Ice Houses

An ice house is a building used to store ice all year round. Ice was transported from lakes, ponds and rivers in winter by wheelbarrows or small carts.  It was packed into the ice house and then stamped on to form a solid mass. Sometimes salt was added to aid the freezing process.  When ice is packed together into a large mass, the relatively small surface area slows down rate of thawing.  It was then covered with a layer of straw to insulate it.  The ice would stay frozen for up to two years. Sometimes foods such as meat, fish, butter and fruit were stored in the icehouse.  

The most popular location for ice houses was the bank of a stream or pond and not too far from an estate road.  Almost all icehouses on country estates have an entrance, a passage, a vault and a drain (for meltwater, in the base of the vault). Most ice houses had roofs of either earth or thatch. Some ice houses had a chute in the roof above the centre of the vault to allow ice to be unloaded from above. Only a few ice houses were designed to be landscape features in the gardens of country houses.

Ice was stored in icehouses for use in the kitchens and dining rooms of stately homes. When ice was needed it was chipped out and taken to the house.  It was washed and placed in wine coolers and ice buckets to cool drinks and make iced desserts.  Fruit, fish and game were also laid on beds of ice to keep them fresh.

One of the first recorded ice houses in Britain was built in Greenwich, London in 1619. The idea for ice houses probably originated in France and Italy.  About 3,000 ice houses were eventually built in Britain and by the mid 19th century most country houses had at least one.  The majority of ice houses were built between 1750 and 1875. They were also built for commercial use, e.g. for packing and transporting fish or meat, for the manufacture of ice cream or for the sale of ice for domestic use.

From the 1840s crystal clear ice was imported into Britain from the USA, especially from Wenham Lake near Boston in Massachusetts, and later from Norway.  Ice houses continued to be used until the late 19th century when ice making machines and refrigerators became available.

There are very few icehouses in Somerset which are accessible to the public.  Montacute and Prior Park, which are both owned by the National Trust, have ice houses.  You can see the mound of the East Coker icehouse from a public footpath that runs close by. Nynehead Court has a very large ice house and the gardens are open to the public on certain days of the week but you need to book your visit in advance. There is an icehouse in a wood on the Ashton Court estate.

Montacute icehouse was built in the late 18th or early 19th century.  It has a Latin inscription over the door: "in superet Glacies frondeat atque Nives", which means "freshness springs from the ice and snow." It is situated halfway between the kitchens and the ponds in the park.

Entrance to Montacute Ice House

Looking down in to Montacute Ice House

Entrance to Montacute Ice House from inside

Diagram showing a cross-section of Montacute Ice House

Cut-away diagram of Montacute Ice House

East Coker Ice House

Entrance to Nynehead Court Ice House

Nynehead Court Ice House

The ice house at Nynehead Court was built in 1803.  It is made of brick and has an iron drain cover at the base.  There appears to have once been an entrance on the north side, but the current entrance way is on the south side.  It would probably have had 2 or 3 doors originally to act as insulation between the warmer air outside and the cool air inside the ice house, but it currently has none.  The ice house was filled with rubbish at some point after the 1950s, but it was emptied out and restored in 1995 by Taunton Deane Borough Council.

Prior Park, Bath

The Prior Park ice house is located half a mile downhill from the mansion it served, but close to the lakes, from which the ice was collected.  It was built c1755-60 for Ralph Allen.  He had the park laid out 1734-1740 and the mansion was built for him 1733-1750.  The external walls were made using Bath stone and the inside was lined with red bricks. During the Second World War it was used as a base by a top secret auxiliary unit of men, who would have led the resistance in the event of a German invasion. They made changes to the ice house, including digging an escape tunnel, which was accessed via a trap door and a wooden ladder. They also inserted timber beams into the internal walls of the chamber, so that they could create a second storey.

Further reading: 

Icehouses: Tim Buxbaum, Shire Publications, 1988

Nailsea Glassworks

John Robert Lucas was born in 1754. After his father Robert Lucas died in 1774, he took over his beer and cider works in Bristol and his shares in a glass making business in Limekiln Lane, Bristol.  In 1781 John Robert married Anna Adams and they had a son and two daughters.   In 1787 he leased a glassworks at Stanton Wick. 

John Robert Lucas established a glass works at Nailsea in 1788.  He chose Nailsea as the site for his new glassworks because of the abundance of coal produced by the mines around the town and local supplies of sand and limestone.  He may also have been influenced by plans for the Grand Western Canal, which would have linked the English and Bristol Channels with a branch to Nailsea.  However only the section from Tiverton to Taunton was ever built.   

