10 Feb - The 'Chapel' in the Fields

With work, rain, shopping and college (taking my wife there and back), no opportunities for walking in recent days, so a little bit more on Southam history - the 'chapel' in the fields.

In the middle of a field to the west of Southam stands an old building (SP408616). It is built of small limestone blocks, giving a similar appearance to the Old Mint and the 'big barn' excavated last year near the church. On the Southam 'Time trail' guide published by the council and in the online record, it is suggested that it is a medieval chapel.

I remember the barn from a visit in the early 1980s. There were stone-mullioned windows on both sides of the building, and a massive wooden door lintel in place. In recent years I visited again, and was sad to discover all the windows caved in or vandalised, and the lintel rotting on the ground inside the doorway. A tin roof that had been partly peeling away on my earlier visit is now completely fallen in.

Old photo showing the south side of the building in 1974.
 © Copyright Greg Fitchett andlicensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Old photo of the north side of the building (source?).

The barn in 2007 - the window mullions have collapsed or been vandalised, the roof completely gone and the wall tops crumbling.

The south side of the building - the fallen lintle lies in the grass at the far end, and the collapsed roof can also be seen, Southam church steeple in the background. Taken on a frosty January morning in 2007.

The building has never struck me as a chapel-like, or even medieval. The style of the windows appear more seventeenth or eighteenth century, and the arrangement of the windows and doors are vernacular rather than church-like. But I'm no expert. Southam's 'big barn', contrary to my pronouncements earlier in this blog, is now stated to be post-medieval in the excavation report.

The idea if it being a chapel comes from a single suggestion made in 1996, but there are no other sources for this idea that I'm aware of. (It is nice to see an old family friend mentioned several times in the official record, Trevor Rogers, who sadly passed away a few years ago.)

In Warwickshire Country Records Office there is a map dated 1754 (document ref: CR1470 / Box 2 / Bundle 24), which shows these fields were occupied by small enclosures, with a number of buildings dotted about on the map. The area in question was at that time occupied by a Mr Manders and a Mr Woods, and the 'chapel' may well have been one of the buildings represented in the map. Unfortunately the map it is not accurate enough to precisely match the buildings indicated with the 'chapel'. There is just not enough information.

Sometimes I feel history like is a jigsaw with 99% or even 100% of the pieces missing. The picture below is of the ruinous church at Bower in Caithness, Scotland (I lived up there for a few years). The building does not appear particularly old, it has numerous burials in and around it, some inconclusive architectural features, and must have been in use in relatively recent times, yet, nothing is know about it. Nothing. There is no record of its building, abandonment, what clergy presided at it, or its ecclesiastical affiliations. The remains of the building are simply there, its history lost, an unrecoverable blank.

Bower Church, Caithness, Scotland. It is there, hidden under all the ivy.

Southam's 'medieval chapel' is a similar historical blank. Quite an impressive building in its time. However, unless the site is ever excavated, like Bower, it will remain a complete and unsolvable mystery, until the walls crumble, or are cleared away, or declared unsafe and a danger and demolished, the site ploughed over and all physical trace gone.