Types of pebble structures

The Aylesbeare Village Hall entrance lobby has a pebble floor, with the design picked out in black pebbles to represent a door mat, with a diamond pattern in-filling the central section (Figure 13.2c). These were collected from Budleigh Salterton beach, because when the hall was built in 1923 pebbles were regarded as the most suitable decorative building material. This diamond pattern is repeated on paths in Newton Poppleford and Otterton.

At Budleigh Salterton the pebble wall running down Saltings Hill is an iconic example of uniform rows of pebbles forming a wall (Figure 13.2d). An almost unique feature of the town is the roadside pebble guttering formed from neat rows of pebbles 5 cm (2 inches) to 10 cm in size lining the drainage gutters. Fine examples can also be found on the sea front, running for almost 100 m, and along Cliff Terrace, Ryll Lane and Landsdown Road (Figure 13.3a).

The majority of walls are constructed from rows of pebbles with a concrete capping. Barns built of pebbles with brick quoins are a featureof some villages, with the pebbles being collected from pits and the surrounding fields and not brought from the beach (Figure 13.3b).

At East Budleigh there is a recent example of a new pebble wall that has been capped with tiles, showing that some people today hold pebbles in high regard as decorative building material (Figure 13.3c). Along the High Street there are pebble paths, with the pathways into the house defined with the pebbles running in the opposite direction.

At Fluxton there is what has to be one of the most amazing pebble structures, built 40 years ago with pebbles that were collected from the river Otter and sorted in the local farmyard. This decorative wall capped with tiles has arches and windows and dominates the garden, and is unique. It was built by a local stonemason, Gordon Ash (Figure 13.3d).

One of the largest pebbled areas can be found at Lympstone, where the whole of Quay Lane has a pebble path running between the cottages down to the estuary (Figure 13.4a). At Newton Poppleford 110 structures have been recorded, the majority being walls, running along the length of the High Street. Fine examples of decorative paths can be found in the village along Station Road (Figure 13.4b). Several walls have been painted black, as at the Southern Cross tea rooms, and the only otherexample of this is at Woodbury. The only church in the 17 villages to have pebbles used in the construction of the walls is St Gregory’s, where they feature in the side chapel wall (Figure 13.4c). Pebble farmyards were once a common feature in the area but most are now concreted over. Examples can be still found at Southerton, Newton Poppleford and Dotton (Figure 13.4d).

Topsham has examples of pebbles from the area and black angular pebbles that must have come from elsewhere or are from the river Exe, but nobody so far has been able to identify their source. Their use as edgings and paths can be found throughout Topsham, but some Bunter pebble structures have been identified making decorative surface features in front gardens (Figure 13.5a, b).

Woodbury Parish Council has insisted that all new building in the village should have pebble walls, which is a welcome development, and this can be seen at Gilbrook estate (Figure 13.5c). Along Greenway there is a perfect pebble wall topped with limestone blocks (Figure 13.5b) and a path of fan-shaped design (Figure 13.5d). The path would have been built with the pebbles packed tightly together so that the stones supported each other; they were embedded into the earth with only the tips of the small pebbles showing. This was built by a local builder, Charles Summerfield, in the 1900s (Brighouse 1981: 239). The church wall is of a similar design to Colaton Raleigh church, with a decorative capping of tiles and bricks and brick quoins.

Pebble colour and size

Having briefly reviewed the different types of structures that exist it just remains to highlight the differences in size and colours of the pebbles that can be seen across the area. The pebbles used in some of the walls in Woodbury are of a larger size than elsewhere. Some are up to 45 cm (18 inches) long, although the average is 20 cm (8 inches). They are not always a uniform size in many structures, and a large number of black pebbles are included in the walls. At Budleigh Salterton the pebbles found in the walls are on average 10 cm (4 inches) long and of a uniform size. At Colaton Raleigh and Newton Poppleford the most striking feature about the pebbles is their variety of colours. They range from red to yellow, grey to brown, olive to black, whilst at other villages the pebbles chosen to build structures are less colourful. This may well indicate the differential selection of very bright and particularly colourful pebbles in these two villages.

Two examples of the use of alien pebbles can be found in the area. One is at the Halfway House pub almost in the middle of the Pebblebed heathlands, where flint pebbles have been used for a retaining edging, the nearest probable source being Sidmouth. The other is hard landscaping in a garden using Charmouth beach pebbles because the owner considered the pebbles were of a better colour, that is, more uniform, and a smaller size than the local pebbles.

During recent sea defence work along the esplanade at Sidmouth the flint and greensand pebbles on the beach were buried by 150,000 tons of new pebbles transported from Black Hill quarry on the Pebblebed heathlands, making this stretch of the beach pebbles unusually brightly coloured and very similar to that at Budleigh Salterton, except that the pebbles are less smooth and well rounded. Pebbles from the same source were used to make ornamental features under the M5 motorway bridges outside Exeter during the 1970s.

The vernacular pebble architecture of the area manifests both a care and concern for pebbles in what might be regarded as simply ‘functional’ structures such as walls, paths, gutters, farmyards and buildings mostly of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century date. The earliest of these is the medieval church of St Gregory in Newton Poppleford. But all these structures are function made beautiful. The pebbles have been carefully selected, their arrangements patterned in terms of colour and form, shape and size, sometimes with quite an extraordinary attention to detail. The care taken and the attention to detail shown remind us once again of the bodily engagement involved and the fascination with what it is possible to do with these particular kinds of stones.