The Plague Kiln

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 6 Aug 2023

Due to the slightly confusing gothic typeface used to denote historic stuff by Ordnance Survey this site actually looks like two when first looking at the map: one called 'Plaque' and one called 'Kiln'. It is actually a 500ish year old doocot, built to provide the wealthy landowners at the time with a constant supply of pigeon meat, but is famous because in the notorious plague of the 1640s - which by most accounts wiped out almost half of the local population - it was used to burn clothing, bedding and other things from the homes of those infected. There is an actual plaque, as it happens, by the old doocot that says this, along with other grisly facts such as the houses of those infected were boarded up and guarded while the church provided them food in their final days. The most curious thing about it is that, for reasons that are unclear, it was used as a kind of office by the Royal Humane Society at some point in the 19th Century. The society's name is a bit misleading, in modern terms at least. It was concerned with keeping alive, or bringing back to life, those who seemed superficially dead through drowning. As well as giving out awards for heroic deeds (which it still does) it was at the forefront of new (at the time) resuscitation techniques. Whilst mouth-to-mouth has stood the test of time, the 'tobacco smoke enema' has not. It seems to have been acceptable a bit over 200 years ago to blow tobacco smoke into a seemingly drowned person's rectum in order to revive them, and Wikipedia details a husband supposedly bringing his wife back from the brink by inserting the stem of a passing sailor's pipe into her anus and kind of doing some backwards smoking by blowing into the bowl of the pipe. Quite incredible really!

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