FIRE & IRON AT ROWHURST - 'THIS BLESSED PLOT'

A large audience heard the September talk by Lucy Quinnell of Fire and Iron Gallery on what had been her family’s house since 1932. Lucy’s own story is a fascinating one while the mysterious origins of her house have led to much speculation. BILL WHITMAN reports.

Lucy told us she was born at the northern tip of Leatherhead, opposite the Star pub. She later lived close to what is now SeeAbility, while her father ran Rowhurst Forge. She went to Therfield School, Epsom Art School and Exeter University where she read English Literature, including a module entitled Land, Landscape and Literature.

She returned at a time of major change. The M25 now bisected the family farm and had taken many acres. Her mother died that year and then too her grandmother - the first family owner of Rowhurst - so Lucy found herself living at Rowhurst with her three-year-old son while her father still ran the forge.

She founded Fire & Iron Gallery to showcase and sell metal artefacts. The business grew and after assisting with London’s Globe Theatre gates she designed and produced a sculpture at Ironbridge, the Amesbury Archer at Stonehenge, and a gold medal-winning garden at the Hampton Court Flower Show. Fire & Iron’s work in Leatherhead includes the sign for Neate’s Alley, ‘hand’ archways for a local park, the cyclists on the wall of the Letherhead Institute and the bridge-themed installation at the Church Street/High Street crossroads, not to mention the Dorking Cockerel down the A24.

Fire & Iron’s site is also a nature reserve and more recently Lucy led the successful campaign to protect the adjacent 57-acre Teazle Wood, now a major local conservation project.

Rowhurst house is located on a spur at the highest point in the area, 60 metres above sea level between two tributaries of the River Mole. The house was evidently built in three phases: a first building, represented now only by the semi-basement; a second timber framed building dated by dendrochronology to 1346; and the newest part dating from 1632. The tower-like semi-basement is a 25 feet square room with flint walls 2.5 feet thick. There are five cupboard niches in the walls, suggesting storage of important items, and arches similar to those in a large dovecote in France. Two dovecotes appear in local records, yet a dovecote would surely not have required such substantial foundations. Comparison with traces of a similar structure near Tyrwhitt House across the valley might suggest alternative function.

Lucy referred to Edwina Vardey’s A History of Leatherhead which describes Leatherhead as “a key place in local government; a centre of royal authority and the site of a minster church”. Leodridan, thought to be Leatherhead, is a royal vill in King Alfred’s will (800s) and later records for Pachenesham (North Leatherhead) feature a prison, pound, courthouse, gatehouse and church.

Might Rowhurst’s origins date back to that time - or even earlier? The semi-basement has been suggested as the missing Anglo-Saxon minster church which lay at the north end of present Leatherhead. Buildings on The Mounts dated from the 1200s, so the earlier minster church may still be found somewhere else in the area. It may be unlikely that Rowhurst itself was the church, but it is possible that Teazle Wood might one day reveal new evidence.

Rowhurst appears as a name from 1418 to 1543 in connection with some fields, followed by a long gap to 1712 where it appears as a ‘messuage’ with 40 acres. A series of very short tenures followed and the buildings became ruinous. The major development of 1632 is not documented, which is puzzling. Exactly three centuries later, Lucy’s family moved in and the modern story began.