A Virtual Visit to Sudbrook with Dr Mark Lewis
From its foundation in 1847, one of the important activities
of the Monmouthshire Antiquarian Association has been its visits to sites of
archaeological, historical and architectural interest. Spring 2020 has seen an historical ‘lockdown’, preventing
travel beyond the absolute necessary and preventing meetings as groups. Not surprisingly, virtual solutions have been
rapidly mastered and, for many, are now mainstream ways of keeping in touch with
the wider world. In this spirit,
Association member, Mark Lewis, has suggested a ‘virtual visit’ option for the
Monmouthshire Antiquarian Association as a stopgap until better times return. Mark has chosen Sudbrook for his ‘virtual visit’, scanning
images of Holy Trinity Chapel that he took in the mid-1980s; before its bell-cote
fell to the ground. The use of
historical images makes this ‘visit’ virtual temporally as well as physically,
and we invite other members to trawl their own photographic archives and
forward their own ‘virtual visits’ for this website.
Sudbrook
By Mark
Lewis MSc, PhD, FSA
A photographic and historical overview for the village of
Sudbrook and its sites is best accessed remotely, online, through the RCAHMW’s Coflein and relevant links are provided within this note. Situated at the end of a no-through road, Sudbrook is one of
those places that one does not necessarily visit unless a conscious decision to
visit has been made, e.g. whilst walking the Wales Coastal Path. The decision, if made, is archaeologically
rewarding, for Sudbrook offers the visitor an impressive Iron Age promontory fort a ruined medieval church, Holy Trinity Church, and the well-preserved workers' village for the construction of the Severn Railway Tunnel, with its majestic pump house and fan house. An outbreak of smallpox in Chepstow in 1883 led to the
construction of a fever hospital. It had four wards with en-suite toilets, a surgery, kitchen, scullery, laundry and mortuary. See plan. It was set back, socially distanced, from the village, opposite
Sea View Terrace, and in line with the post office at the end of Post Office
Row, on the site of the later paper mill (and near the site of the medieval
water grist mill and mill pond shown as the ‘Olde Mill’ on John Aram’s 1777 map
– see Archwilio: 04769g, with a link to The Old Mill and Paper Mill dating from 1958-2007.
The Mission Hall and the Post Card
Sadly, Sudbrook’s most impressive communal building, its
Mission Hall which seated 1,000 people, also no longer stands, but its
magnificent pipe organ was preserved at Christ Church, Aberbeeg, until its
closure in 2012. Shropshire Museums
Service preserves a very fine late-19th century sketch of the interior of Sudbrook’s Mission Hall which shows the seating
arrangement, pulpit and three-towered organ.
The sketchbook also contains images of the exterior of the Mission Hall
and of Holy Trinity Church at the time. Sadly, Shropshire Museums Service’s ‘Darwin
Country’ website is currently being rebuilt and its catalogue cannot currently
be searched, but the images still feature online in Google images searches. See illustration from the Revd. C.H.A. Porter Collection.
'The Mission Hall Subrook' was posted to Albert House, Stoke Flemming, Devon and franked in Subrook on 8th Jan. 1907. The correspondence on the reverse is, in every way, the Edwardian equivalent of the modern-day text message, omitting the sentence structures of full stops and capital letters, the text being a continuous stream. The postcard is a possible reminder of internal migration linked with the railway and industries of South Wales. An Ethel Emily Davis was born at Stoke Fleming, Kingsbridge, Devon in 1879, Recourse to the censuses will hopefully
resolve the nature of the relationship between the correspondents and reveal
their occupations. Intriguingly,
marriage indexes online record a marriage for John Edwin Davis in 1907 at
Kingsbridge, Devon, and for Ethel Emily Davis at Kingsbridge, Devon, in
1908. Perhaps they were siblings? Be that as it may, Edwin attests the ‘rough
and wet weather’ which the ruins of Holy Trinity chapel were exposed to, at
least during the middle of the winter of 1906-7!and an Edwin Davis was born
in 1881 at Brixham, Totnes, Devon whilst a John Edwin Davis was born at
Kingsbridge, Devon, in 1881 (making him 26 years old in 1907) and was residing
in Stoke Fleming in 1901, according to official record indexes.
The Workers Village and the Severn Tunnel
One of Sudbrook’s most significant heritage claims may be
seen by inspection of the front walls of some of the terraces of
workers’ houses to the north of, and parallel to, the former railway line and
its adjacent road. Impressions of planks of wood may be clearly seen in
concrete beneath exterior paint for these ten houses were the amongst the first
concrete-built houses in Britain (1882-4). The beam of one of the six great Cornish beam engines that, from its
construction, pumped the water of the Great Spring out of the Tunnel workings
may still be seen, not in Sudbrook, but in the grounds of Swansea Museum
(formerly The Royal Institution of South Wales and Monmouthshire; the first
museum to open in Wales (completed in 1841), followed by the Monmouthshire
Antiquarian’s ‘Museum of Antiquities’ at Caerleon in 1850). See Beam Engine.
