Regions said to be poor in building stone (or far enough away from good stone to make transport prohibitively expensive for all but the most high status structures) often display ingenuity in the way builders use what is available. One example is the use of pebbles and nodules of such materials as flint, chert and quartzite, all of which are found in and near Suffolk, among other areas. These rounded or irregular forms seem at first unpromising building materials, but they have all been used to make pleasing walls. I was reminded of them when I came across this picture of a section of wall in Lavenham when looking through my photographs for something else.
The wall has obligingly fallen into disrepair, giving us an insight into how it was constructed, There seems to be a core of brick combined with rubble, together with areas of brickwork on the surface that must key into the core masonry and give the structure strength. Much of the outer surface, however, is covered with pebbles and small nodules of stone. The majority of these stones come in various shades of grey and are probably flint. There are also a small number of orangey stones, which are likely to be chert. They’re all arranged roughly in courses and stick out a lot from the mortar in which they are embedded, which may have eroded away with time to produce the very knobbly effect.
Erosion, moisture and frost certainly seem to have affected the wall badly, as a large area of the pebble surface had come away when I took this photograph a couple of years ago. Water has probably got in at the top and then frozen, in spite of what looks like a top course of hard grey (aka ‘blue’) bricks, designed to protect the wall and probably added later than the rest of the structure. Full marks for effort. Perhaps with a little care and attention, what is still in part a very attractive wall could be put right – maybe it already has been.
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