Lucas’s company was called Nailsea Crown Glass and Glass Bottle Manufacturers.  Initially one cone shaped kiln and a furnace were built at Nailsea.  A second glass furnace was built there in 1790.  In 1793 John Robert Lucas went into partnership with William Chance, Edward Homer and William Coathupe.  In 1788 William Chance had married John Robert’s sister Sarah and Edward Homer had married John Robert’s sister Mary.

In addition to window glass and bottles, the Nailsea Glassworks also produced domestic ware and novelty items such as flasks, rolling pins, pipes, jugs and walking sticks, which were sometimes decorated with flecks, loops or bands of white or coloured enamel.  Most of these items were produced by workers at the end of their shifts using leftover pieces of glass.

In 1811 William and Sarah Chance’s son, Robert Lucas Chance, took over the management of the Nailsea works and married his cousin Louisa, the daughter of Mary and Edward Homer.  In 1812 he persuaded John Hartley, the leading crown glass expert in the country, to come and work at Nailsea.

The partnership of Lucas, Chance, Homer and Coathupe lasted until 1821 when William Chance sold all of his shares and Edward Homer sold part of his to William Coathupe.  Edward Homer’s son James Edward Homer was taken into the partnership at this time and the company traded as Lucas, Coathupe and Homer. 

John Robert Lucas died in 1828 and was buried at Backwell. Most of his estate passed to his grandsons John Rodbard Bean and Henry Lucas Bean.

The New House Cone was built at Nailsea c1828.  Experienced sheet glass blowers were recruited from France and Belgium from the 1830s, due a shortage of skilled British glass blowers. By 1835 Nailsea was the fourth largest glassworks in Britain.  Bottle making ceased at Nailsea in the 1830s in favour of plate, crown and sheet window glass.

In 1835 a partnership called Lucas, Coathupes, Homer and Cliffe was formed to run the business. In 1844 the company became Coathupes & Co with Charles and Oliver Coathupe, John and Henry Bean and James Edward Homer as shareholders. In the 1840s a new cone known as the Lilly or Lily Cone was built.

In 1848 Charles Coathupe retired and Oliver Coathupe became manager at the Nailsea works.  Over the next 25 years there were various changes in the partnership and shareholdings.  In 1861 the Nailsea works were closed for a while and the following year they were leased to Samuel Bowen, a glass merchant from West Bromwich, and John Powis of London.  They traded as Nailsea Glass Company and made patented ventilating glass, cut glass and coloured glass for stained glass windows.  Samuel Bowen became bankrupt in 1869 and he and Powis surrendered their lease.  In 1870 the Nailsea works were sold to Chance Bros of Smethwick, together with a coal mine on the same site.

Glass production ceased at Nailsea in 1873, due to competition from cheap Belgian imports and the decline in production from the Nailsea Coalfield, and the works were closed in 1874.  The New House Cone was demolished in 1905.  Some of the rubble from it was supposedly used to build the extension to the runway at Filton in the late 1940s.

Extensive archaeological excavations began on the glassworks site in 1983 and continued for several years.  In 2002 a supermarket was built on part of the site.  The only surviving building is one which housed the French kilns, and gas-fired furnaces.  This was later converted into the Royal Oak Garage. 

A collection of Nailsea Glass items can be seen at the National Trust’s Clevedon Court.  However much of what is today described as Nailsea Glass was not made at Nailsea but was made in the same style elsewhere in England e.g. Stourbridge.

Glassworks Cauldron, High Street, Nailsea

This would have been filled with cold water into which surplus molten glass would have been ladled.  Once the glass had cooled and solidified it was broken up and used to speed up the melt of the next batch of sand, limestone and soda.

The Glassblower Sculpture, High Street, Nailsea

This was sculpted by Vanessa Marston and unveiled in 2008

Former Glassworks building, later the Royal Oak Garage, High Street, Nailsea

Two glazed ceramic tile panels illustrating the glassworks and its various manufacturing processes. The panels were designed and produced by Ned Heywood of the Workshop Gallery in Chepstow.  They incorporate fragments of glass excavated from the site.  They are on display on the outside wall of Tesco’s Supermarket.