Holy Trinity Church
The RCAHMW online archive for Sudbrook church contains images
from the Revd. C.H.A. Porter Collection. Amongst them are copies of drawings attributed
to Monmouthshire Antiquarian Association founding member F.J. Mitchell of Llanfrechfa Grange published by Octavius Morgan and Thomas Wakeman in their ‘Notes on
Ecclesiastical Remains at Runston, Sudbrook, Dinham and Llanbedr’ published
by the (then) Monmouthshire and Caerleon Antiquarian Association (1858). However, the preface to their notes states
that the illustrations were executed and drawn on stone by John Edward Lee
(founder of the Monmouthshire Antiquarian Association), with the plan and
mouldings executed by F. J. Mitchell. The Association’s hope was to ‘rescue from
oblivion (and possibly in some measure by the interest thus excited, from destruction
also), remains of buildings either little known or likely to go to decay.’ Their
description of the remains in 1858 states that the ‘Bell-cot …is so
entirely shrouded with ivy, that it is hardly to be discovered’. This
initially probably afforded a degree of protection from the elements in this
exposed location.
Revd. Porter’s drawing dated 15.5.[19]48 suggests that the
Norman south nave window, situated between the chancel arch and south porch
(drawn by John Edward Lee in 1858) may have survived (wholly or in part) in
situ until c. 1948, but it is not clearly present in the Shropshire
Museums Service sketch, the 1887 lithograph of the chapel in Thomas A. Walker’s
book ‘The
Severn Tunnel: Its Construction and Difficulties, 1872-1887’ (1890:
4) which was clearly the published version of the Shropshire Museums Service's sketch of the chapel in the book (access and scroll down) but the lithographer has misinterpreted the bell-cote arches as
round-headed rather than pointed), or the RCAHMW nitrate negative taken by
Leonard Monroe, see Coflein (but scroll down for pictures).
National Museum Wales preserves a drawing of the chapel by
Sarah Ormerod, but only provides details of picture and there is no image. Monmouthshire Antiquarian Association member and former editor of
its journal, Revd Dr David H. Williams, published a detailed history of
Sudbrook, including the chapel, in The Monmouthshire Antiquary (Williams
1971: Mon. Ant. 3, 20-28).
Dilapidation of the chapel during the first half of the eighteenth
century seems to have been followed by roof removal or collapse, perhaps in the
decades around 1750. William Coxe (1801)
appears to have found verbal accounts of burials, and divine services within
the chapel, ‘within the memory of several persons now living’ credible
on the occasion of his visit. Sir Richard Colt Hoare, and Coxe's Tour, dated to visit(s) of autumn 1798 or spring or autumn 1799. See also a lithographic print by Revd. J. Gardner, published in 1793 and one by Henry Gastineau published
in 1830. Sudbrook Chapel on the Caldicot Levels. These illustrations seem to support a, then-relatively recent abandonment of the building,
for they show it unroofed and overgrown in a manner similar to that shown in
the author’s photographs below, but with little apparent loss or erosion of
stonework:
Mark Lewis's photographs (© Mark Lewis. All rights reserved)
Pictures of Sudbrook Chapel included below were taken by
the author using a simple 35mm box camera and 35mm film SLR camera on two
occasions, c. 1984 and c. 1986, and they have been scanned from
colour prints. They show the advanced
ivy growth and scrub engulfing the chapel remains during the early 1980s. An attempt to clear the scrub from the
interior occurred around c. 1986 and this is recorded in images 3 to 6. It has been said that a local resident,
concerned about the potential damage caused, especially, by the ivy, initiated
a clearance of the monument again in 2015, in part using fire. The resulting exposure of the remains is
fully recorded on Coflein.
 |
Holy Trinity Chapel, Sudbrook, circa 1984,
before clearance, looking north-east from the banks of the promontory fort. |
 |
Holy Trinity Chapel, Sudbrook, circa 1986,
looking north-east from the banks of the promontory fort, following clearance. |
 |
Holy Trinity Chapel, Sudbrook, remains of western
wall and window circa 1986, looking north-east from
the banks of the promontory fort, following clearance.
|
 |
Holy Trinity Chapel, Sudbrook, circa 1986,
west window taken from outside the church looking eastwards towards the chancel arch following clearance. |
 |
Holy Trinity Chapel, Sudbrook, inscribed tombstone fragments within the chancel of the church circa 1986, following clearance. The surviving fragments have a chamfered upper edge and, on the flat, upper, face an inscription border consistent with medieval ‘coffin lid’ grave markers. A Greek cross within a circle appears to straddle the crack, within the inscription border, and the date ‘1635’ may be read on the upper face of the stone, possibly indicating reuse. Sadly, the rest of the inscription is weathered and illegible.
The bell-cote
The author’s photographs suggest that the bell-cote had partially
collapsed in situ, engulfed in ivy once more, with some loss circa 1985,
before the cleansing by fire in 2015. It
is estimated that the slow deterioration and collapse of the bell-cote occurred
during the 1980s and 1990s, impressively about 250 years after the probable
date of abandonment. This resulted in
the ultimate fall of the bell-cote arches to the floor of the nave beneath,
where they could be clearly seen in 2015.
The comprehensive 2015 clearance is likely to expose the stonework of
the structure to increased weathering, especially alveolar erosion (particularly
resulting from wind combined with rain, frost, etc.), and it will be
interesting to monitor the structure’s ongoing decay if it remains exposed to
the elements without intervention. Limited excavations within the chapel, and outside it, were
undertaken by G-GAT and these have been published in Studia Celtica (Sell,
S. 2001: Stud. Celt. 35, 109-141).
