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!

More Local Faff

I'm still going through boxes of old photos and scanning them before they fade too badly, so I shall continue my compact and bijou tourette around my part of the planet with a little journey four miles north of my house.

Beeston Hall is a rather nicer house than mine, dammit.

I was out there surveying the old ice house in the woods but it was a lovely day so I spent my lunch break wandering the grounds and taking photographs that I knew one day I might find a use for.

As we discovered in the previous post, most of Norfolk is built on chalk beds dumped here when the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age, which some people assume to be 10 to 12,000 years ago but which I am pretty damned sure happened only last month.

And what - geology 101 students - do we find in chalk beds?

Yup: layers of flint.

Norfolk has no other natural building stone so most of our vernacular buildings and a lot of our major ones are built of knapped flint, which has its own weird beauty.

Beeston has a lovely park, which is sometimes open to the public, but not on the day I was there.

The lake is a wonderful place to chill on a hot summer's day.

Anyhoo … more Norfolk and Norwich will no doubt turn up here over the next few days, if you're into that kind of thing.

TTFN.

Careful Where You Walk

Petrea asked yesterday if I'd actually seen any of the old chalk mine workings that make living in Norwich so much fun and that I brought up in the last post.

Well, yes, I have. I spent several years surveying them as a kind of side project when I worked in Norwich many moons ago. The surveys were carried out when it was realised that only about ten percent of the old mines and chalk pits had been measured (not counting the ones we didn't know about until we almost fell in the buggers - see later in the post) and the council's Building Regulations department operated mostly on guesswork.

 Anyhoo, the result of all the work was this book, the blockbuster publishing sensation that was "Subsidence In Norwich," a tantalising pot-pourri of maps, statistics and geology that would make a spiffy stocking filler for the whole family at Christmas (if it wasn't so prohibitively expensive).

ISBN 0-11-752868-4 if you really feel you cannot live without a copy.

 Here are some of the photographs from the book. First up is the back of a house at the top of Kett's Hill. The woman who lived there had just left her kitchen when a hole opened up right where she'd been standing and ate the back of her house. The pit went right down to river level about 80 feet down.

 And here's the infamous bus in a hole incident.

 These things (the sink holes, not the bus) are caused when water finds its way down to the old chalk workings and gradually leaches out all the chalk, usually leaving a pit some twenty feet in diameter and anything up to 200 feet deep.

 The chalk workings themselves were dug from Roman times, expanded greatly in the 1200s and then usually used as storage in the mediæval city until most of them had their entrances blocked up and were forgotten about.

Until Norwich started falling into them.

 Here's an old map from the 1820s of the workings under Earlham Road, right next to the Roman Catholic Cathedral, which is probably still standing solely due to the power of prayer.
You can see the plan of the Cathedral outlined on the left of the map.

These workings were used (and lived in - very Dickensian) up until Victorian times and actually have street names.

 More fun.

I actually found one of these stupid holes by accident.

I was surveying an old house on Ber Street at the top of the cliff and found some pretty scary cracks in the back of the building. Walking out across the back yard I thought it sounded hollow underfoot (it was paved with Victorian bricks) and the word "oops" popped into my head.

Calling in the Structural Engineer we found to our horror that once a few bricks had been removed the whole yard fell 180 feet down a sink hole, taking the back of the house with it.
Yikes!

This is the kind of thing that happens. You can see soil has fallen in to this old chalk mine. Luckily, this one is under Eaton Park golf course so it merely resulted in some new landscaping once it had all been filled in.

So there you have it.

Mind where you put your feet.

Pink Dress

Petrea wants to see more of Norwich.
Well, here is just about all of it, laid out beneath St.James's Hill.