Drawing showing the layout of Nailsea Glassworks c1873

Monk's Steps, Kewstoke

Monk’s Steps or St Kew’s Steps, as they are also known, run from Woodspring Avenue near the top of the northern slope of Worlebury Hill in a north westerly direction for about 150 metres down a natural gully to join the bottom end of Monks Hill in Kewstoke.

The origin and original purpose of the steps, which are made of roughly worked stone, is uncertain but they may date back to the early medieval period.  At this time there was an Augustinian Priory called Woodspring a mile and a half north at Middle Hope. St Paul’s Church at Kewstoke, which is located at the bottom of Monk’s Steps, was linked to Woodspring Priory for a while during the medieval period, so that may be how they acquired the name.  

The freehold of Monk’s Steps was acquired by the National Trust from R.H.C. Butt on 7th July 1936.  The grid reference for the top of the steps is ST 337 632 and for the bottom it is ST 336 633.

Bottom of Monk's Steps

Looking up Monk's Steps from Monks Hill

Top of Monk's Steps

Dead Poets

Some of Britain's most famous poets have connections to Somerset:

• Siegfried Sassoon and T.S. Eliot are buried in Somerset. 
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth both lived in the county for a few years.
• Alfred Tennyson and William Makepeace Thackeray both visited Clevedon

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1722-1834) was one of the great Romantic poets.  He was born in Ottery St Mary in Devon on 21st October 1772.  Samuel and his wife Sara (nee Fricker) spent the first few months of their married life in a cottage on Old Church Road in Clevedon in 1795. In 1797 they moved to a cottage in Lime Street, Nether Stowey, where they lived for three years.  Samuel went for long walks in the surrounding hills and countryside.  His epic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is said to have been inspired by Watchet Harbour. While he was writing Kubhla Khan in a laudanum induced haze, he was famously disturbed by "a man from Porlock."  Frost at Midnight describes the interior of the house at Nether Stowey.  In 1800 the Coleridges moved to Keswick in the Lake District.

Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey is now owned by the National Trust and it is open to the public.

Cottage on Old Church Road, Clevedon where the Coleridges stayed

Coleridge Cottage, Lime Street, Nether Stowey

Plaque on Coleridge Cottage in Lime Street, Nether Stowey

  

Statue of the Ancient Mariner and dead albatross, Watchet Harbour

Plaque on the Unitarian Chapel, Dampiet Street, Bridgwater

Plaque on the Unitarian Chapel, Mary Street, Taunton

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the albatross from Rime of the Ancient Mariner,

Watchet history mural, Old Mineral Yard, Watchet

In 1795 William Wordsworth met Samuel Taylor Coleridge for the first time in Bristol.  They became good friends and in 1797 William and his wife Dorothy rented Alfoxton House near Holford, which was only three miles away from Nether Stowey where Samuel Taylor Coleridge was living.  Wordsworth and Coleridge went for many walks in the Quantock Hills, along the coast and on Exmoor.  However, due to rumours about some of their radical house guests, the Wordsworth's lease was not renewed after a year and they moved on, first to Germany, before settling at Grasmere in the Lake District in 1799.

Alfoxton House

Alfoxton House

Looking very sad and semi-derelict in January 2019

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (1886-1967) was one of the leading First World War poets.  He was born in Kent and educated at Cambridge University.  In 1914 he joined the Sussex Yeomanry and in 1915 he was posted to France. He was wounded in April 1917 and while he was convalescing at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh he met Wilfred Owen.  Sassoon returned to active duty in 1918, first in Palestine and then in May he returned to France.  In July 1918 he was wounded in the head and that was the end of his military service.  He wrote angry but compassionate poems about the First World War. Some of his best war poems were published in Counter-Attack and Other Poems in 1918.  

After the war Sassoon wrote more poetry, but also prose and autobiographies.  In 1957 he became a Catholic.  He died on 1st September 1967 at his home in Heytesbury near Warminster in Wiltshire. He was buried in the churchyard of St Andrew's Church in Mells, close to the grave of the Roman Catholic priest Father Ronald Knox, who he greatly admired.

Siegfried Sassoon's grave in the churchyard of St Andrew's Church, Mells

St Andrew's Church, Mells

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St Louis Missouri but he moved to England in 1917 and became a British citizen in 1927.  One of his Eliot ancestors had lived in East Coker before immigrating to America in the 1660s.

T.S. Eliot's best known poetic works include The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, The Hollow Men, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and Four Quartets.  Four Quartets is a set of four long poems, the second of which is entitled East Coker.  He also wrote several plays and essays.

