“One of the UK’s smallest National Trust properties, Priest’s House at Easton on the Hill is now a museum dedicated to the area’s Collyweston slate mining industry...”
Like diminutive Rutland itself, the National Trust property is one of the smallest in the conservation organisation’s group, cared for by volunteer custodian Paul Way and just three keyholders, who each unlock the building to show visitors around. “The property itself is fascinating enough, with a 2010 survey and dendrochronological techniques being used to date it to around 1474,” says Paul. “But we’ve ensured that it can also serve as a museum and reflect one of the area’s other important historical features; Easton’s Collyweston slate mining industries.” Many of Rutland’s heritage properties and historic buildings are constructed from the band of oolitic limestone that runs diagonally through Rutland right down to Dorset.
It’s still mined today in quarries in Clipsham and Greetham. By contrast, though, Collyweston slate is much rarer, and below Easton was a stratum of slate, just 2ft high and 30ft below the ground. Slate was found underneath its eponymous home of Collyweston, at Easton and also under Duddington, where it occasionally appears in a working limestone quarry. Collyweston slate was used in the construction of Rockingham Castle’s roof, around 1375. But around the 1500s, a new way to process the material was more widely used. The process of ‘frosting’ began to be more widely used and by the late 1800s in the open pits and mines around Collyweston. The process used the expansion of freezing water to split the stone once it was hauled
Top: The Priest’s House was dated by dendrochronological analysis to between 1474 and 1499. It features stone mullion windows dating back to the C15th and also served as the village school before use as an agricultural building. Main: Collyweston slaters with their tools, C 1910.
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