Let's start on the beach. It's a lovely North Norfolk day. The sun is shining, which it does a lot along this coast, and there's a gentle offshore breeze, which is not so common, but pleasing when it happens. You stand in the middle of a deserted beach of clean firm sand recently vacated by the tide. Nearer the cliff there is a long drift of mixed rounded flints and shingle of various sizes. You breath deeply and suddenly feel the need to make your mark, impress your character on the wildness of it, perhaps even impress the wildness with your character.
You select several large very round stones and try to pile them one upon another. They fall over. You build a pyramidal cairn. It stays up, but it's far from being a wall. You select a new batch of stones, not so rounded, flatter more oval. You stack them up with some wet sand in between. It looks a mess but it stays up. You do it again with more care and firmer sand. Now all you need is a cart-horse and a sturdy wagon and "Hey!" off you go up the cliff path with the first installment of your Norfolk Cottage Constructor Kit.
The ancient village of Sheringham, now called Upper Sheringham, was the best part of a mile and a half from the sea. However this didn't stop the young men of the village from being fishermen. They kept their boats in a fold of the cliff where a small stream cut its way down to the sea, and walked home after every trip with a basket of fish and a basket of beach flints. When they had sold enough fish and brought home enough flints, they married their sweethearts and built themselves a cottage. Eventually, the community grew sufficiently large to divide like a social amoeba and Lower Sheringham came into being in the valley behind the fishing huts. Then the railway arrived and flooded the place with trippers. The rest, as they say, is history.
The simplest way to lay a cobble wall is to take the flints as they come to hand and place them on the wall wherever they fit best. This results in a rather untidy looking wall, which is best if the stones arrived in a truly random order. If they happened to arrive is varying batches of predominately the same size you'll get a wall of mismatched patches.
However, if you feel the need for more order and want to impress people with your skill, you will grade the flints so that all those forming the face of the wall will be roughly the same size and shape. Lay them in even courses and your wall will be a joy for ever. You can even do herringbone patterns for an air of solidity or slant them all the same way for that go-faster look.
Naturally, you wont just use sand to bind the beach flints, with chalk to hand and a lime-kiln, a stiff sand lime mortar is easily prepared. Cobble walls work best with a lime mortar, unlike lime-flints which we shall discuss tomorrow.
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Tomorrow: Building with Lime-Flints.
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