There are some parts of the city, even within ten minutes walk of the mediæval centre, that are kind of weird, untamed hillbilly country, and this is one of them. A maze of public vegetable allotments left over from Victorian civic reforms mingled with odd patches of waste ground and the occasional goat and - on this particular day - a pink dress waving in the breeze.
Norwich was built on chalk hills and most of those have been undermined by diggings in mediæval times, leaving stretches of the hillsides prone to subsidence and the sudden opening up of 20 to 200 foot deep sink holes that can (and do) swallow houses and buses. Some of these areas are parkland, but some - like this one - are places the Victorian social reformers gave over to the poor for growing food and keeping animals. I'm glad that it is too expensive to build safe foundations for buildings here. It's a nice place to wander, backing as it does onto Mousehold, which is a hilly, meandering wonderland of prehistoric woodland and all the better for being right in the middle of a city.

Bugger January

We are "between snow" here at the moment, enjoying a spell of dull brown fields (a hell of a lot better than white), dark grey arctic skies and a stinging wind blowing straight from the North Pole and directly down the back of my neck.

Here, to remind me why I don't want the smegging white stuff to come back ever again, is a shot I took off the train as it rattled across a bridge and scared the crap out of a flock of gulls.

Roll on Spring!

Never Take Photos Straight Into The Sun

Today we're still in Norwich, but leaning out of the old attic print room window of the office I used to work in many years ago and gazing down Prince's Street toward Cathedral Close.

Yup, I've found a stash of old photos and cranked my scanner back into life. Prepare to be bored.

More Of The Same

Yup, it's the Cathedral again.

 

I was showing mum where to take the best shots (you can see her version here).

This is from the south-west corner of the cloisters. You have to duck down and squirm arund a bit to get it but it's probably my favourite view of the Cathedral.

Blog-Dried Again

Many thanks to the wonderful Petrea for sending me this link to a lovely article praising my part of the world.

Some of you may have noticed (thank you, Ms.M) that I am going through one of those periodic spells of blog-dried frustration where as soon as I sit down to write a post all creative thought is sucked from my mind. What happens to it then is beyond me. It probably gets deposited in a messy heap somewhere in the arse end of Mongolia; it's certainly nowhere around here. I've looked.

Anyhoo … until someone finds it and sends it back to me I shall resort to posting photos taken around and about my part of the world.
Maybe daily; maybe a few each week.
Who knows?
I certainly don't.

 

To start you off, here's a nice one of Norwich Cathedral in the snow.

 Do click on it to enlarge it.

Maybe they will persuade one or two of you to pick a more unusual vacation destination and head down my way. Maybe not. Until I can think of anything worth writing about, however, you'll have to put up with these instead.

Toodle pip!

Deliverance Boy

Odd cove, my baby brother …

Usually, musicians start at the bottom and work their way up, but I fear something has gone awry with Phil. Pray allow me to explain, and be sure not to read this in the dark as it is a tale of descent into madness.

Many an age ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and Raquel Welch ran around in a fur bikini, Phil was that rarest of rare gems, a world class rhythm guitarist. I've never found another one even close to being on the same planet.
Unlike 100% of other guitarists (and especially me), he was not interested in strutting around at the front of the stage, throwing dumb poses and trying to see how many notes can be stuffed painfully into a solo (older blog readers will know about my problem from bitter experience). Oh, no. Instead he realised the basic truth that eludes the rest of us: that a rhythm guitar player should only be noticed when he's not playing. And when he's not playing the music sounds WRONG.
It was great being on stage with Phil because I could play as many dumb widdly notes as possible and know that behind me the music would sound right.

And then something weird happened: he decided to take up bass.
Bass players are usually frustrated lead guitarists and it is very rare for a guitar player to "go the other way," down into the darkness of the lower registers.
But that's where Phil went and bloody good he was, too. I missed his rhythm playing but he was a great bassist.

This is where it gets creepy …
Drummers - as opposed to musicians - tend to drool a lot and sniff one another's bottoms whenever they meet up. They are not as other folk.

 And yes, The Dark Side took my baby brother and made him hit things.

 Hokay, I confess, the boy doesn't do things by halves; he's what's known in the trade as "a fucking good drummer," a treasure rarer than rocking-horse shit.

