Featherbed Lane
by Eric Brain 2004/2025 ©
“I remember, I remember,
the house where I was born.
The little window where the sun
came peeping in at morn….” (Thomas Hood)
The Southern end
I was born in Featherbed Lane and therefore of course know the area like the metaphoric ‘back of my hand’. It is alleged that the lane is thus named due to an old lady living there many years ago who kept geese for the feathers for making mattresses. Hmmm, an easy enough theory but…..read on!
It once was a through-way to Stanton Wick and to the stone quarries which were once there. One of the quarries was on land owned by Sutton Court. The other, which I can remember as a lime kiln until it was planted over, was reached by a fork in the lane (shown on the 1st series O/S map) down to Stanton Wick Farm. Until the advent of the hated Avon, it was resurfaced every few years by Clutton RDC; since then and subsequent authorities it has become impassable except to intrepid “off-roaders!.
It was also the road leading to Bromley Colliery where my father once worked until the General Strike in the 1920s when he vowed never to go down a pit again. However my wife and I accompanied him by invitation of the Deputy to go down Kilmersdon Pit just before its closure in the early 1970s, my father died soon afterwards. I remember seeing miners pass along the lane, in particular Leonard Parfitt who rode a “sit up and beg” bike and lived in The Mead. He became village postman after Bromley Pit closed.
Charlie and Annie Blanning
At the southern end of the lane where it joins the A37 is a triangular piece of land which was an orchard owned by Charles and Annie Blanning. Charlie was a strong Labour Party man and was often to be seen as teller for them at the General Elections. Charlie bought the half acre plot with a small cottage known as 51 The Flat from the Warwick Estate sale in 1920 for £220. Previously it had been let to Bill Parsons. On the far side from the cottage, the land extended to the field hedge and along behind the four cottages alongside the main road. In the orchard was a deep well and another well was situated at the rear of the cottage. Lewis Blanning, son of Charlie and Annie, still used the well as his only water supply until just before his death around 1970. Incredibly he had mains water laid in and oil-fired central heating installed just a few weeks before my father found him dead in his chair. The heating had been fired just once, by the engineers for testing.
Both Bill Parsons and Charlie Blanning, in common with many cottagers at that time, kept pigs and hens. After Charlie died in about 1938, my grandfather Fred Cook had noticed that the land to the north of the cottage was becoming overgrown with nettles, the hens had all disappeared and knowing that my parents were looking for a building plot, suggested they approached Mrs Blanning.
Delamere
After some protracted negotiations, in about 1939 with war looming, my parents bought the plot of land from Mrs Blanning, now a widow and living there with her unmarried son Lewis. My father had their house, 'Delamere', built there by Maggs & Son of Temple Cloud for £800. The house was of red London brick, small, badly designed and built in an old fashioned 1920s style. Due to a very intermittent water supply based mainly on the fact that the height of the house was similar to that of the reservoir at Downside, eight or ten miles away on Mendip, my grandfather had suggested mounting a water storage tank on a corner of the roof. This tank collected stormwater and fed a back boiler and a 'Jack Horner' coal-fired wash boiler in the corner of the kitchen. In the early 1950s the kitchen was brought up to date and the boiler and the 'Foresight' grate were removed being replaced by an electric stove, sink unit and washing machine. At the same time some of the old fashioned grained varnish with which all the doors skirtings and window sills were decorated, was painted over more in line with the modern age. The chimney breasts were outside thus taking the heat from the house, this was my father’s idea to make the rooms bigger. As the back door was opposite the fireplace in the living room, all the draught from the door swept through the house which was extremely cold. I well remember ice forming on the inside of the bedroom windows and the condensation freezing as it ran down the walls.
Bottling!
Sewage was taken care of by a septic tank in common with most country properties at that time. While the house was being built, my father "bottled" the septic tank. For those never before encountering this term, it involves setting a milk or mineral water bottle bottom side up through a hole in the concrete bottom of the tank with a thin film of concrete covering it. Following the final visit by the local council inspector, an iron bar would be ‘accidentally’ dropped on the end of the jar or bottle thus smashing it and allowing a percentage of the water content of the sewage to slowly seep into the strata beneath. These days this practice would be frowned upon and anyway, septic tanks now come in the form of a plastic sphere delivered on the back of a lorry. The limestone of the ground around the area was ideal for this and I never recall too much trouble with the tank! Nevertheless, water was used sparingly unlike today with showers, automatic washing machines and dishwashers.