T.S. Eliot died of emphysema at his home in London on 4th January 1965.  At his request his ashes were interred at St Michael's Church, East Coker.  There is a commemorative plaque to him on the wall of the church, which quotes some lines from Four Quartets: "In my beginning is my end" and "In my end is my beginning."

 

T.S. Eliot's memorial plaque in St Michael's Church, East Coker

T.S. Eliot's memorial plaque in St Michael's Church, East Coker

St Michael's Church, East Coker

In the mid-18^th century the author William Makepeace Thackeray was a frequent visitor of the Elton Family, who lived at Clevedon Court.  He is best known as a novelist but he did also write some poetry.

Alfred Tennyson had a close friend at Cambridge University called Arthur Hallam.  Arthur’s mother was a member of the Elton family of Clevedon Court.  Arthur, who was a poet and essayist, was engaged to marry Tennyson’s sister Emily but he died suddenly in Vienna in 1833 at the age of 22.  His body was brought back to England and he was buried in the family vault at St Andrew’s Church in Clevedon.  In 1850 Tennyson wrote a poem called In Memorium in tribute to his friend.  In the same year he made his first visit to Clevedon.  The house on Old Church Road in Clevedon, where he is said to have stayed, is called Tennyson House.   A nearby road is called Tennyson Avenue.

Tennyson House, Old Church Road, Clevedon

Tennyson Avenue, Clevedon

Wibbly-wobbly Hedges, Montacute House

Montacute House (owned by the National Trust) has some particularly fine examples of wibbly-wobbly or "cloud" hedges.  The ones at Montacute are yew trees.  They were not originally designed to be shaped like this, but the hedges buckled under the weight of heavy snowfall in January 1947, which lasted until March.  Due to a postwar labour shortage, they weren't cut until June 1947, by which time they had become permanently misshapen.  They are now clipped to maintain the "cloud" appearance.

The National Trust's garden at Lytes Cary near Kingsdon has some smaller scale but beautifully clipped box cloud hedges.

A house facing the pebble beach at Porlock Weir has a short section of cloud hedge, although whether it is clipped this way deliberately I don't know.

Wibbly-wobbly hedge close up in the Cedar Lawn Garden

North Garden

North Garden

Wibbly-wobbly hedge undergowing repair, August 2018

Wibbly-wobbly hedge and Orangery in the North Garden

Wibbly-wobbly hedge in the Cedar Lawn Garden

Wibbly-wobbly hedge and Lord Curzon's Pavilion, Cedar Lawn Garden

Wibbly-wobbly hedge and Montacute House from the Cedar Lawn

Montacute House and wibbly-wobbly hedge from a very parched Cedar Lawn, August 2018

Cloud hedge at Porlock Weir

Cloud hedge at Lytes Cary

Cloud hedge at Lytes Cary

Conygar Tower and The Arches, Dunster

Conygar Tower is a folly located on Conygar Hill above the village of Dunster.  It was commissioned by Henry Fownes Luttrell (1723-1780), the owner of Dunster Castle.   It was  designed by Richard Phelps, who was a local artist from Porlock.   He was a pupil of Thomas Hudson, a Devon born portrait painter.  Richard Phelps also designed the Lawns' and Lovers' Bridges at Dunster Castle and painted portraits of several members of the Luttrell family.

Conygar Tower was built in about 1775 at a cost of £75.   It is a round tower 7.9 metres in diameter and about 18 metres high.  It is built of red rubble sandstone, has four open entrances at the bottom and tapers slightly towards the top, which is crenellated.  It has Gothic style window openings, but there is no evidence that it ever had a roof, staircase or floors.  It was designed as an eye-catcher to be viewed from Dunster Castle.

Henry Luttrell also created Dunster deer park, planted trees on Conygar Hill and had a Sham Ruin, also designed by Richard Phelps, built 400 metres to the north west of Conygar Tower.  It is known locally as 'The Arches'.  There are two unroofed turrets either side of one of the arches, with the second arch at right angles to the first.  Tracks were created to wind around Conygar Hill, so that the gentry could travel up to the folly via the Sham Ruin in horse drawn carriages.

The name Conygar comes from two medieval words: coney (rabbit) and garth (garden), indicating that the area was once a warren used for breeding rabbits for food.

Conygar Tower, January 2025

Conygar Tower

View from Inside Conygar Tower

Sham Ruin

Sham Ruin in winter

Approach to Conygar Tower

Sham ruin in mid summer

Sham ruin cleared of ivy, August 2024