Lewes, Sussex

Fossils and flutes

Every architectural history and glossary will tell you about the classical orders, the sets of rules defining how columns, capitals, and the structures they support should be designed. They will tell you that there are five orders – three (the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian) invented by the Greeks, and the other two (Composite and Tuscan) added by the Romans. They were imitated and adapted by the architects of the Renaissance, and became fashionable in England thanks to classical architects such as Inigo Jones and the legion of classicists who came after him, from the 17th to the early-20th centuries.

But this is not quite the whole story. Regular readers of this blog may remember a post about the curious ‘Gothic order’, invented in the Georgian period and used on a building in Ludlow. There’s another variation on the orders in Castle Place, a house in the High Street in Lewes. The porch is in the Ionic order – the capitals, with their pairs of spiral volutes, are straight from the builders’ pattern books of c 1810 when this house was built. But what is this on top of the fluted pilasters that bookend the façade? Not spirals in the Ionic mode, but pairs of fossils, ammonites in fact!


The ‘ammonite order’ was the brainchild of George Dance, who used it in London in 1789. It was taken up enthusiastically by Amon Wilds and his son, also called Amon, builder-architects who did a lot of work in Sussex, especially Brighton. Perhaps they liked ammonites because the name afforded the opportunity for a visual pun. Fossil-collecting was already a popular pastime by 1810, and ammonites, or ‘snake stones’ as they were often called, were prized by collectors. Their likeness fits wonderfully, if eccentrically, on top of the pilasters on this Lewes house, and no doubt acted as a kind of advertisement for the builders. In 1816 Castle Place was bought by a Dr Gideon Mantell, who was a geologist. No doubt he liked the ammonites too.

Kilve, Somerset

Scotch from the rocks

In 1851 the scientist James (‘Paraffin’) Young realized that oil could be distilled from shale, a kind of rock that could be found in, among other places, West Lothian and Fife. Once mined, the shale had to be heated in a retort to extract the oil. The resulting products included naphtha, lamp oil, paraffin, paraffin wax, motor spirit, and black tar of the sort used on roads. Scottish shale mining peaked in 1913, but the business carried on in other parts of the country, declining after World War II. Between the wars, with a nod to motor fuel’s origins in Scottish shale, petrol pumps were sometimes labelled, rather ambiguously, ‘Scotch’.

Kilve, not far from Minehead in Somerset, is one place where shale abounds in the coastal cliffs. In 1916 it was discovered that the rock contained oil and in 1924 the Shaline company was set up to begin oil production here. This small brick building housed a retort. It was probably the first to be built here in a rush of optimism in the 1920s, an optimism that now seems to be mocked by the rusty, plant-grown chimney.

Oil production on the Somerset coast was not profitable and the industry failed to take off. As a result, the landscape along the coast at Kilve is far from industrial. One can still admire the dramatic layers rock formations of the shale, and, rich in fossils, the cliffs and beach draw palaeontologists as well as those who come simply to admire the view. Rock pools, ammonites, and cream teas are more likely than oil to bring people to Kilve today.


Ammonite, Kilve