By Peter Beacham
    From "Down the Deep Lanes" - Peter Beacham with photographs by James Ravilious (Devon Books, 2000)

There come days after the first frosts of every autumn when drying grass and dying bracken so burnish Devon's uplands and moors that the hills glow even in the gloom of an equinoctial gale and if caught in strong slanting sunlight against a sky of battleship grey they blaze in russets and golds. Each such moment is unique in the infinite play of light on landscape, delighting the eye and satisfying the senses through the union of human activity and the natural world in the colours and textures of common land and enclosure, field boundaries and farmsteads, buildings and landscape. Only when we focus more sharply on the individual buildings of the farmstead might we realise we have naturally absorbed into this palette of harmonious perfection some rusted roofs of corrugated iron.

Yet 'corrugated' as it is generally and affectionately known does not always have a good press and is sometimes even depicted as an undesirable alien in the countryside. At worst this is the prejudice that sees it belonging in the slums and shanty towns of the global village but not for that very reason in the 'heritage landscape'. At best it is an emblem of stereotyped rusticity from which quasi-peasant wretchedness the incomer can offer deliverance; Flora Post's serial cleanup at Cold Comfort Farm must surely have included a purge of every sheet of corrugated about the place. Almost all references to this material assume it to be a tawdry twentieth-century introduction that has tarnished the countryside's natural thatched innocence.

The facts of its history are rather different. Corrugated iron was invented and patented in Britain as early as the 1820s and was the first mass-produced cladding material of the modern building industry. By 1850 it was being used with iron and timber frames for prefabricated buildings manufactured here and exported all over the world. It was a technological breakthrough. The corrugations give strength and considerable structural advantages over flat sheeting, even allowing it to be built in a curved profile as a self-supporting barrel roof to cover relatively large areas. So it is that the same material cladding the humblest woodshed on a remote Devon smallholding was taken up by kings, princes and governors: as early as 1843 in Africa King Eyambo of Calabar chose corrugated from a Liverpool firm to clad his sumptuous new iron palace for himself and his 320 wives. It was subsequently to be employed in cathedrals, churches and chapels; dockyards, barracks and warehouses; town halls, offices and shops; villas and cottages, sheds and shelters throughout the remotest parts of Empire and to the uttermost parts of the earth.

It soon became a familiar feature of the British landscape. In 1861 J B Denton wrote in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England 'On the comparative cheapness and advantages of iron and wood in the construction of roofs of farm buildings'. It was especially useful for roofing some of the large Victorian farming enterprises that were even then known as factory farms. They must have seemed strange newcomers: the spectacular example at Eastwood Manor Farm, East Harptree in Somerset completed in 1858 looks like a railway terminus absent-mindedly erected in the middle of the Mendips from which a steam train might emerge at any moment. On the more traditional farm pre-fabricated buildings became increasingly popular as manufacturers' catalogues offered corrugated iron dairies, stables, lambing sheds, shepherds' huts, cottages, rickstands and rickcovers.

For over a century' the archetype of prefabrication on the farm has been the Dutch barn. Although indisputably a newer arrival in the family of traditional farm buildings this is a structure that seems comfortably settled into the farmstead cluster. Its modest scale relates well to the older ranges and can even mitigate the impact of much larger late twentieth century buildings by providing a transition in scale and materials between the vernacular and the contemporary. Standing alone in the fields it displays an intrinsic elegance, its slender steel uprights supporting the gentle convex curve of its roof sometimes echoed in the rhythm of the curved-headed bracing between the bays. Stuffed with yellow bales after harvest it offers even the casual passer-by a reassuring guarantee that provision has been made against the coming winter.

Low cost and general utility ensure that corrugated has always found employment in the various repair jobs that need doing on the farm. Its light-ness means that it can be used to re-roof farmyard buildings on the existing roof carpentry without expensive structural alterations. Its replacement of costly or unobtainable thatch, slate or clay tiles is undoubtedly a loss of that sense of naturally belonging in the landscape which is effortlessly displayed by vernacular roofing traditions. But how much more catastrophic would have been the wholesale disappearance of the buildings themselves. It is no exaggeration to acclaim corrugated a hero of the countryside because for well over a century it has prevented the otherwise inexorable decay of unroofed cob or earth-mortared rubble walls in the pervasive wetness of the south west's weather. Through the seemingly inevitable cycles of relative prosperity, recession and downright despair that are the lot of the farming community it has saved the familiar buildings of the farmstead from certain dereliction.

In the long established rural version of design-and-build, corrugated is the stuff of improvisation for roofing over the yard, lean-to extensions, field shelters, sheds and mended fences. Its curved virtuosity is ingeniously deployed as the coping to cob walls and even as canopies over the pointed-headed windows of a Methodist chapel proud of its rustic Gothick. With a little imagination a Nissen hut's prefabricated portability allows it to become almost anything on the farm; and a garage, scout hut or village hall elsewhere. Sadly, natural rust-red, which looks so at home against a Dartmoor landscape of dried bracken or a ploughed field of red Devon soil, is evidence of corrosion. Corrugated must be painted even if galvanised but fortunately paint not only enhances durability but almost always visual attraction as well. Bituminous black is traditional and always looks well in the landscape but the heart often rejoices in bold essays in blue, green and red that give points of colour and protest against a soulless tastefulness.

Its supremacy was eventually challenged in the late 1930s by the introduction of asbestos cement sheeting which offered better insulation and required no maintenance but whose corrugations are too wide and whose colour is anaemic compared to the original. More modern competitors have emerged with better colours but still wider corrugations. Nevertheless the original and best, now usually called 'galvanised', lives healthily on. Officialdom, at least in the form of the Ministry of Agriculture, has proved reluctant to accept its unpretentious virtues for the repair of traditional buildings. There is an indisputable case for its widespread use not only in the conservation of existing structures but in their sympathetic extension and sometimes at least for the wholly new.

In the nineteenth century the detractors of corrugated iron inevitably included the ecclesiastical establishment who mocked the catalogue chapels of nonconformity as 'tin tabernacles'. Methodism soon shattered such presumption by demonstrating how humble temporary buildings could serve the spiritual needs of ever changing mining communities in the far south west better than the ancient parish churches stranded by their medieval geography in the wrong place. In the wastes, noise and dirt of the mining areas the 'tin tent' of the chapel must indeed have seemed like a sanctuary in the wilderness. Anyone caught out in the worst of weathers will have known at least faint echoes of such experience when refuge is sought under the roof of a field barn and the rain drums deafeningly on the tin and a loose sheet bangs in the wind; we have been offered all we needed, no more and no less. That is what corrugated has always offered. It has entered the soul of the countryside in countless different guises and has long since proved it belongs there.

Image: corrugated iron shed, Fordton, Devon by James Ravilious.

You can read Peter Beacham's essay on Cob on www.england-in-particular.info.
BACK to IRON HISTORY or HOME PAGE