Boring Stuff About Flints

Hokay. This one goes out to Ms.M, who foolishly asked about flint.

Do click on the pictures as I've made them nice and large.

In a region that is built on chalk and has no other natural building stone, we tend to dig out the flint nodules that occur in the chalk and pile them up on top of one another.

It's better than building your house out of chalk, which only lasts until the next time it rains.

The first photo was taken at Castle Acre, a ruined monastery in Norfolk.

We've been using the stuff for an awfully long time.

The Roman forts around here are all built from flint (see posts passim),

and this cute little 6th century church at Cockley Cley is the earliest of many hundreds of flint churches around here.

Things started to get a little more adventurous around 1300, when we stole the secret of bricks from the Dutch and builders began playing with patterns like this gable on the Great Barn at Waxham, just up the coast from here.

In its simplest form, flint is gathered off the beach in coastal villages and used whole as cobbles.

Flint is crap at corners, however, so stone or brick is usually used to stop it all falling down.

This cottage is at Happisburgh (that's Haysbruh to the locals).

And this gorgeous house is in Southwold, overlooking the sea.

Cobbles were usually used for the cheapest buildings, like cottages, but there was a fashion in Regency times for making houses look quaint and cottagey by building them from cobble.

This is one of those.

This - another house from the 1300s - is uncoursed flint rubble, where any old flints were thrown together in all sizes. Walls like these would originally have been rendered over to make them neater but the fashion of late has been to strip off the render and expose the flints.

Another uncoursed flint rubble building from Cathedral Close in Norwich.

This house started life as the brewhouse for the people building the Cathedral and the earliest parts date from around 1100. One of the perks of my old job in Norwich was the opportunity to poke around these places when repair work was being done. Fun!

During the 1400s flint went out of fashion and you see a lot of it used on gable walls and other parts you don't normally see from the street, while the fronts of the houses were built of more fashionable brick or timber frame.

This is on King Street in Norwich.

And this is around the back of St.Augustine's, showing how things change over the centuries, with old mediæval windows bricked up and then later opened again with a smaller 17th century window inserted and a whole lovely mess of brick, flint, cobbles and stone making a patchwork of the wall.

In Victorian times flint came back into fashion big time.

This Puginesque confection sits in Cathedral Close.

I want it.

The finest form of flintwork is called knapped flint.

There are still a few flint knappers around and I love watching them preparing flints for repair jobs.

They sit with a leather apron across their laps and bang the shit out of flints with other flints and somehow always come up with perfectly squared-off blocks. It's quite a skill.

This is Blythburgh church, showing a nice modern sculpture sitting in the niche left by a Saint destroyed back in Henry the Eighth's day.

And here is the beautiful flint and brick front wall of my old school.

The moat around Norwich Castle has recently been re-faced with uncoursed knapped flint (knapped until one face is flat but not made into square blocks) and looks great.

The Castle itself, together with the Cathedral were both started in 1068 and were built from Caen stone barged over from France by a homesick William the Conqueror.

The other tower built of this stone is the Tower of London, known as the White Tower back then.

Norwich Castle was know as Castle Blancheflower, a Franglais attempt at "white flower."

More on the castle soon.

Toodle pip!