Lorries
The house was finished just as war broke out and my parents moved in as hostilities started in September 1939. My father was a haulage contractor; his main contract was with the Milk Marketing Board hauling milk in churns daily from the Chewton Mendip area (where my mother had taught at Chewton school) to Hornsby's dairies in City Rd., Bristol and to Lansdown's dairies in Redfield. He had the entrance to the house from the lane made large and, in 1940, Maggs built him a garage for two lorries on the plot adjoining Mrs Blanning’s cottage. Here he kept an old grey Commer but used his 1936 Leyland Cub GL3891 for the milk. I remember even as a small child, being told that the Commer had no brakes! It soon vanished to be replaced by an additional Leyland Cub DTA 828, this time with an aluminium body and cab - quite modern for a 1937 chassis. I have since learned that father lent the Commer out one week to Dando and Rogers as their own lorry was in for repair. Bert Dando soon found that the brakes on the Commer were not upto the standard of the ones on his old Fordson or Reo and refused to drive it. The only time I remember it moving was one day when I was quite small, a rat found its way into the garage having been lured by the smell of the food we kept there for the hens. Everything was turned out until the rat was cornered and quickly despatched by father with his 12-bore. I remember Roy Collins who worked for father, rushing out as he did not want to feel the effect of a possible ricochet from the blast!!! About 1949, father went to London for another Leyland but this time a bonneted Lynx, HYV 688. It had been little used since 1938 and had been a Royal Navy vehicle; it was grey, dropsided, and still had a drawbar for a trailer. Being normal control with the cab behind the engine rather than over it as the Cub, it was not so manoeuvrable for farm work. It was not popular with the drivers but I liked it…….!
The second Leyland Cub worked until about 1951 when it, and the Lynx were replaced by the first Albion Chieftain OYC 9. For a time DTA 828 was laid up alongside the drive, for spares for the earlier one. I used to play for hours in it, standing up at the steering wheel. Eventually, in 1954 the other Cub was sold and another Albion Chieftain TYB 530 bought in its place. A third Albion Chieftain, a very much better one, came soon after secondhand from Suttons of Penzance SRL420.
My father ran a Triumph Dolomite 2-litre car DHY 623 which I remember going to view at Lydford Cross Keys in around 1950. It was white, very imposing and had been laid up during the latter part of the war even though it still had its chrome bumpers painted white as was the law in the blackout. It gave some trouble and, at the fuel crisis in 1956 when large cars were cheap, he replaced it with his first Rover 75, GHR 501 – this turned out to be one of the first hundred pre-production models made in Solihull – one of the same batch became the JET 1 gas turbine experimental car. I learned to drive on this car and the Albions, even driving the lorries back from Hinton Blewitt in the dark after hay-hauling when aged about sixteen.
Stantonways
The front of the house faced the Mendips across two small paddocks. In each there was a well, one of which was filled in in the 1950s when the mains water to the village was laid from the reservoir farther up. In this paddock, especially when the frost is on the grass, it is easy to see the outline of a boundary in which the well was once incorporated. Also, in the hedge of the lane are a couple of pieces of stone wall, and, what was once the vestige of a gate. It is shown as a cottage on the early maps and the 1881 census records a “cottage, uninhabited” which fits the location. Could this have been the cottage where the maker of the feather beds once lived? Farther along the lane is a small bungalow on the left built by Tommy Elms of Hallatrow in the 1930s for Clifford Parsons on land given him by his employer Johnny Thayer of Hill farm. It is now called 'Stanways' after the name of the field which is a corruption of "Stanton way" obviously back to the time when it was the route for horses and walkers between Stanton Drew and Clutton. I distinctly remember the miners from Bromley colliery using the lane and seeing the piles of white residue from where they stopped to clean out their acetylene lamps as they rested on the steep ascent after a hard day or night underground. My grandfather would caution me against touching it, my first association with dangerous chemicals!
