BUILDING & NATURAL BEAUTY.
Aroundthe cottage I live in there is a large rookery, spreading over many trees which form a small wood on the hillside. Last year a pair of rooks began to build a nest in a beech-tree that stands by the cottage: they chose a large bough over-hanging the road, quite away from the general colony, and in a very prominent position. This was evidently the cause of great annoyance to the black-coated community, who again and again destroyed the half-built nest. The enterprising pair maintained their position however; and after some weeks of contention got the nest completed, by working in turns, one mounting guard while the other fetched the twigs. They reared their family without further molestation, so far as I could observe; but this spring the first thing the rooks did was to destroy the last remnants of the nest left by the winter storms.
This interesting little episode of rook life set me musing as to why the community should object to this nest. I could only suppose that its isolated and prominent position offended their sense of the general fitness of things, and that they wished to guard against the first beginnings of “Suburban Villadom.” If so, we must I think commend alike their good sense and their good taste. For there is nothing which it seems more hopeless to harmonize with natural scenery than the modern town suburb. We find plenty of cities, towns, andvillages, castles, mansions, and cottages, which are a joy in the landscape; but when a modern town begins to sprawl its squalor or its suburban gentility out into the fields, what desecration of scenery follows! Most people feel this without realising the cause very fully. But if we look for it, we shall find that modern suburbs specially offend in coming between the town and the country; so that, however the city may be fitted to beautify the landscape, we cannot see it from the fields; nor can we catch a refreshing glimpse of the cool green hillside from amidst our busy streets. For between lie miles of jerry cottages built in rows, or acres of ill-assorted villas, each set in a scrap of so-called landscape garden.
In the old towns which we admire when we chance to come on them, we notice that the country comes up clean and fresh right to the point where the town proper begins: and it does begin indeed: honest town, confessed, which does not seek to look half-countrified. In the oldest cities we sometimes find a wall with the country coming right up to the gates, which adds to this effect. In old times all the townspeople lived in the town, and tried to make it comely as a town; and when this was done it generally looked pleasing in the landscape. It was possible to get most charming peeps of country from its streets—framed in perhaps with an old gateway, or with some decent town buildings. Of our modern citizens, all who can afford it live outside the town, removed from those who work to make them wealthy. Hence they loseinterest in the town as a dwelling-place, and we get a great central business quarter, surrounded by the residential suburbs containing only poor town buildings or nondescript half-country dwellings. It is not however with suburbs only that we spoil scenery; in isolated buildings, or groups of buildings, we very often put up what is offensive to the lover of country; and it will I think be both interesting and useful to enquire a little further why the buildings which our forefathers put up mostly adorn a landscape, while our own erections so frequently spoil it.
Much of the charm of old buildings is no doubt due to the kindly hand of Time, which not only heals the scars that man makes on the earth, but tones down the raw surfaces, and softens the hard lines and colours of anything he may build. But not to Father Time can we give all the credit. It will be more than he can do, I think, to make our modern suburbs look as beautiful, as fitting in the scenery, as many an old city or country town does. Apart from the question of beauty in the style of building, which of course is an obvious factor of great influence, there are a few more easily understood reasons for the difference between old and new. If we take for example their position: do not old houses and villages generally seem to nestle in a valley, under a hill, or by the edge of a wood or copse, and both by their placing and style convey the idea of shelter and retreat? Sometimes this characteristic was carried so far, that we find houses placed so as to get little or no view. But they werebuilt for busy people who lived mainly out of doors, and returned to their shelter at night as the rooks come home to roost. Too often now we place a building so as to strike a note of defiance with surrounding nature. The thing stands out hard and prominent in the landscape; shouts at you across the valley; and through not co-operating with the scene, fails to convey anything of that sense of nestling in a fitting nook, or on an appropriate ledge—that sheltering under Nature’s wing as it were—which makes a building look really at home.
