Context 158 - March 2019

C O N T E X T 1 5 8 : M A R C H 2 0 1 9 45 Out of the mists of time: the Fountaine Hospital in around 1890 JANE HOULTON Out of the mists and myths of the past The previous issue of Context told the story of the Fountaine Hospital Almshouse. The experience of investigating that building highlighted some of the perils of architectural research. If you want to research the architectural history of an interesting building, you usually start with the primary documents – any surviving plans, drawings, account books, correspondence, jour- nals or daybooks that concern the creation of the building.To supplement the knowledge these bring, or if the primary sources are incomplete, you also go to secondary sources that relate to the architect, builder or client, such as biogra- phies, correspondence, diaries, learned articles or theses. What do you do, however, if the primary sources are all but absent, and the secondary sources either do not exist, or else are wholly misleading and encrusted with myth? This was the challenge confronting Michael Devenish, conservation architect in commercial practice, who had trained in architectural history with Joseph Rykwert, and who often produced histories for the buildings on which he worked. He had long been fascinated by the Fountaine Hospital Almshouse in Linton-in-Craven, a modest village in the Yorkshire Dales – a flam- boyant baroque building, which had clearly been designed by a skilled, sophisticated hand (see my article ‘An extraordinary baroque miniature’, Context 157, November 2018). The building’s origins had never been researched. Michael had collected sparse mate- rials about the Hospital, and talked to various trustees over 30 years. When he retired in 2013 he set about producing a history of the building, with the blessing of the trust. Its records had recently been collated, indexed and archived, and this was his first opportunity to study them in full. Now, thought Michael, was the time to do a proper job. Alas, no such luck. The archives contained only two documents from the time of the com- missioning of the Hospital in the 1720s, and virtually nothing from the remainder of the 18th century, absent probably due to corruption in the charity. The two documents were the 1721 will of the benefactor Richard Fountaine, who died the following year, and an indenture record- ing the purchase of the land in 1723 on which the Hospital was ‘Already begun to be built and erected’. Nothing apparently of use in these two documents. In the archives, not even a sketch on a scrap of paper, or a column of numbers about the building costs. The Hospital had been attributed to vari- ous architects over the years – principally to Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor, Wakefield and William Etty. Thorough study of the sources relating to these and other contemporaries gave no proof. Where confident attribution was made (such as by LawrenceWhistler toVanbrugh), there lay no evidence beyond opinion and connoisseurship. It was time to think laterally, and pursue indirect paths. One route was the biography of the benefactor Fountaine, to see if there was connection between him and any architect. Another was to sift through records, archives and local history to see what might be found. Two years later, by mid-2015, Michael’s