are of very great interest. It is difficult to say what was their exact
purpose. The elevation of the pavilion (Fig. 6) may have been drawn
from the executed building. On the other hand, it may have been a
development of Thorpe’s rather rough sketch. If so, it would probably
be the work of Robert Smythson, and thus link him up with John; and,
assuming that they were father and son, John must have preserved his
father’s drawing among his own.
The plan (Fig. 5) has already been surmised to represent an idea of
adding a forecourt to each front; but the levels of the ground seem to
preclude the possibility of their ever having been carried out, and the
drawing may be merely an exercise of fancy. In any case it appears odd
to modern notions that the principal objects opposite to three of the
fronts should be the stables, the dairy and laundry, and the bakehouse
and brewhouse. On the fourth or entrance front there was to have been
a gatehouse, which was quite a customary feature. The forecourt lying
between the gatehouse and the mansion was to have been surrounded by a
raised terrace or colonnade, as is indicated by the flights of steps
leading up to it.
The plan of the orchard (Fig. 7) is entitled “Sur Percevalles
Willoughbyes Newe Orcharde at Wollaton, Ann. Domi. 1618.” It is
curious, inasmuch as the central part corresponds in outline with the
plan of the house. Whether it was ever carried out or not is not known.
Sir Perceval, it will be remembered, was the son-in-law and successor
of Sir Francis, the builder of the house.
The drawings of the screen (Fig. 8) are of peculiar interest. There are
three of them: one is the general design, differing in some respects
from the actual work, and suggesting that it was the original design
subsequently modified; another is a sketch for the upper carved panels
between the columns (Fig. 9), and it agrees with the existing carving;
the third is a sketch for the panels in the frieze above the screen
(Fig. 10), and it agrees, in the main, with the actual work. All these
facts point to the drawings being the originals from which the work
was executed; they may, therefore, without forcing the argument, be
fathered upon Robert Smythson, and they thus provide another link to
connect Robert with John.
[Illustration: FIG. 9. WOLLATON HALL: PANEL IN THE
SCREEN, BY SMITHSON.]
[Illustration: FIG. 10. WOLLATON HALL: PANEL IN THE
FRIEZE ABOVE THE SCREEN, BY SMITHSON.]
It is always interesting to find out who the men were who designed
the old buildings which we admire so much. The houses did not grow of
themselves, there were definite means employed to gain the results; and
a careful study of such drawings as survive is gradually helping us to
further knowledge on the subject. Several groups of men at this period
seem to have been proud of their work and to have preserved their
drawings. Among them were the Thorpes, father and son; the Smithsons,
who for several generations (excluding Robert, who, however, seems to
be taking his place in the family) were architectural designers of
acknowledged ability; and Inigo Jones with his nephew and successor,
John Webb. The lives of these men covered almost the whole of that
interesting period in English architecture when the Italian influence
was gradually transforming our methods of design. The elder Thorpe,
who was already at work in 1570, saw the early stages; Inigo Jones,
who died in 1652, was the agent who familiarised his countrymen with
the finer forms of Italian design, and established the reign of
Palladianism, the effects of which lasted for more than a century and
a half. The work at Wollaton represents an early step in this long
development, and will always be interesting on this account alone,
apart from the striking, and indeed magnificent, individuality of the
house itself.
THE ANCIENT AND MODERN TRENT
BY BERNARD SMITH, M.A.
THE RIVER TRENT
The valley of the Trent deserves to be considered as one of the most
interesting of the antiquities of the county of Nottinghamshire. When
our ancestors dubbed it “The broad vale of Trent,” they unconsciously
laid stress upon its width, and, in fact, rightly, because the
present river Trent is a misfit--too small for the valley--a shrunken
representative of that ancient stream which carved the great
steep-sided trench between Nottingham and Newark.