Then, too, does not the old building seem almost to grow out of the ground on which it stands? Built of the local stone; roofed with material common to the district—thatch, stone shingles, or grey slates, perhaps; harmonizing in colour with the rocks and soil; it is as appropriate to the earth on which it rests, as the twig built nest of the rook is to the tree top on which it sways so lightly and yet so securely.
As we pass from county to county, rejoicing in the unspoilt bits of old villages and towns, we cannot but notice how much of the restful quiet beauty is due to the general harmony. We see the grey stone-roofed village of Yorkshire and Derbyshire, so quietly fitting to the country of rocks and stone walls; the green slate of Cumberland and Westmoreland, that country of bright colouring; the thatch of Shropshire or Somerset, always cosy and homely looking, whether on the timber-framed building or on the whitewashed cottage; or again,the purple slates of North Wales, unobtrusive among the dark blue shadows of her towering peaks, and fitly covering in the cottage whose walls are of rough slabs of the same slate. The red tile, too, coloured with the iron which tints the soil, more widely distributed and in greater variety than any of the roof coverings, though not exactly a natural product only needs to be clothed with the golden green of the lichen to look as much at home as any of the rest: we know it well in Staffordshire, and to think of Whitby without its red roofs is to realise at once what beauty it can give to a scene. Each of these roof coverings has a special beauty of its own; some look well almost anywhere; but we do not always realise how much of roofs we see in a landscape, or to what extent the restful charm of old places springs from their harmony with surroundings and the general prevalence of one material in the district.
Our fathers were not tempted as we are in this. They had to use the local material and to stick to it. There were no railways in their time carrying blue slates to Whitby, or red tiles to North Wales. Now all these materials are brought to our doors, and the builder chooses each according to his own fad; and so we get all sorts of materials and colours hopelessly jumbled up together, with no thought of general harmony.
Our manufactured materials too are less beautiful. Our tiles by perfect machinery are made so true and flat that a modern tile roof looks as though it had been ironed with a polishing iron, like a shirtfront. And both our tiles and bricks tend to become so hard and forbidding that no kindly lichen will clothe them, no wind and rain soften and tone them. It gives one something of a shock to see the delicate clematis and the clinging ivy struggling with a wall which, after twenty or thirty years, still looks as hard and new as the day it was built. The old tiles were a little curled in burning, and had a surface rough enough to afford lodgment for moss and lichen; and so the lines were less hard, and the newness of surface and colour soon mellowed into all sorts of lovely shades.
Many an old building that has little pretension to fine architecture, yet adorns a scene of natural beauty by its simple fitness of design, where a modern one would probably spoil it. Such design was the outcome of a natural effort to get the most use and convenience out of materials thoroughly known. Hence a general suitability is found between design and material, and an obvious connection between quaint features and the want that has called them into being. Look at the plainest old four-square thatched cottage, and there will nearly always be some interest in the way the thatch has been coaxed up over a window, or a ridge worked to avoid a chimney gutter, which redeems it from baldness. The same skilful handling of tiles is found in all real tile districts; and so we find many picturesque gables, which we should miss in a country of slates or stone shingles.
There is on all hands evidence of a willingness to give labour without stint; to do a job well and abit more; to linger over it, and see if a little more work here and there would not improve the look. In fact, we read in these old buildings, as in an open book, of a simple workman who was something of an artist, one who could take pleasure in his work, finding joy in the perfection of what he created, and delight in its comeliness.
Whenever we again raise up such an army of builders, working at their trades with the pleasure of artists, then will all buildings become as beautiful as of old; then will it be possible for such workmen, co-operating with a true architect or master builder, to raise fine architecture, like our old cathedrals and abbeys. No effort of office-trained architects, with workmen whose chief interest on the job is to find ‘knocking-off time,’ can ever take the place of the co-operation between real craftsmen under the leadership of the most able among them: for it is to this that we owe most of the building that we can truly say adorns our country.
RAYMOND UNWIN.