The “post and panel” work, the “magpie” style, to use the sobriquet sometimes familiarly applied to it, so plentifully strewn throughout its length and breadth, does certainly bring a very distinct contribution to the picturesqueness of the Palatinate, whose now fertile plain, studded with these timber structures, is where buildings of this traditional type most do congregate. Indeed, it is a question whether they do not serve to connote Cheshire quite as much as that prosaic product the cheese, which has made the name and fame of the county a household word! Another proof of the identification of the county with the kind of buildings under consideration is that when a building is referred to as being in the “Cheshire style,” the description is always understood as implying a half-timbered erection, and at the same time goes to show that its designer has been paying his tribute of imitation to and admiration of the manner and method, which formerly was so felicitously employed in several parts of the country, but in none more extensively than in Cheshire—a fact happily still capable of demonstration in the frequency of surviving examples.
Many a piquant touch of contrasted colour does the landscape owe to these delightful buildings, one of whose attractive qualities resides in just that faculty of focussing the eye they so eminently possess. Here it may be a cluster of quaint cottages, or perhaps a single cottage of comely proportions nestling in some sequestered spot, or one of those moated granges or sturdy farmsteads that dot the countryside; or there it may be a more elaborate and ornate example, some “stately home,” attesting the skilful handiwork of the faber lignarius who centuries ago followed his calling with such excellent and enduring results, his fitly and soundly framing of the building together having enabled it to withstand the action of time and weather—if so be by good fortune it managed to escape that more fatal enemy fire, whose ravages are no doubt responsible for the disappearance of many an architectural treasure, which, had a more resistant material been employed, might have survived to shed additional lustre on the county, already so renowned for its half-timbered treasures.
The explanation of the prevalence of this species of building, and of Cheshire having become par excellence a centre for it, is, of course, to be found in the fact of the county having possessed an abundance of raw material in the “thick trees” ready to the hand of the hewer.
In his Story of some English Shires, as told by the late Dr. Mandell Creighton, speaking of the physical features of Cheshire, he says: “Three great forests covered much of the surface of the ground. From Chester to the sea stretched the forest of Wirral, from the Mersey to the Dee extended the forest of Delamere, and the forest of Macclesfield formed an impenetrable barrier between Cheshire and Derbyshire”; and he adds a remark not altogether irrelevant to the matter in hand: “There was so little agriculture that the men of Cheshire used to leave their homes and serve as harvesters in districts where corn was grown, in the same way as did Irish labourers in our own days.” These copious sources of timber have long since disappeared, and the once afforested area has given place to those broad acres under cultivation now covering the county.
In Domesday Book, under Cestrescire, these forests are often referred to, but we are left to conjecture what were the trees growing in them; doubtless there was the ash and the elm, and also “the monarch oak, sole king of forests all,” ready to hand for those who, in the elder days of the carpenter’s art, erected the dwellings from which those later buildings now being considered are either lineal or collateral descendants. The earliest extant of these may only carry us back some 500 years, but this had not only Norman but Anglo-Saxon progenitors. It is well known that the latter employed both in their churches and houses timber as their staple building material, and although all these have perished there remains the testimony of their language; the Saxon word “timbran” signified to build with wood, and builder meant carpenter. Their rude halls may be regarded as the origin of the old English timber-built houses.
The oldest form of rectangular house was erected in “bays,” the simplest form of construction being the house of one bay. Two pairs of bent trees (whence the term “roof tree” seems an outcome) were set up in the ground about 16 feet apart, each pair making a sort of pointed arch, united at their apexes by a longitudinal beam. The gable end of many an old Cheshire cottage shows the persistence of this traditional type.
Before bringing under review some few of the many specimens the county contains, a word or two with regard to their method of construction may not be out of place. Scarcity of stone and difficulties of transit account for this material being so sparingly used. Upon a few courses of stonework forming a plinth, horizontal beams were laid, and into these angle posts and intermediate uprights were framed. These carried the sill of the upper storey, whose floor joists were often made to project, producing the “overhang,” frequently coved, which is one of the most effective features of the style.
It is not, however, so much the general disposition of their main timbers as the varied patterns and devices of the panels filling in the intervening spaces that provides one of the distinguishing characteristics of these Cheshire buildings. As one may often determine a person’s native place by his dialect, so do these lozenges and other chequer patterns enable one to recognise the place of their origin; they are, as it were, a sort of idiomatic architectural expression. When the carpenter had finished the skeleton of the structure, there remained, to complete the wooden walls, the filling in of the interstices of the framing. For this purpose, what is known as “wattle and daub” was commonly employed. By this primitive process clay could be used in its natural state. The method was to make a foundation by interlacing osiers or hazel twigs, thus forming a sort of basket work, and then to daub over with clay mixed with straw or some stringy weed, and upon this put a thin coating of plaster on both the inside and outside faces. In his Cheshire Glossary, Colonel Egerton Leigh remarks, “The daub seems to have given a name to a trade,” and in support of this statement a quaint old couplet is quoted:—
“The mayor of Altrincham and the mayor of Over,
The one is a thatcher, the other a dauber”;