There is something very human about the behaviour of rivers; they live
and move. In their youth, and at their headwaters, they are full of
energy, constantly overcoming difficulties and removing obstacles from
their course. As mature streams their paths are smoother and their ways
more orderly. In old age they wander lazily to the sea, often haltingly
and dropping their burdens on the way. But--unlike human beings--they
are constantly at work. Should their energy be greater than is required
to carry their load of rock-waste, they employ it in lowering and
widening their beds, and in clearing and straightening their path to
the sea. If all their energy is required to carry their load they can
still burrow sideways into their banks, although they cannot now cut
downwards. If the load is too great they wisely drop the overburden
and carry that which their strength is equal to. The power of a river
should never be gauged by its work or appearance at ordinary times,
for tremendous vigour--out of all proportion--comes both with increase
in volume and increase in pace, conditions only fulfilled when the
river is in flood. Rivers, again, are more than human in the manner in
which they adapt themselves to their environment. If hard rocks must be
crossed they take the shortest path in a narrow gorge; if soft rocks
are traversed they follow them as long as possible, meandering somewhat
lazily along the path of least resistance; they thus tend to become
adjusted to the texture and grain of the rocks over which they flow.
THE ANCIENT TRENT
The history of the river Trent is intimately connected with the
story of the Great Ice Age in Britain. This event--so recent from a
geological standpoint--was fairly distant from the human point of view,
since nearly all of the Palæolithic relics of this country date from
the retreat of the ice.
Long before the Ice Age (at a time when great earth movements were
taking place upon the Continent and building up the Alps) the younger
rocks in the Nottinghamshire area were uplifted and tilted gently to
the east, away from the older and underlying Carboniferous rocks of the
Pennines, and were thus brought within the influence of destructive
processes.
Rivers, running down the slope in the direction of the North Sea, began
to cut deeply and form a plain, whose general surface agreed roughly
with the slope of the river channels. The higher beds on the west were
stripped away, because a river is more active and cuts more deeply
at its head than near its mouth. Hence the original surface of the
uplifted plain has gone; the new surface slopes on the whole from west
to east, and the older rocks are more elevated than the younger ones.
Tributary streams, developed along north and south lines in the soft
belts of rock, became in time more important than the first-formed
west to east streams. One of these tributaries, no doubt, working its
headwaters backwards from the Humber, formed a valley in the red clays
of Nottinghamshire which lie west of the Lincoln Cliff, and tapped the
easterly-flowing waters, thus forming a river very similar in direction
to the present Trent.
However this may be,[41] there is no sign of that river and that valley
at the present day, although they were doubtless the guiding lines
which eventually determined the course of the Vale.
Nottinghamshire was invaded by ice-sheets descending from the north.
The direction of movement was rather from the west of north in the west
of the county, and from the east of north in the south-east of the
county; and as the ice advanced the rivers were naturally destroyed,
partly by refrigeration, but chiefly by being invaded by ice. When the
climate ameliorated the floods were let loose and the waters sought
their old channels.
As the ice-front retreated it left behind it a mass of gravel which
was in part washed from the ice-front by water draining the ice, and
in part introduced by floods from distant sources. At the same time it
is possible that much of the gravel was deposited beneath the surface
of a large sheet of water; for in late-glacial times the water in this
district seems to have been augmented by floods pouring into the basin
from the direction of the Cheshire Plain and endeavouring to escape to
the North Sea, since its escape to the Irish Sea was prevented by the
Irish Sea ice. In our district it is thought that the water, finding
its passage to the Humber barred by the retreating extremity of the
ice-sheet, which rested against the cliff north of Lincoln and extended
thence to the high ground north-west of Kelham, was forced to pour over
a low gap in the hills at Lincoln.
The highest elevations between Newark and Lincoln, near Coddington,
Potter’s Hill, Swinderby, Eagle, and Doddington, are capped by the
gravels of late-glacial age. The Lincoln gap was then cut down; the ice
had now probably retreated--although there is no direct evidence--and
already opened up the way to the Humber, and a second series of gravels
distributed by running waters on gently-inclined slopes of the solid
formations and in hollows scoured through the older gravels. Such
gravels occur near Nottingham, Radcliffe, Farndon, and Newark; and from
the latter place they stretch to Winthorpe and Langford, and thence in
a well-defined S-shaped belt to within one and a half miles of Lincoln.