The Pond
In the corner of Stanways next to the bungalow is a deep stone-lined pond where the cattle once drank. It was filled with land-drains from the field, overflowed under the lane and found its way across under the next field to eventually help fill the brook behind Taylor's Farm in Northend. In this pond as children, we used to discover toads, frogs and a couple of varieties of newt which used to sun themselves against the laneside wall. Having been constantly warned of the dangers of the pond we always treated it with respect even when it froze over completely solid in the winter months. One day we were playing in the lane and Roger Parsons had climbed a willow tree which grew in the hedge over the pond. All of a sudden there was a loud crack followed by a splash; a branch had broken and Roger had disappeared from our view. We rushed to the gap where the overflow led out only to find Roger was completely out of his depth in the water. Aided by his sister Kath, I grabbed his hair - or what there was of it, he had a crewcut! - and dragged him to the surface. I managed to get a better grip on his collar and together we pulled him out, dripping wet, crying, and covered in duckweed. We got him indoors and Kath towelled him down while I mangled his clothes in the old Acme wringer by the back door of the bungalow. He was none the worse for his adventure but it was a salutory lesson to all of us about the danger of deep water. Later that evening, his father knocked on our door asking for me and my mother called me with some trepidation in case there had been some wrong-doing, but all Clifford wanted was to thank me "for saving Roger's life!!"
Stantonways is now arable rather than pasture, the land drains blocked and broken, the pond filled in and overflowing, making the lane into a muddy, marshy place. Read on to the end…..
The Barn
In the opposite corner of Stanways field is a large barn with a barton and a low building with cow stalls. Here we used to happily play as children; hide & seek and all sorts of things within our imagination. The barns contained hay in the latter half of the year in storage for winter use. The other shed contained the mowing machine, side rake, swathe turner and the tedder in perfect dry storage for the next season's use. We used to crawl in and sit on the cast iron seats high under the pantiled roof and imagine we were haymaking or driving a horse and carriage. At haymaking time it was all dragged out and oiled up for use. The rick yard of the barton became full of activity with Doris or Dick driving the old Fordson Standard pushing the hay sweep and the Lister Blackstone elevator loading the rick as the entire Thayer family plus of course, Clifford Parsons, gathered in the hay. Later Clifford would thatch the hay mow and we would go to visit him with a flask of tea or lemonade which his wife had made him up.
At harvest time the sheaves would be stacked in another rick and, later on along would come the contract threasher with an orange Case tractor and the rick would be threashed and the straw all baled up. This was always a very dusty proceedings and we used to watch it for hours. Ben Thayer would always be ready with his gun for the inevitable rats running out from the bundles of sticks supporting the rick as the threashing came to an end.
The barn was inhabited by swallows in the summer months and the pools of mud from the slurry from the manure store made excellent nest material. We would creep in and count the nests, never hurting them as the little birds cowed down sitting on their precious spotted white eggs. Sometimes we would see a barn owl although I can never remember them nesting there. They are a rare sight nowadays.
Photograph Eric Brain
During the war, a stick of bombs were dropped across neighbouring fields and one fell in the field behind the barn. As it was being guarded by a evacuee local home guard volunteer, it went off and he lost a leg. The bombs were reputed to be shed to lighten the load on an aborted raid on Bristol. Some of the craters from their explosions can still be seen in adjoining fields.
From the barn which is at 620 ft above sea level, it is possible to see the whole ridge of Mendip with Farrington Gurney church tower, Downside Abbey tower and Cranmore tower almost in a straight line. Ston Easton and Emborough churches stand out too especially in the summer evening sunlight. A former well-known villager had his ashes scattered there. Farther round, on a clear June evening, one can see the Westbury White Horse on Salisbury Plain quite clearly with the naked eye and University of Bath tower, Kingswood School on Lansdown, the Racecourse and Beckford's Monument are easily seen. In the opposite direction one can see Maes Knoll camp, East Bristol, the airfield lights at Lulsgate Bristol International Airport and Blackdown on Mendip.
Beyond the barn were once two small arable fields and a much larger pasture beyond, called locally "Brockells", a corruption of Brockwells which is seen on old maps. In this field was a small stone quarry, obviously where material for the barns was quarried; it was always very overgrown and alive with rabbits. It has now been filled in and no sign of it remains.
