Pretty as a Beatrix Potter cottage, it stands on the sunlit sea-moor of Redwick.   The Green embankment across the meadows is the sea-wall, and a gentle south breeze wafts ozone – essence of Severn – across to Fir Tree Cottage.

 

A pretty young bride awaits me in the porch.  Christine came here from Newport, where all the girls are glamorous; she married one of those engineer-magicians who like modern Jacks o’ Kent are striding the Severn with that incredible bridge.  With their two lodgers, Tinker Bell the white poodle, and Phred the cat, they form a happy household.

 

As we talked on that sunblest afternoon a jolly countrywoman approached. ‘I asked Miss Hilda Halfacre to meet you,’ said Mrs Evans ‘She lived here for fifty years and knows more about the cottage than I do.’

 

Under Miss Halfacre’s instructions I got a picture of the cottage before its modernisation. ‘This end room’ – at the right of my drawing – ‘was of old two rooms separated by a partition.  One was the pantry, the other the sitting room.’  That sittingroom must have been what the Welsh called the ‘parlwr back’ – the little parlour.

 

Kitchen

‘The spacious and pleasant room adjoining was the kitchen, with its massive fireplace.  In spite of the changes you can still see the great thickness of the cross wall which contains not merely the fireplace but also the spiral stone stairway.’

 

‘Between the stairs and the fireplace a passage leads into what was the dairy and that in turn was joined to the cellar.   The last room on the left, entered only from without, was the stable.  No, I never heard that referred to as the cowhouse, and you see that a fireplace with copper and bake-oven was installed when its use as a stable ended.’

 

‘The outhouse, opposite the front of the dairy was as old as the cottage.  Near the entrance was the well, and at the far end was the original fireplace, bake-oven and copper boiler.’

 

‘At the rear of the stable the pigsty survives, and that is all, except the name.  A big fir tree stood between the cottage and the road, but the cottage is much older than the tree.  It would be interesting to know the first name of the cottage.’

 

The Stops

After the grand tour of the homestead ground-floor we took tea in the kitchen, transformed now into a bright and pleasant sittingroom-cum-lounge-cum-drawing room.

 

Walls, pictures, curtains, furniture testified to the good taste of my charming young hostess, who was thrilled when I was able to assure her that the ‘stops’ on the ceiling-beams gave the early seventeenth century as the ‘date’ of her cottage.  Maybe, she felt, before the Pilgrim Fathers left Plymouth; maybe before Charles 1 was king; maybe almost as old as the bible in English!

 

With pride she showed me a ‘camphor-chest’ from Borneo a gift from her husband’s parents. ‘Compartments for candles?’ I asked, and she flushed with greater pride as she answered, ‘Not in this chest, but look at my Welsh ‘hope’ chest.’  This was indeed a treasure in dark carved oak with a candle-compartment at each end.  I suspect that the ‘hope chest’ was named after the ‘cist gobaith,’ traditional gift to a bride.

 

I saw the delightful bedrooms, where the dainty furniture and fittings of this era rested under the principals and corbels of Stuart days.   Good it was to see that the corbels supporting the big principals had been retained.

 

Footnote:  In the deed of 1756 Jonathan Squibbs is named as the owner of Fir Tree Farm.  A century and more later when it was taken over by Mr Halfacre from Mr Moses Squibbs the name was changed to Fir Tree Cottage.

 

I assure my readers that the personal names in this article are all genuine.