They are also found to the east of that city. The waters were again
rapidly lowered and escaped by two exits--the Humber and the Lincoln
Gap. Gravels formed at this stage occupy not only the floor of the
present Trent valley, but below Newark spread widely over the ground
to the east, abut against the well-marked terrace of the second series
near Langford and Eagle, and sweep round the northern flank of the
Doddington Hills to Lincoln.
The rather scanty evidence at our disposal tends to show that all
these deposits were formed after the retreat of the ice, for although
they rest upon boulder-clay (the ground moraine of the ice-sheet) at
several points, they are never found beneath it. Between Nottingham
and Newark the valley floor is almost certainly post-glacial, for,
were it not so, we should expect to find boulder-clay on the valley
slopes or beneath the river deposits--but such relics are wanting. The
river had, however, established its present course very soon after the
close of the Ice Age, because the bones of extinct mammalia--mammoth,
rhinoceros, and hippopotamus--have been found in the valley deposits
above Nottingham. At such a time heavy floods would occur when the
winter snowfall melted in the spring, and the river and its feeders
would be larger and more powerful than the present stream, which cannot
lift and spread gravel over its flood plain.
Between the flood-periods the stream was choked with débris and
gravel-bars, and compelled to split up into rapidly changing branches
which spread the gravels far and wide. Such was the ancient Trent--a
powerful flood immediately after the Ice Age, but slowly dwindling in
volume and power as, in course of time, it cut deeper and deeper and
sunk its valley below the level of the earlier-formed gravels, which
were therefore left as terraces and flats above the level of the latest
and lowest flood-plains (Fig. 1). The older gravels are probably of
Palæolithic Age, although no remains of the earlier Stone Age have been
found in them. Palæolithic man, however, inhabited the district, for
signs of his presence have been discovered in the Creswell Caves, hence
it is reasonable to expect that Palæolithic implements may eventually
be discovered in some of the oldest post-glacial gravels between
Nottingham, Newark, and Lincoln.
[Illustration: Fig. 1.]
In the Idle and Leen valleys there are also gravel terraces of
considerable antiquity, whose history is very similar, although
somewhat shorter than those of the Trent.
THE PRESENT RIVER TRENT
Since the accumulation of the river gravels there has been slight
widening of the valley in places, but hardly any deepening. The
gravels, as a rule, are spread over it from side to side beneath the
recent alluvium of the present enfeebled river, and the surface of the
alluvial plain is at a slightly lower level than that of the gravel
terraces. At ordinary times the river meanders to and fro among its
ancient gravel-bars without sufficient energy to clear away all the
detritus brought down to the flat by its tributaries. It rearranges
the mixed sandy gravel of the old river, depositing the sand above the
gravel, and placing a layer of loam, derived mainly from red Triassic
rocks, upon the top of all. Thus the alluvial plain--within the old
gravel plain--is built up both by lateral wandering of the river and by
the floods which level up the surface.
Between Midsummer and Christmas A.D. 1346 long continued rains
caused one of the most disastrous of the early recorded floods. In
1683 the bridges at Nottingham and Newark were destroyed by ice and
water, due to the breaking up of a frost (which began in September,
accompanied by much snow). Muskham and Holme also suffered severely.
The Brampton bank (Breach Pit Bank) was broken five times previous to
1730, and again in 1824, since when a new bank has been erected. The
banks near Newton and Torksey gave way in November 1770 and flooded all
the lands on both sides of the Foss Dyke as far as Lincoln, flooding
villages and destroying great quantities of hay and corn. Water stood
several feet deep in the houses of Narrow Marsh, Nottingham. Floods
also occurred in 1774 and 1790.
The great flood of Candlemas 1795 was--like that of 1683--the result
of a quick thaw after a frost, which lasted from December 24, 1794,
until February 9, 1795, and was accompanied by some 15 inches of snow.
In Notts, as well as in Staffordshire and Derbyshire, the whole of the
Trent valley was a scene of desolation, rendered more terrible by the
masses of ice and melted snow carried along by the waters. The outer
river bank near Spalford (the Wath Bank) burst at the south-east end
of South Clifton Hill (Fig. 2), where the signs of the flood are still
discernible (the hollow formed, though now dry, was long filled with
water). An immense breach was formed, into which 80 loads of faggots
and over 400 tons of earth were dumped before it was filled up.
