In his contribution to a new volume of essays on the history of cruck construction, the architectural historian Richard Suggett remembers an occasion on which his mentor, Peter Smith – the great authority on vernacular architecture in Wales – stood completely lost in thought while contemplating a Denbighshire cruck. After a while, Richard ventured to ask what Smith was thinking. He replied, though not unkindly, to the effect that ‘if I needed to ask, I probably would not understand the answer’.
Peter Smith’s appreciation of the aesthetic appeal of this form of medieval timber architecture is all the more striking because cruck construction has long been viewed as a primitive building style, deployed by peasants and those who could afford nothing better. Crucks are made quite simply by selecting an oak (or occasionally an elm) with a stout lower branch, felling the tree and squaring off the trunk, then sawing it in two vertically. The result should be a symmetrical pair of curving or elbowed ‘blades’. When placed opposite each other and joined at the apex, the blades form an arch which, if you are of a Romantic bent, could be described as Gothic – some crucks even have a double curve and form an ogee arch. If you add a tie beam to connect the two blades, you create an A-frame, a triangular structure that is very strong, resistant to lateral forces, and capable of bearing the weight of additional timbers, such as the purlins and rafters that support the roofing materials.
Enthusiasts for vernacular architecture see something admirable in this building technique. Crucks were portrayed as the oldest form of architecture, the primordial carpentry technique, truly vernacular and belonging to a quite separate building tradition and social class from so-called ‘polite’ architecture. James Walton, one of the first members of the Vernacular Architecture Group (VAG; founded in 1954, see CA 307), published papers in 1948 on Yorkshire crucks, which he likened to prehistoric huts and the dwellings of peasants across Europe, with cut boughs reaching from the ground to the ridge. F W B Charles’s Medieval Cruck Building and Its Derivatives (1967) pointed to possible links with early buildings in Ireland, while J T Smith published papers in the 1960s revealing an exclusively western distribution to crucks and their absence from eastern and south-eastern Britain. His conclusion that ‘crucks are an ancient form, perhaps of Celtic origin’, added the further Romantic element of Celtic mist to the foundation myth of cruck construction.
