Self-Sufficiency in Style
hangman's cottage
fact or fiction?
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Self-Sufficiency in Style hangman's cottage fact or fiction? |
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We don't know when this photograph was taken, since we know that the land has remained much the same for well over 100 years. We do know the picture can't be that old, since it is in colour. |
Well, it could be fiction, but it isn't.
North is at the top, where you would expect north to be. The castle mound is just off the picture, top left, with hangman's hill between us and the castle. We don't know the original names for the fields, but the Hay Meadow is top left. Top right is the Home Acre, now with walled garden, a couple of small grazing paddocks, the pig paddocks and orchard. The two fields in the middle on the map are the Water Meadow on the left and the Front Meadow on the right. There is just over 5 acres in total. The pond is right in the centre of the property fed by ditches running from the north. It overflows into a ditch than runs down alongside the road, crosses it and finally joins the River Waveney a few miles away in the valley. The river is part of the Broads system, finally discharging into the North Sea at Lowestoft. The two fields at the bottom, belong to our neighbours and are used to graze sheep. |
| This picture looks west. The
road runs up to Misery Corner.
The brown patch was a vegetable garden. The "building" on the left is a railway carriage acquired when the little branch line in the valley was closed. The house was once thatched, then tin roofed and finally tiled. The brown in the top centre was a haystack. The land over the road was then ploughed for wheat. Now it is permanent grass, much used by horse-riders, as is the lane. The field on the top right is arable still. |
About 30 years ago. An aerial photograph of the walled garden (slow to load) taken last year is available now |
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Did
a Hangman ever live here?
Who knows? We do know that the castle mound was only noticed by archaeologists in the 19th century. It was probably an early Norman wooden structure. Hangman's Hill is an oddity. A strange little pimple on the landscape, completely out of place in the flat clay landscape. As always, such geological peculiarities attracted attention in days gone by. It could have been thought an appropriate place to hand out rough justice, but equally it might just have attracted stories in a superstitious countryside. ...but when the wind howls on a winter's night or on a sultry moonlit summer night when the owls call and the thunder echoes in the distance, you could be forgiven for thinking that just maybe... |
| What
was important, from a self-sufficiency point of view, was that the land
slopes very gently to the south, and the house could be altered so that
its back was into the walled garden and full south.
Never buy a smallholding in the cool temperate regions facing south; on land sloping upwards towards north. A south facing house will prolong the winter by a couple of months and the house will be cold. Our forefathers, or foremothers really had no refrigeration and needed to put the pantries and dairies on the north side of the house. That meant that the farmhouses often did face south. Not so good today. The windows to the north have been kept small. The conservatory, larger windows and doors are now on the south side and facing into the garden. The converse would obviously have been true, had Hangman's Cottage been in a warmer climate such as the southern US and most of Australia. We could not not get all these things in any house, but when we made alterations, we designed them in. We turned Hangman's Cottage, by closing access to the east and providing new doors and windows facing south. We lived in the house under both orientations. The difference was amazing. |
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Beams to read under
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So, no, Hangman's Cottage
does exist. It is no figment of the imagination.
Hangman's is not its real name today. It is a place where you can still see the stars and take the temperature of the world. You can stand aside just a little from the follies and pretensions of man. You can laugh at fashion, find time to read of days gone by and watch the wonders of nature unfold from the back window. You can write a little and sip homebrew on the sunny terrace or elderberry wine by the fire in winter. You sit under beams that would have been trees growing on the castle mound when Pocahontas was a girl and before Cook set sail for the southern seas. |
| When it is a very wet night
with an easterly wind and the main road is busy, you can hear the faint
swish of wet tyres in the distance as the world rushes by.
You can lie abed listening and dream about the men and women that left this village to colonise whole continents. They were self-sufficient and fiercely independent too. Perhaps some were running from the Hangman's rope? Perhaps some were to see lynch mobs on the other side of the world?
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and beams to dream under.
You can click on Writer to read more about his sometimes hectic life and find out the reasons why he and his wife chose a self-sufficient life. |
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...stay or run from - the dreadfully named Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner. |