Double gates
Back in Featherbed Lane and past the pond the road goes uphill. This was always useful to us as children as it was steep enough to try out our latest wheeled cart or bike without being so steep or so long as to cause danger. I remember once we had found an old pram, one of those very high ones. The Parsons children, Pat, Kath and Roger all piled in and I set it in motion down the hill. One side is a ditch and the inevitable happened, the pram upended at quite a speed, tipping the children all out in a tangled mass of arms and legs in the briars, rosebay willow herb, and nettles. I had a similar experience soon after that when trying out my first bike, a Phillips. I encountered a Morris Minor coming up the lane. It was the series MM with the SV engine owned by some new people called Jutsam in the bungalow further down. Because it was green, I failed to see it coming until the last minute; they must have been as scared as myself but I avoided a collision and ended up in the same ditch bottom almost exactly where the pram incident took place some years before. At the top of the hill are some double gates opposite each other. Just over the gate on the left in the barn field there was an RAF lookout post during the war with a mobile trailered caravan. Some RAF lads who manned the station were billetted with us during the first part of the war. As a child I remember the sand pit, obviously a store of sand in case of incendiary attack and other signs of the station. It soon all got ploughed over and later on there were some metal plates piled there for a proposed water tower to help alleviate the water problem in that area. At about the same time BICC came through with an electricity line and made their temporary HQ there. We used to go and talk with the linesmen many of whom were Irish. The line is still there with a transformer pole just inside the gate.
From the gate on the other side of the lane, now at the time of writing sadly taken away and replaced by a strand of barbed wire, (although the blue lias stone gatepost remains hidden in the hedge), it is possible to see the Welsh pillar of the first Severn Bridge although the other is obscured by the slope of Maes Knoll. In the field through this gate, once a small ploughfield, the Thayer family planted swedes, mangolds or sometimes oats or barley. All the family would be out hoeing and weeding by hand, and of course the horse and cart would be employed later on in the year to carry away the roots. Just a shout was all that would be needed for the horse to move on a few paces each time. We used to watch the horse pulling the plough or the reaper-binder cutting the barley or oats. The stack was always in the corner where the Bristol Water pump house now stands. The threashing machine unit would threash this rick first before moving on across to the barn to deal with those there. The field was always good for seeing scarlet pimpernel and heartsease, never seen now with the modern use of weedkillers - and skylarks would nest here and the air would be full of their song.
Reservoirs
In about 1950, in conjunction with the construction of Chew Valley Lake down in the valley below, two reinforced concrete reservoirs were constructed in Featherbed Lane. The object was that the water would be pumped up to them from the new Stowey treatment works and that one would feed Bath, the other South Gloucestershire. The first, just past the double gates on the left, holds two million gallons and was constructed by Pollard of Bridgwater. This superceded the idea of a water tower and the metal plates piled there for so long were sold for scrap. A large steam derrick crane was built on rails on the site and earthmoving scrapers brought up the narrow lane to deal with the site. A Ruston Bucyrus excavator was employed for trenching and a pipeline with black cast iron pipes arrived from the treatment works. We would crawl through these eighteen inch diameter tubes, the ones with bends were more interesting! The pipes had been delivered to Clutton railway station from Stanton ironworks in the Midlands and then by road to the site. All the soil was piled to the right hand side of the site and the public footpath which always ran across the field was closed “temporarily”, never to reopen. (It did, by public demand some 50 years later!) Possibly due to the construction works at the time, the footpath from the lane was seemingly omittted from the survey and present day maps now show it incorrectly as starting further down the lane. During evenings and weekends we would play among the reservoir excavations, and as the work progressed, explore the depths of the underground tank with its concrete pillars until the manhole covers were finally fitted and further access denied. From the first reservoir, one can cross the field which is still owned by Bristol Waterworks, to the Folly or rather more correctly "Folly Farm". This was once a 'ferme orneé' of Sutton Court; it is in Stowey-Sutton parish and thus out of the village of Clutton but nevertheless affords a beautiful view of the Chew Valley and the lake and was once a popular picnic spot for Clutton villagers.
The other reservoir farther along the lane was built for South Gloucestershire Waterworks at the same time by William Cowlin of Bristol. It holds two and a half million gallons but was of different construction and is in Stanton Drew parish.