But a drummer?

Drummers are forever cursed by the stigma of Ringo.

In the pit of Musical Hell there is only one circle lower than that haunted by the screaming souls of drummers …

A short while back Phil took that final step and slid down the greasy slope into the last and deepest festering pismire of musical insanity.

 He bought a banjo …

 He has a book that teaches you how to say "Yee" and "Haw."

He has started creeping round woods and telling people, "You sure got a purrty mouth, city boy."

In short, he's gone Deliverance.

We spent yesterday playing "Duelling Banjos."

If there are any support groups out there, please contact me.

So … What to do with 2011 …

I thought I'd try it out and see what it portended. This is what I found:

Well, the weather's still crap but at least it's not snowing any more. Snow is so 2010.
Driving in to the city on deserted highways with not another car for miles around made for a pretty good start to a Saturday, even in grey mist and drizzle. No traffic in the city, either, just empty streets echoing away in all directions, the only noise being my car engine and the drone of hundreds of thousands of snoring revellers about to wake up to a stonking and well-deserved hangover.
More fool them.
I went to bed early (you should all know why by now) after watching Rigoletto from the Duke's Palace in Mantua, with Plácido Domingo as Rigolleto and Julia Novikova as a smoking hot Gilda (mmmm) and so will not be joining in today's official national headache and nausea festival.

I took my pick of a thousand empty and free parking spaces (weird at eight on a Saturday morning) and wandered a plague-ridden city. Had the weather been any better I could have taken a bumper crop of Hollywood disaster movie style photos. I was kinda glad I'd not watched The Omega Man for a few years as I felt like the last person alive.

All the shops closed and shuttered, all the market stalls deserted, the streets echoing and empty and allowing me the discovery that my right shoe has developed a squeak that seemed to carry right across the city centre.

Ask me what I was doing there? I have no idea whatsoever, but it was strangely fun having the whole place to myself.
Then I discovered I was not alone. All the coffee shops and newsagents were closed (along with everything else) apart from two, my usual paper shop and my usual coffee shop and breakfast haunt. Weird, but kinda nice, like they'd just opened up for me.

No queue in the paper shop, just Lucy wishing me Happy New Year and chatting about how spooky the city was with only us in it. No queue - in fact no customers - in the coffee shop, just big greasy Matt behind the counter, looming and lank, looking for all the world like a low ranking Mafia thug with a godawful hangover.
Wahey! My pick of every comfy chair in the place! I settled in to my favourite chair by the window and started my year as I mean to go on, with a diet breakfast of creamy porridge with honey and a full-fat latte.
I managed to read the Guardian Book Review from cover to cover with nary a person walking in (or indeed past the window). Not until an hour later did I see another soul: a confused looking family who seemed spooked by the vast echoing emptiness all around them who wandered into the coffee shop and wandered out again, apparently lost.

Heading back to the car I heard music and was pulled toward Saint Peter Mancroft where the organist was sitting all alone in the massive gothic darkness belting out Bach at full-stops volume. He'd locked himself in, otherwise I'd have recorded him for you. I stood in the rain and listened for ages.

I've decided I like 2011 so far. It's got no people in it other than weird little Lucy in the paper shop, with her startled hamster face and her hair that lives an independent and completely wild life of its own, Matt, who was too hung over to do much more than grunt but luckily sentient enough to operate the coffee machine, a confused family and a deranged organist.
No doubt last night's revellers will soon wake up and ruin everything, but having a little piece of unspoilt year to paddle around in by myself was not unpleasant. Let's hope it bodes well.

 On my way to Saint Peter Mancroft (the big church in the background here), I found this stall.

 Ooh! Lots more!

"Er … Hello?" I ventured.

"Anyone about?

How much for the pigeon?"

But alas, nobody would take my money so I wandered on and enjoyed my own private Bach recital in the rain.

Happy 2011, Blogville.