Page 17 - Oundle Life August 2021

As a regular reader of my musings I hope
you are now more able to date a building by visually unpicking its fabric; applying the insights shared and lessons learned. And yet, every now and then something comes along to trick us all. Look at Ashton for example; at first glance this chocolate box village, located a mile or so east of Oundle, looks like a time warp from the late middle ages with its Tudor-styled cottages and rough stone walls, steeply-pitched thatched roofs and stone mullioned windows infilled with small leaded glass panes. And yet all is not as it may first appear.
Look again! The houses facing the green
were clearly designed by the same hand, at the same time – they all share common features
and exhibit zero evidence of evolutionary change down through the years. The building stone is the same in every house, and the walls and chimney stacks remain straight and true without a hint of movement. Indeed, there is not a single brick chimney stack as evidence
of ad-hoc rebuilding and the metal window casements have hidden hinges as opposed to the period pintles which I featured in my windows article from February.
Clearly Ashton village as it stands is not 500-years old. None of the historic or forensic tell-tales are evident and one glaringly contemporary feature which is common in historic villages is impactful by its absence – there are no overhead cables or telegraph poles. So, what’s the story? Turning as ever to Pevsner and Historic England, I read that Ashton village was the brainchild of Hon. Charles Rothschild – an avid entomologist – and son of 1st Baron Rothschild. It seems that Charles fell in love with his family-owned estate when on
a butterfly hunting expedition with the vicar of Polebrook in the late 1890s.
Way ahead of his time, Charles was a pioneer conservationist, arguing that the whole natural habitat needed to be protected, not just rare species. Accordingly, Charles lobbied his father to replace the old hunting lodge at Ashton
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A MODEL VILLAGE
Built for a Pioneering Conservationist