Norton House (Somerset)

Norton House was a mansion in Midsomer Norton, Somerset. It was built around 1789 by the Savage family, investors in mines in the Somerset Coalfield. It was demolished in 1937-8 to make way for housing but several features from the house and its estate survive to this day.

A Duchy of Cornwall estate map of 1787 shows the grounds of Norton House acquired by Thomas Savage. Records show plans for the house by Thomas Savage being laid out in 1789 on the land, close to the centre of Midsomer Norton. It is likely there was an earlier house on the site. The Savage family were major investors in mines in the Somerset Coalfield. Woods were planted on adjacent sloping land as a landscape feature when Norton House was built.

Thomas Savage arranged for mine sinkers to build a springhead on a hill overlooking the house, so running water could be supplied to the house. In 2013 the springhead was restored using remnants of the original pipes. With the formation of the Midsomer Norton Water Works Company in 1881, the springhead was no longer required. At that point it appears to have been converted to use as an ice house. For this purpose, the oval outline of the brick-built cistern was covered with a stone vault and buried under a mound of earth to provide insulation against the outside air. The ice would have been obtained in winter from the neighbouring shallow artificial pond nearby which appears to have been created especially for this purpose and survives to this day.

The stone gate piers from Norton House survive in Silver Street, Midsomer Norton and have been incorporated into the gateway of a modern house. Along with the cast iron gates themselves (no longer onsite) they were grade II listed in 1979. The gate piers date to the 1830s; the panelled gate piers have a cross-gabled capping above a honeysuckle frieze while the gates had flower designs between the rails. Norton House lay a short distance to the south of the gate.

Around 1866 an obelisk monument with two marble plaques was built at the site of St Chad's Well near the boundary of the grounds, close to Midsomer Norton town centre, by the mother of Major Frederick Stukeley Savage to her son who had been injured in the Crimean War. The decision to place the monument near the spring, which had long been used by the people of the town, resulted from her son's letters home from the war. He highlighted the problems the soldiers had gaining access to clean water, causing them many deaths from waterborne diseases. Although the Major did return from the war, he was an invalid and died ten years later. The writer Evelyn Waugh whose grandfather Alexander Waugh was the doctor in the town tells how the distraught Mrs Savage visited the memorial daily. "Here, in the evenings, the pathetic, wizened Mrs Savage was conducted in her wheel chair, attended by her faithful henchman, Jonah Shearn. The path to the well was set with shrubs, and if any weed had grown between their stems, the wheel chair was stopped before the offending vegetable, and Jonah, trowel in hand, dug it up and cast it in the stream that babbled by. Then she paused and read the inscription with a far-away look in her eyes. It was her tribute to an only child". The monument survives to this day, next to the Somer Valley FM radio station in the grounds of Somervale School. Also surviving are elaborate enclosure railings and gate, but an original grotto archway of Chilcompton rough stone has disappeared.

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Wikipedia