Winteringham Buildings & Materials

Winteringham Local History and Genealogy at winteringham.info

See also the renovation of Walnut Farm Cottage:

Bricks and Mortar ...

Old shops, West End, WinteringhamWinteringham’s earliest houses were built of the local stone, and these two shops in West End are examples of this. 

But bricks and tiles were also manufactured in the village for a very long time, and evidence such as the clay pits in the aptly named ‘Old Brick Fields’ showed they had been used before the middle of the 19th century. 

There were three brickworks in the village by the latter part of the nineteenth century - Suttons, Slaters and one half a mile west of Ferriby Sluice - but this last one was washed away, together with two cottages belonging to it, by the Humber.

In White’s 1842 Directory, the William Marshall is listed not just as the village butcher, but also the brickmaker too. He sold his brick-making business in 1857, and we assume that he then concentrated on butchery.

George Button, and then his son Harold were brickmakers too, but after they finished, that was the end of brick manufacture in Winteringham.

Cement Factory, Winteringham, old factoryIt was not, though, the end of Winteringham clay as a building material.  In 1938, Eastwoods opened their cement factory, utilising the chalk from the hill above South Ferriby which was transported to the works by overhead cableway, and clay from Cement factory aerial ropeway at South FerribyWinteringham Ings where the plant was built. The factory chimney, at 232 feet could be seen for many miles distant. The cement was named “Eastwoods Humber Cement” and was manufactured using a ‘wet’ process. Eastwoods owned three other cement factories - Barrington in Cambridgeshire, Chinnor in Oxfordshire and Lewes in Sussex, plus two subsidiaries overseas, a brick-making business and a builders merchants’. 

There was a narrow-gauge railway running out into the clay fields, which was powered by diesel locomotives, and fed by dredgers. 

In 1967, after the factory had been acquired by Rugby Portland Cement, the new plant was built, changing over to a dry process, and fed with chalk by a less-romantic, though doubtless more efficient conveyor belt.

Cement factory at Winteringham - new building

Bye Laws and Thatch

Old Cottage West End Winteringham
Oldest Cottage in Winteringham (Silver Street)

Above: Thought to be the oldest house in the village, pictured in September 1967, but since that time, Walnut Farm Cottage has now been dated at approximately 600 years old! (See below)

Left: detail from the photograph of the Rose Queen procession, c.1954

Despite losing the house above in the black and white photograph, Winteringham had, and still has some very old houses.

The plaque above the door is not readable even in the original photograph, but it stated that the cottage was built in 1677.

The house in the colour photograph was built five years earlier.

Both houses would originally have been thatched. To help prevent the thatch catching fire, there were a number of bye-laws in force at the time.  These included the requirement that each house had to have a thatch hook - for tearing off any thatch that caught light; no cooking was to be carried out after 9 o’clock at night; and there was to be no smoking in the streets ... a law which put Winteringham 350 years ahead of New York!

Restoration of Walnut Farm Cottage

In 2006-7 the renovation of the iconic building on Silver Street, Walnut Cottage, was begun, and Ken Jacobs took a unique series of photographs detailing the stages both inside and outside the building. It had not been lived in for more than 50 years by the time renovation was begun.  To see these photographs, click one of the areas below:

Walnut Farm - originalOutside views

Inside Views Inside views

Detail photos Detail photos  

Walnut CottageProgress February 2007

Boot from the ChimneyAugust 2007- the boot

Walnut Farm Cottage wellOctober 2007 - the well

Further Research: For further research about cement, click here for the Cemex website.

Have you tried the other Winteringham Websites?
Parish Council (includes current news items, photographs, weather forecasts, calendar of events, etc etc) Don Burton World of NaturePhoto Archive (modern photographs of the village), What the Papers have said about Winteringham (since July 2004), High Resolution Historical Photographs, Winteringham Film Archive, Winteringham Football Club

AddThis Feed Button
AddThis Social Bookmark Button
Contact Winteringham.info

Visitors

Winteringham Info Favicon