THE COB WALL

Standing side by side on the village street in Easton Royal are two Grade II listed properties, both former farmhouses but three hundred years apart in age.

The frontage of the White House, previously called Little House, is distinctive and imposing, prominent on the junction of the street with Harris Lane. The building appears to have evolved from a two-bay 17th century cottage built of chalkstone or cob and brick, now white rendered. There was originally one chimney in the gabled south wall with a thatched roof hipped only at the northern end. In the early 19th century, an extension with sash windows and a hipped roof was added. The front casement windows, the porch with steps down to the street and further chimneys came some years later.

Home Farm was built in 1845 by Savernake estate at a cost of £78 10s 1d for tenant Mrs Elizabeth Kimber, on the site of a previous 17th century dwelling called Upper Farm. Another of its early occupants was Noah Goddard, thatcher and farmer, who had the dubious honour of being the first person to be buried in the new village cemetery in 1900.

Walter Trowbridge was the next to farm here but when Ellen Follett died in 1910, Walter moved to Lower Farm and his brother Alban came to Home Farm. After some twenty years, Frank Fry took over the farm when Alban left the area.

Home Farm was originally of L shaped plan with gable roofs of clay plain tiles, with courses of banded plain and fish scale tiles. The walls are of the distinctive estate made yellow-pink bricks with a diamond pattern of red brick in each gable and incorporating a datestone on the west gable wall.

Casement windows have the diamond lattice lights also made on the estate. Details include contrasting red rubbed brick arches over the openings, projecting roof verges and other features of the estate’s early Victorian architectural style. A modern rear extension has been added in matching materials and details.

The White House has the only surviving thatched cob wall in the village separating it from Home Farm along the garden boundary for around thirty metres. The wall must have been there when Home Farm was built and probably existed for one hundred years or more before then.

Traditionally common around the village and founded on sarsen stone, these cob walls were built, stage by stage, between parallel casements of planks about two feet apart and a yard high. The space between them was filled with mud from the river Avon, mixed with straw and flints, thoroughly trodden down and allowed to set when the casements would be removed. The next layer would then be added in a similar fashion and so on until the top of the wall was reached. The top was then rounded off and while the mud was still soft, the wall received its covering of thatch.

The disintegration of the sides of the wall due to wind and weather is only slight and slow, they moulder a little and harden up again as rain is succeeded by sunshine.  But if the tops of the walls are left unprotected, the heavier rains will drive fissures into them and these are widened and deepened by frost. Lateral splits appear and the wall breaks up into scattered cakes. From all this, the thatch defends it.

Although a few such walls are still to be found in this part of Wiltshire, the art of making them has been lost. More skill is required to thatch a wall than a house and it is only those such as this one, where the thatch has been carefully kept in repair, that remain standing.

Home Farm circa 1929

The White House

The Cob Wall