century Courthouse, north of the village, which is now in the hands of the National Trust.

ABOVE (left-right):The 15th-century Hawkshead Courthouse was given to the National Trust in 1932; The limewashed interior of the parish church of St Michael and All Angels – Grade I listed it has painted murals dating from the 17th and 18th centuries.

Hawkshead is a huge draw for fans of William Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter. Having been born at nearby Cockermouth, Wordsworth came to Hawkshead at the age of eight to be educated at the Grammar School from 1778 to 1783 and his name can still be seen carved into a desk.

Beatrix Potter lived nearby, at Hill Top, Near Sawrey, and married local solicitor William Heelis whose office was in the 17th-century building in Hawkshead which is now the National Trust’s Beatrix Potter Gallery. Potter was a determined preserver of her beloved Lake District and a great believer in the aims of the fledgling National Trust, bequeathing her numerous farms and land to the Trust in 1943.

Visit Roger Hunt's website at huntwriter.com

WORDS ROGER HUNT PHOTOGRAPHS HUGH PALMER (Courtesy of The Most Beautiful Villages of England); GOLAKES.CO.UK (golakes.co.uk); DAVE WILLIS; NTPL/ALEX BLACK; NTPL/JOHN HANNAVY
Featured in the April 2011 issue of Period Living