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HAMPSHIRE 3 miles south-east of Andover Anyone who feels that straw-thatching is a dying craft should visit Wherwell, which could well be the place where master thatchers take their apprentices to show them just how far the craft can go. There, crowning the mainly black-andwhite timber-framed cottages in the centre of the village, it goes far indeed - almost to the ground in many instances, and in great curves and voluptuous billows above eaves and windows. Even the doors are sheltered by their own deep, luxurious mantles of thatch, and when the crafts- men have exhausted the possibilities of roofs, they thatch the tops of walls. Among so much fine workmanship it is hard to pick out particular examples, but perhaps The Old Malt House, on which thatch flows over windows like a stilled sea over rocks, deserves pride of place. Close runners-up must be Gavel Acre, with its five tiny casements framed in clipped straw, and the plain white wall of Aldings, whose thatch almost brushes the road. The place is full of small, pleasant surprises, from its Home Guard Club - there cannot be many of these left - to its Church of St Peter and Holy Cross, rebuilt in the 19th century with a tower clad in wooden tiles that looks just like a church in miniature perched on top. Within, there is a tomb believed to be that of a 14th-century abbess and some Saxon and medieval sculptures rescued from an earlier church on the same site. Over the churchyard wall is The Priory, a splendid, 19th-century house with a pretty wooden cupola, defended by tall yews, immaculate lawns and an arm of the river acting as a moat. The house stands on the site of the Abbey of Wherwell, founded in 986 by Queen Elfrida, mother of Ethelred the Unready, to expiate the murder of her stepson, King Edward. A notice near the gate to the house relates how the abbey was destroyed by ‘the zeal or avarice of King Henry’ at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. A few fragments of the original building still remain in the grounds of the house. |
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