Jurassic Brick

Our house was built around 1902. It's the most modern building at our end of the lane (the house opposite, for example, dates back to the 17th century). As such it has always felt less historically interesting than our neighbours' homes - until today when I discovered that it's built with prehistoric materials!

I was poking around in the alley that runs between our house and next door, and noticed several bricks with baked-in fingerprints. On closer inspection I realised that every single brick is unique, because they are all handmade. That's quite a thought in itself. This is not a tiny house. So much human effort went into it even before it was assembled.

Brickmaking was a lowly trade requiring the back-breaking lugging of heavy clay and bricks. The clay was moulded in forms, stacked and fired in kilns. By the late nineteenth century a degree of industrialisation had come into play and rather than coming from a local small-scale brickyard our bricks may have been made at a large commercial brickworks and brought to Linton by railway.

What of the clay itself? As with many buildings in East Anglia, our house is made with yellowish, greyish Gault bricks. In the June 1998 edition of the British Brick Society newsletter you'll find as much information about the history of the use of Gault as you will ever need to know. Cutting to the chase, Gault is prehistoric clay deposited in the Lower Cretaceous Period. Jurassic stuff, which is even older, also gets thrown into the mix. It contains fossils and coprolites (dinosaur poo - there was a whole local industry in mining coprolites, but that's another story) and is found mainly in this part of England.

So, in quite a real sense we live in a prehistoric house. And it's completely handcrafted, down to the very bricks. Henceforth I shall regard it with a new respect.

Info on Gault: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gault;  http://www.arct.cam.ac.uk/Downloads/bbs/bbs-74.pdf
Info on bricks: http://www.bricksandbrass.co.uk/design_by_element/external_wall/bricks_and_brickwork_in_period_home.php; 
http://www.tewkesburyhistory.com/trades/brickmaker.html;