Bungalows
Next to the reservoir field, (which incidentally until 2025 was still owned by the waterworks and let back to the owner of Hill Farm on a 'peppercorn rent') stands a small, recently enlarged bungalow formerly called 'Vicnor'. It was built in the 1930's by Osman of Temple Cloud for Victor Baylis as an out of town weekend retreat and where he came to live permanently during the air raids with his second wife Norah. On his retirement from Barratt's shoe shop, he worked part time at Folly Farm doing odd jobs and kept a few pigs in some block-built stys at the bottom of the garden. Farther down the lane stands another bungalow 'Roundhill'. This was also built by Osman but for Sidney Foster, a Bristol business man, who like Victor Baylis, had it built as a weekend cottage. Mr Foster sold it to the Jutsams, who after a few years sold it to Mr & Mrs Walker. Jack Walker worked for E.S.& A Robinson as a 'clerk of works' and he enlarged the bungalow with an extra bedroom and considerably improved its quality of construction. They lived there until well into his retirement. I used to visit him and assist with his projects on his Ford Ten car or help with fetching and carrying when he was building. The garden contained a "swimming pool" – these days it would be a “dipping pool”, but subsidence had caused it to crack and I never remember seeing any water in it. The garden was a haven for wildlife and Nuthatches, Jays and Great Spotted Woodpeckers were everyday visitors to their bird tables. Both bungalows benefitted from the waterworks reservoirs in that an arrangement was reached to pipe water from the 18" main in the Folly field with the permission of Lord Strachey who was the landowner. Until that time, all water had to be carried but 'Vicnor' had a well and an agreement had been made for 'Roundhill' to access it for water.
Sidney Foster kept himself a piece of buffer land between the two bungalows, possibly with a view to erecting a retirement home there at some future date. In the 1970s Roger Parsons approached him with a view to temporarily siting a residential caravan on the site and permission was granted. Roger piped the water from the main and excavated a septic tank on the site. However after a few years tenancy and with a growing family, he moved nearer to the village and soon after that the new owner of Roundhill at that time, Bob Gardner, bought the land to add to his property. The plot was home to quite a rare wild plant, Herb Paris, which has a star shaped cluster of dark green leaves surrounding a very pretty tiny flower. Sadly the plants have all died and completely vanished, I know nowhere else it survives other than Dowling’s Wood on Folly Farm.
Honey Gaston
The village boundary at this point follows the boundary of the woods to the stream. The right hand wood is called 'Honey Gaston' and has a public footpath running through its eastern edge and thence to Stanton Wick. The small copse on the other side of the lane called Featherbed Brake, was owned by Lord Strachey of Sutton Court. The two pieces of woodland together total six acres and were put up for sale at the Warwick estate sale in 1920 but withdrawn at £420. This price at that time included the adjacent eleven acre field rented by Cecil Tucker but that was eventually sold separately to William White of Church Farm. The field hedges have recently been bull-dosed and one huge expanse of land made, stretching right to Red Hill. We used to play in Honey Gaston as children. At that time the owner was Alec Osman who, amongst other businesses, had a saw mills at Temple Cloud. He used the wood as a dump for the excess sawdust and, sometimes old tree roots. We used to find interesting fungi growing in the sawdust, wood blewitts especially. Sometimes the sawdust would heat and take fire and the fire engine would come rushing up the lane to damp down the flames. I know too, of an occasion when a local courting couple in an old Ford Prefect became stuck to the axle in the sawdust and had to encourage the nearby farmer’s son, Bert Thayer, out late at night to retrieve the car using his tractor. We once built a tree house in an old beech in the wood but no-one ever complained about us playing there. Both sides of the lane, bluebells and wood anemones grow in a thick carpet in the spring and further down through the wood, wild garlic. We would chase squirrels and find wood pigeon's nests here and on one occasion my dog 'Lady' discovered a family of badgers at play, the sow fended the dog off while the cubs sought cover. An attempt was made in the early 1970s to fell the trees and build a mobile home park on the site but the permission was opposed by locals and the plan was squashed.
Father down, at parish boundary, is the headwater of Salter’s Brook which eventually empties into the Chew at Pensford.
If you look-up the meaning of Featherbed (lane) on say Google, it suggests a muddy, marshy place, a hollow. Before the lane was hard-surfaced, it is conceivable that this area was “a muddy marshy hollow” – Salter’s Bottom on old maps) which provides a better theory for the name, especially today, than the more obvious one of geese and goose feathers……
The village boundary strikes eastward behind Honey Gaston as far as the top of Red Hill.