[Illustration: Fig. 2.]
Sweeping across country from this gap, the water soon converted some
20,000 acres of land, west of Lincoln, into a vast lake, and only
stopped here because the High Street at Lincoln was raised above the
general level of the Foss Dyke. The country inundated being in those
days largely composed of swamp lands (now drained and cultivated), the
damage would bear no comparison to that which would be caused by a
similar flood at the present day.
With one exception it entered every house in Spalford, and Girton
village street was submerged 3 feet. The water rose to a height of 4
feet 6 inches on North Collingham Churchyard wall (31 feet 6 inches
above O.D.). In Nottingham the inhabitants of Narrow Marsh were
prisoners for two days and nights, the water being 3 feet deep in some
places. Water also entered these houses in 1809.
A great inundation took place in 1814 after snow and frost, and
thousands of acres of hay and corn were laid under water by a high
flood on the 5th August 1839; whilst in November 1852, before the bank
gave way near Dunham, the waters were halfway up the western wall of
Collingham Churchyard and drowned Girton village street to a depth of 2
feet. At Nottingham the waters rose 14 feet 9 inches above their mean
level.
In more recent times a sudden thaw produced an immense flood in
January 1867, and in October 1875 thousands of acres were deluged in
the Trent valley, the scene from Nottingham or Newark Castles being
most remarkable, buildings, hedges, and railway lines alone appearing
above the water-line. Marks registering this flood are preserved at
Nottingham, Fiskerton (Trent House), Newark, Collingham, Girton,[42]
and Low Marnham (the stone crosses at North Muskham and Holme are
said to be records of floods, but are unfortunately undated). So deep
was the water that a four-oared boat was rowed by Newark Magnus boys
across country to Averham and Kelham. At Low Marnham, which is entirely
surrounded by a flood-bank, a great struggle took place to prevent the
water from overtopping the bank and flooding the village, in which
there was a valuable store of grain. When all efforts seemed to be in
vain, relief came at the critical moment by the bursting of a bank near
Ragnall.
This flood was at Nottingham 5½ inches higher than that of 1852, 23½
inches higher than that of July 1875, and 28 inches higher than that of
a later flood in January 1877. The flood of 1795 is estimated to have
been 10 inches higher than that of 1875.[43]
The severe floods of 1887, 1895, and 1901, and the recent flood which
at Nottingham culminated at 6 A.M. upon the 4th December 1910,
will live long in the memory of Nottinghamshire people. In the latter
case incessant rains, following upon a severe snowstorm, produced a
flood against which the improvements in drainage and dredging of the
river bed were alike impotent. The floods continued to rise between
Nottingham and Gainsborough and produced scenes unparalleled since
1875. Official figures for the height of the Trent at Trent Bridge in
the recent big floods are[44]:--
October 1875 80.38 feet above mean sea-level at Liverpool.
„ 1901 79.65 feet „ „ „ „
July 1875 78.46 feet „ „ „ „
„ 1895 78.25 feet „ „ „ „
Yesterday (December
4, 1910) 78.63 feet „ „ „ „
One of the most remarkable features was the flooding of the Midland
Railway line from beyond Attenborough to the centre bridge of the
Nottingham Midland Station. All trains between Nottingham and Trent had
to plough their way for five miles through water 3 to 4 feet deep in
places; every locomotive, however, got through safely. At Collingham
the water rose to within less than a foot of the 1875 level, whilst it
poured bodily over the flood-bank near Gainsborough.
[Illustration: THE GREAT FLOOD OF OCTOBER 1875.
(View from Nottingham Castle looking South.)]
It will be seen from the above account that whereas the smaller floods
usually inundate the lower and recent alluvial plain, mostly meadow and
pasture land, the more severe floods (_e.g._ 1875) cover large
tracts of the higher-lying river gravels of the ancient Trent, now
occupied by such villages as West Bridgford, Fiskerton, Collingham,
Holme, Girton, and Dunham.
