Patrick Comerford
After an afternoon walk along Cross Hand in Lane on the northern fringes of Lichfield a few days ago, I decided to cross to the other side of Lichfield and to search for Borrowcop Hill and the Borrowcop Gazebo. The hill at around 113 metres AOD (above sea level) is the highest point in Lichfield and is shrouded in myth and legend.
I have known Lichfield for 50 or 60 years, to the point that I have felt at home there almost all my life. But this was my first time ever to search for Borrowcop Hill, even though when I first stayed in Lichfield in my teens it was nearby on Birmingham Road.
I knew even then about the legends and the myths surrounding Borrowcop Hill and about its history too. But, somehow, I had never visited the hill or searched for the gazebo. I thought I knew where they were, so I was surprised how difficult it was to find Borrowcop Hill last Friday afternoon, hidden in behind the houses off King’s Hill Road and Borrowcop Lane, both reached from Upper Saint John Street.
Things would have been easier had I gone up King’s Hill Road and found the narrow lane behind King Edward VI School. Instead, I ended up walking aimlessly in the summer heat up and down along Borrowcop Lane and could find no signs pointing to the hill. I might never have found either the hill or the gazebo but for the Google Maps app on my ’phone. Eventually I found a narrow, almost secret, lane off Hillside, running between the back gardens of houses and the school grounds.
Is it any wonder that the gazebo has been described as ‘one of Lichfield’s little know gems’? Yet its hilltop location offers views on clear days across Lichfield and out towards the Black Country and Charnwood Forest.
Local legend in Lichfield has it that three British kings were slain on there by the Romans in the year 288 and that they were buried in a ‘barrow’ on the hilltop. Other variations of the story say it is the traditional site of the graves of three Christian kings who were killed in battle with King Penda in 288.
In its earliest written forms, the name Borrowcop appears as ‘Burwey’ or ‘Burwhay’, incorporating the Old English element burh, suggesting a fortified place or that there may have been an Anglo-Saxon fortification on the site, according to David Horovitz in his study of Staffordshire placenames.
A Historic Character Assessment or Extensive Urban Survey of Lichfield for Staffordshire County Council in 2011 said excavations carried out by antiquarians on Borrowcop Hill in earlier centuries allegedly recovered burnt bone from the mound. However, more recent archaeological investigations have so far failed to recover any evidence for human activity’.
Although most historians now accept the story is a myth without historical foundation, it inspired for the City Seal adopted by Lichfield in 1549. The city seal became part of a large relief on the façade of the Guildhall, but it was later moved first to the Museum Gardens and then to the herbaceous borders in Beacon Park.
A version of the seal is among the heraldic symbols decorating the railway bridge on Saint John Street, close to Lichfield City station, and the three golden crowns of the legendary kings were later incorporated into the emblems of Saxon Hill Academy.
The gazebo was built on the hill in 1804-1805, paid for by public subscription. Before that, buildings on the site included a late 17th century structure called the Temple, built in 1694, the ‘Temple’ of 1694, a summer-house, an arbour in the 1720s, an ‘observation turret’ and a gun store, probably built ca 1750.
There are accounts of Erasmus Darwin recovering bits of burnt bone on the hill in the 18th century. At times of celebrations and at times of threatened invasion, beacons were lit on top of the hill.
In a talk organised by Lichfield Discovered in 2014 on Philip Larkin’s connections with Lichfield, Peter Young, the former Town Clerk of Lichfield, said that Larkin wrote three poems when he was staying with relatives at Cherry Orchard in 1940-1941. Young suggested the arched field in ‘Christmas 1940’ refers to Borrowcop Hill.
When Larkin returned to Lichfield from Oxford for a Christmas holiday in 1940-1941, he regularly walked from Cherry Orchard into the centre of Lichfield to drink in the George and the Swan. During that time in Lichfield, he wrote three poems: ‘Christmas 1940’, ‘Out in the lane I pause’ and ‘Ghosts’.
Writing about ‘Christmas 1940’, Larkin told Jim Sutton: ‘I scribbled this in a coma at about 11.45 p.m. last night. The only thing is that its impulse is not purely negative – except for the last 2 lines, where I break off into mumblings of dotage.’
This poem was never published during Larkin’s own lifetime. It was first published in 1992 in Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940-1985, edited by Anthony Thwaite (p 8). It was included in 2005 by AT Tolley in Philip Larkin: Early Poems and Juvenalia (p 135), and more recently it is included by Archie Burnett in Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems (p 171).
The Gazebo was in poor condition by 1963. John Sanders, then Principal of the School of Art and chair of a Lichfield Study Group for the preservation of buildings of interest, announced the group’s intention to enter a Civic Trust ‘improvement competition,’ hoping for a grant of £450.
Meanwhile, the grammar school, which dates from 1495, had moved to the area from Saint John Street in 1903, and it merged with the adjacent King’s Hill secondary modern school in 1971 to become King Edward VI School. Another school in the area, evocatively named Saxon Hill, opened in 1979.
The gazebo is a square pavilion built of brick with two round arches no each side, a pyramidal tile roof and a ball finial on roof. The arches have square brick piers and pilasters, and narrow imposts on the proud brick arches. Inside, there is a spine wall with a on bench to each side and embossed-tile paving, and renewed roof timbers.
The condition of the gazebo was a cause of concern once again in 1981, when Derrick Duval, an architect who was then a newly elected city councillor (1980-1995), pushed for its restoration. He was the Mayor of Lichfield in 1982, I stayed in his home on Dam Street two or three times around 2009-2011, and he died on 16 December 2022.
Derrick’s dream for the gazebo was eventually achieved in 1985 through the Government’s Community Programme. Borrowcop Gazebo is now owned and maintained by Lichfield City Council.
Borrowcop Hill was once the venue for a Good Friday fair after the more sombre services in the cathedral. The hill was a place for walks and other entertainment, and until the late 20th century children enjoyed tobogganing and skiing down the slopes in the snow at winter.
The urban survey of Lichfield in 2011 pointed out the potential for archaeological deposits to survive at Borrowcop Hill and associated with the line of the Roman Road.
But, as I found on Friday afternoon, it is no longer possible to walk across fields from Cherry Orchard to Borrowcop, as Philip Larkin must have done 85 years ago. Now high railings have enclosed the school field and access to the Gazebo today is only possible along an enclosed, marrow footpath between King’s Hill Road and facing Minor’s Hill.
Christmas 1940, by Philip Larkin
‘High on arched field I stand
Alone: the night is full of stars:
Enormous over tree and farm
The night extends,
And looks down equally to all on earth.
‘So I return their look; and laugh
To see as them my living stars
Flung from east to west across
A windless gulf?
– So much to say that I have never said,
Or ever could.’
