The small barn that is the only building that remains standing from New Hall Farm, also on the site of the ‘old’ New Hall once had a fine “Owl Hole”, which is exactly as expected - a hole for owls to use to enter barns. I expect it was a good way to keep rodents from stores in the barn. Below the owl hole was a strange looking stone head.
Up until around 2005/6 the barn was standing but in a bad state, the roof was I think mostly gone but some roof timbers remained, the interior was overgrown if I recall correctly - although I note that in these images from 2004 the windows and doors appear to be boarded. The images are very poor because they’re stills from an old VHS video. I have some better ones but I have yet to dig them out - sorry Shazza ;) At least we’ve got an image right?
Both the owl hole and stone head where lost when the roof timbers fell in, you can actually see the structure starting to give at either side of the roof, level with the bottom of the owl hole in the 2004 image. The top of the gable wall seemed to have given way and the next time I passed a few days later there was nothing to be seen of the owl hole or stone face. I had a look on the ground and there was quite a bit of rubble but nothing that looked more interesting than wall stones.
I assume this is what happened but it was during the “architectural salvage”, boom-time when there were lots of thefts, even of cobbles from old streets. It’s possible someone rescued the head from the rubble, maybe even the owners at the time but to my knowledge it’s never been seen since. I think the rumours of the time were that it had been knicked.
The barn has been renovated and fitted with a new roof since then and I think I saw it advertised as a workshop with utilities a while back but passing by in 2016 it seems to be boarded up and disused. Rather optimistically in my opinion the people seem to have left a space for the owl hole and stone face.
The replaced stonework around the top of the gable wall doesn’t seem to match the old stone, which is strange - as though the old stone that fell from the wall, wasn’t found on the ground and re-used. Maybe all the fallen stone was taken along with the stone head.
It has been said by local authors that the stone head from the New Hall Barn was in fact the old sign from the original Black-a-Moors inn, which is now below the edge of the Upper Rivington Reservoir, roughly inline with the Cunliffe farm across the water. I’ve never been sure about this as the barn was already in existence at the same time as the old inn, further to this, a new inn was built at the same time as the reservoirs that is gone today but stood at the corner of the reservoir - why not build the stone head into that and not an old barn some distance away.
It’s been given with a bit of spin sometimes, as if to say back in the day when all shops and pubs had stone signs but I don’t see many around, you’d think many would survive throughout the country.
The stone head in the barn was beneath the owl hole, which seems contemporary with the barn so why deconstruct the wall down to that level to fit the stone head?
The stone head itself was of a rather peculiar design though, a straight-lipped face with a heavy, straight brow. The head jutted out from two side panels decorated with horizontal lines. Does that look like a Black-a-Moor? A “Moor”, around the time of the inn was probably used to denote a dark-skinned person or probably more specifically a muslim. The term has been used more broadly to also refer to an African.
I don’t know, it looked more like one of those heavy-browed stone heads from Easter Island to me.