BLOWN SANDS
As we trace the gravels northwards from Nottingham to Newark, and
thence to the Humber, the stones of which they are composed are noticed
to become increasingly finer, and there is much more sand mixed with
them. During the later days of the ancient Trent, when its waters kept
altering their courses, the river channels, when dry, laid bare the
sand, which was caught up by the prevalent winds--then, as now, blowing
from the south-west. The sand was swept up on to the higher parts of
the river plain, and accumulated as dunes near what is now the main
road from Collingham to the north.
Although to some extent fixed in position by the growth of grasses and
gorse, and partly destroyed or levelled by agricultural operations,
there still remain enough dunes to give a characteristic seaside-like
appearance to the district, especially near Girton and Besthorpe. It is
interesting to note that, since a part of the tract has been brought
into cultivation, the drifting has again commenced, the sand being
piled up in the north-east corner of every arable field, and swept away
from the south-west corner. The direction of the winds which formed the
original dunes also accounts for the nearly complete absence of blown
sands on the western side of the Trent valley below Newark.
It is related that in the coaching days wheeled traffic often
experienced considerable difficulty in passing along the high road near
Besthorpe and Girton because of the great depth of the sand which had
been blown into it from the dunes.
CHANGES IN THE COURSE OF THE TRENT
We have seen that the ancient Trent wandered freely over its gravelly
flood-plain, splitting up rapidly into branches, and abruptly altering
parts of its course with every flood. Nowadays, although floods still
occur, the river’s course is more or less controlled by flood-banks,
and the chief changes are due to the slow action of the river swinging
into and undermining its bank as it sweeps round its curves; yet, even
within historical times, we have records of sudden changes in course.
These changes are of two classes--firstly, those in which the river has
found a new channel through the old gravels; and, secondly, those in
which the river has shortened its course on its present alluvium. As
examples of the first class we may cite the cases of Kelham and Muskham.
Rastall, quoting from an autograph of Thomas Heron of Newark, says:
“Where the main stream now runs by Kelham there was a small brook
which, not being sufficient for the various purposes of the Sutton
family resident there, a cut was made from the Trent to the brook which
gave a turn to the whole current ... it then forced its way and formed
that channel which is now seen. There were carriage bridges over the
brook at Kelham and Muskham ... and they were obliged to build bridges
over the new and extended river.” This probably occurred before 1225,
because tolls were at that date collected at Kelham Bridge.
According to Dickinson and Throsby, the hamlet of Holme was attached
to the parish of North Muskham, until the Trent, in A.D. 1600,
separated the two places during a high flood (Fig. 3). Saxton’s map,
however, published about 1576, shows Holme already cut off. A will of
Stephen Surflett, of the same date, leaves land for the maintenance of
the water-bank at Holme; it is therefore probable that the change took
place in Surflett’s lifetime. The alluvium between Muskham and Holme is
three times the width of the stream, whilst that at Kelham is no wider
than the river itself; but whereas the Kelham cut was nearly straight,
that at Holme must have followed a winding course: subsequent movement
of the meanders down stream would account for the greater width of the
alluvial strip. An old man living at Holme last century remembered a
barge sinking in the river on a spot, now an orchard, 100 yards from
the stream.
[Illustration: Fig. 3.--The Trent separating Holme from North
Muskham.
The stippled areas are gravel.]
Changes in course on the recent alluvium have taken place sometimes by
artificial means, but usually in a natural manner.
The Nottingham Borough Records for 1392 give an account of a “Process
against the Lord of Colwick for obstructing the course of the Trent,”
the substance of which is that William de Colwick, Knight, and one
Richard Byron, Knight, and others, have diverted the waters of Trent
from its ancient course at Over Colwick into a trench, by which a
portion of the said water of Trent formerly held its course, by
planting obstructions, such as willows and piles. The water totally
left its former course and ran by the aforesaid trench to the mill in
Over Colwick, where a closed “wear” was made. The former course, about
1¾ miles in length, between the village of Adbolton and the village of
Over Colwick, was destroyed and filled up by sand, willows, and other
obstructions, so that ships could not come up the river to Nottingham
for nine years.