All products are independently selected by our editors. If you purchase something, we may earn a commission.
‘See if the house speaks to you,’ says author Alan Garner, from a high-backed chair in the Old Medicine House’s vast Tudor chimney. Smoke from the fire has escaped into the house, so the ten rooms have a silver-grey cast, as if seen through old glass.
Like the odd enchanted cottage in folklore, the Old Medicine House wasn’t always here – it was once, in fact, somewhere else. Alan and his wife, Griselda, first encountered it in Staffordshire, and promptly rescued the derelict timber-framed Tudor house from ‘ball-and-chain wreckers’ in 1970. With the help of architect Michael Peach – a former student of noted timber-frame expert Freddie Charles – and a small team of tradesmen, the couple dismantled it into ‘three wagonloads of timber’, transported them 18 miles, and rebuilt the house, beam by ancient beam, alongside Toad Hall, the Garners’s private home.
‘Freddie Charles said the house held secrets that, if it went, would be lost,’ says Alan. ‘Things he hadn’t seen but he knew would be there.’
‘It was 30 years before we started to find them,’ adds Griselda.
Dating from the 16th century, the Old Medicine House – so named because from 1870 until 1969 it was used by Samuel Johnson and his sons as a manufactory for patent medicines – is now part dwelling, part museum to a collection of archaeological finds from the house and surrounding area, ranging from Mesolithic flint blades to 20th-century medicine bottles. Alan’s books, scattered among these talismans, reflect their author’s long-standing fascination for the peculiar power held by historic artefacts.
The author’s career began with the publication of the wonderfully unsettling The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in 1960. His literature is filled with magical objects, scenes and people inspired by the surrounding landscape. ‘He pinches from everywhere,’ says Griselda. ‘But that’s what writers do, what artists do.’ The enchanted patterned dinner plates in The Owl Service (1967), for example, sit in a cabinet in the dining room. Passed down from Griselda’s mother, their ‘green and gold glinting’ pattern was ‘exactly, word for word, what Alan wrote in the book. He pinched it,’ Griselda laughs.
Alan’s most recent novel, Treacle Walker (4th Estate, 2021), now pinches the setting of the Old Medicine House. For visitors, the Booker-shortlisted story acts as a double exposure: there is Joseph Coppock’s bed next to the chimney; there is the jutting beam where Treacle Walker sits. This is a kind of family inheritance. The Garners, who Alan describes as ‘not having moved out of their square mile since at least the 16th century’, have left traces upon the landscape over generations. His great-great grandfather, a stonemason, carved an old bearded face into the rock of a well in nearby Alderley. The basin and carving appear in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, but it’s long been known locally as ‘The Wizard’s Well’.
The stories behind the acquisitions of Toad Hall and the Old Medicine House are fittingly fable-like. In 1957 at the age of 22, Alan was looking for somewhere to live. ‘I had certain criteria,’ he says. ‘One was that it had to be an old house, and ideally a timber-framed house, because that was very much a part of my childhood – old beams and rough surfaces. Nothing polite.’ He bicycled around the area in a meandering attempt to find something suitable. After exploring a lane that led to the newly built Lovell telescope, he came to the main road. Not wanting to cycle along it, he turned around and came back up the lane. ‘And then I saw something I hadn't seen before,’ he says: a piece of board stuck in the hedge. On it, daubed in whitewash, was a notice: ‘17th-century Cottage For Sale’.
Although Alan knew he couldn’t afford the place, he went to have a look. ‘I went down the track to the bottom of the valley and up the field at the other side. So I approached the house from the north-east. And as the roofline started to appear, I began to whimper, because the way the chimneys were aligned told me something: I wasn’t looking at a cottage, I was looking at a Medieval great hall.’
Acquiring the property came via a stroke of good fortune. When Alan told his parents that he’d found ‘the only place I can live’, his father – ‘a man of few words’ – disappeared to the pub. When he came back, he had the money for the property. ‘He revealed to me that he had been paying a penny a week to a friendly society called the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, and that they would give me a mortgage,’ says Alan with a wry smile. ‘It took me 15 years to pay it back.’
Some time after moving in, he got the house listed. ‘I knew how important it was. And the more I looked at it, the more I lived with it, the more important it became.’ When The Owl Service won two national literary prizes and was turned into an eight-part TV series, Alan wrote the scripts, which earned him enough money to begin real repairs on the house – including installing running water and electricity. It took a year to find the right architect.
As Alan tells it, ‘We found Michael Peach through a chain of events.’ Peach had set up on his own and had been waiting for work to come in, which it didn’t, until a letter came through the letterbox. ‘From me,’ says Alan. ‘Griselda had done a sketch of the rear wall of Toad Hall. And he looked at it and thought, “The woman can’t draw.” But he came to look at the house. When he saw that Griselda could draw, he got very excited. The more excited he got, the quieter his voice became. He'd sit around the table and be so excited we couldn't hear what he was saying.’
Peach then revealed that he and Freddie Charles had been involved with a forerunner of English Heritage on a four-year attempt to save another timber-framed structure – the Old Medicine House. Demolition was due to start in a week. ‘The report on the house said quite clearly that if the building was lost, so would an important part of the history of Tudor domestic timber framing,’ says Alan. The Garners bought the derelict building – for one pound.
Alan’s publisher, William Collins, fronted the money to dismantle the house and move it to the Garners’ property. Peach numbered each of the 400 timbers, much in the same way 16th-century artisans did (their score marks are still visible on the beams). Most of the wattle-and-daub panels had disintegrated so they were discarded, but in one of the panels, trailed by a finger when the plaster was wet, was a date: 1605. That was kept. Another find was a cowrie shell from the Red Sea, hidden in the wall of ‘the great chamber’, serving to magically protect the room where births and deaths occurred across five centuries.
Alan describes the tragedies and triumphs of former owners and visitors to both the houses: Mrs Carter, who lived in Toad Hall all her life and cared for her disabled brother, left the furniture on the condition that it would remain in the house. Edward Pope, a schoolmaster who had survived a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, made the first modern improvement to the house, piping water from the well into the house and installing a semi-rotary hand pump in the kitchen. For the first time in her life, Mrs Carter had running water. And then there was ‘the Rat Man’, who visited the Old Medicine House to lay traps, moving from room to room with a growing sense of disquiet. Rounding a corner, he turned whey-white: he’d found his initials carved into a beam, despite never having visited the area. He’d played in the house as a child when it was located 18 miles away. Later in his life, returning from Dunkirk on a train of wounded soldiers bound for an unknown destination, he wiped his sleeve over the misted glass. Framed in the small circle was the house, and he knew he was almost home.
This collapsing of time, history and stories into a single place is also a feature of Alan’s work. As if conjuring this theme, from May to mid-August the house acts as a sundial. Light slants through an ancient timber-framed window, casting a beam across the wall; its slow growth makes visible the rotation of the earth. ‘About 960 kilometres an hour,’ says Alan. ‘It’s expanding just enough for you to see how fast the world is turning.’
This article was first published in June 2023.
‘Powsels and Thrums’ by Alan Garner is published by by 4th Estate. ‘Treacle Walker’, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, was published by Simon & Schuster in November 2023.
The Old Medicine House is home to the Blackden Trust, established by Alan and Griselda to preserve, explore and share the history of the house and surrounding landscape. Details: www.theblackdentrust.org.uk
