Bodkins and Blacksmiths: Part One

Ever heard of a place called Bodkin Hall? No, we hadn’t either. Actually, that’s not strictly true. We had heard of it, but we’d no idea where it was. We thought it might have been somewhere down Bodkin Lane in Out Rawcliffe, but it wasn’t. That’s because Bodkin Hall in Pilling isn’t really a hall at all. In actual fact, it’s reckoned to be the oldest blacksmith’s in the village, although, of course, it’s undergone a few alterations since its halcyon days when the walls vibrated to the sounds of hammers on the anvil and the air was filled with the stench of burning hoof.
Exactly where the building attained its unusual name we couldn’t honestly say. The word ‘bodkin’ immediately suggests some sort of connection with sewing and seamstresses (no comments please) -- sail making perhaps -- although in Lancashire dialect ‘bodkins’ is also an expression of surprise (as in “Odds Bodikins” immortally uttered in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor).
Here’s a photograph of the place. It has a certain undeniable charm about it.

Mr. Bradshaw, who currently owns Bodkin Hall, got in touch with us recently to investigate what appeared to be a wall that he’d discovered beneath his front lawn during the construction of his driveway. Obviously we couldn’t turn our noses up at that, so me, Fiona and Michelle took a trip to Pilling one evening in full detective mode for a good old snoop around.
Mr. Bradshaw had been busy. He’d dug into a sizable portion of the aforementioned drive again, just for us, revealing a swathe of archaeology that hadn’t seen the light of day for some considerable time.

Now then, that’s not the best of photographs perhaps, but for any amateur archaeologists reading this, what do you reckon that is? It’s composed of cobblestones, ancient bricks and clay.
We’ll give you a clue…it doesn’t look much like a wall to us. It’s far too wide and unstructured for that. Well, it’s far too unstructured vertically. On the horizontal somebody in times past had gone to a lot of trouble to fit the pieces together.
Our first guess was that we might be looking at the original blacksmith’s yard, especially when Mr. Bradshaw explained that the cobbled area stretched all the way beneath his newly extended garage and, when laying the floor a few years ago, he’d uncovered a number of interesting artefacts that can be seen in the photograph below.

What have we got here, then? Well, there’s a brick – Victorian – complete with the fingerprints of the somewhat lackadaisical manufacturer embedded in it. There’s some treacle ware, a rusted fork and various sizes of knackered old horseshoes (the large one, no doubt, belonging to a shire horse, whilst the smallest appears to have come off a pony…possibly a very fancy pig).
Mr. Bradshaw then kindly showed us around the house, in particular the attic, which he was currently redecorating. Because the paper has been stripped off the walls this gave us an ideal opportunity to view some of the brickwork. Out came the tape measure and it was soon established that the bricks all dated from the 18th century. (That’d be the Georgian era to you and me.)
All right, the photograph below is extremely grainy (that’s because dusk was drawing in and my camera’s atrocious at handling low light levels) but as far as photographs of bricks go, it’s adequate for the purpose of illustration.

On the ground floor the walls were cobbled (with similar sized stones to those lying beneath the driveway) and lime mortared, suggesting that during the eighteenth century (that’s somewhere between 1700 and 1799 to those who get their centuries confused) the house was rebuilt from the first floor upwards. Or to be more accurate, from the bottom of the windows on the first floor upwards.
There were also some fine old beams in the attic. Michelle suggested that Fiona took a closer look at the nails imbedded in them. (You can tell a lot from the shape of a nail’s head.) Unfortunately the ever-gathering gloaming proved to be more than my camera could handle. The bunk up proved to be more than Michelle’s back could handle, as well. Nonetheless, here’s the photograph (such as it is) just before her back gave out and the pair of them ended up in a heap on the floor none-the-wiser about the shape of the nails for all their efforts.

Now, I did say a couple of paragraphs ago that the ‘blacksmith’s yard’ theory was our first guess. Since cogitating on the matter at home we’ve reached a far more profound and obvious conclusion as to what Mr. Bradshaw had actually discovered beneath his drive. But we’ve run out of space once again, so if you’re intrigued by the possibilities you’ll just have to return for the next bit of this article.