If building with beach-flints is like stacking cannonballs, doing the same with lime-flints is more like a jigsaw puzzle. The flints quarried from the chalk come in irregular branching nodules, with some rounded white surfaces and some flat, glasslike split ends. Stacked in a skilful way, and bonded with sandy clay or weak lime mortar, they can easily be interlocked to form a cottage, barn or garden wall.
If you're carful, you can arrange for the outer surface of the wall to consist entirely of the split faces of the nodules, with any voids filled with smaller stones faced and shaped with a sharp blow or two. This is called "Split-Flint" work rather than "Knapped-Flint" work, which needs a lot more work to achieve.
There are Norfolk cottages built with knapped flint facings, but they are relatively rare and represent an entirely different level of investment in both time and money. Perhaps I will write about knapped flints in proper detail at a future date, but for the moment, we shall stay with the more economic ways of building cottages.
One of the most important things about flint is that it is impervious to water. This means a flint faced wall will shed the rain with very little absorbtion or penetration, so long as the jointing is well done and of the right degree of flexibility. If the bonding between the stones is too hard, the wall will crack from any slight seasonal ground movement or from thermal expansion and contraction. Getting the strength of the mortar right will ensure the wall has a long and useful life.
So far we have looked only at the plain face of the wall, but with flints of all types, turning the corner is a serious problem. The Saxons and early Normans sometimes avoided it by building round towers to their churches. The Romans did much the same with their fortifications, as can be seen at both Caister-on-sea and Caister St. Edmund, despite the fact that they had bricks available. There was one church in Heigham, Norwich where the corners were built of flint, but historically quoins were generally turned using either brickwork or some type of squared stone such as limestone, sandstone or granite.
Most Norfolk Cottages have quoins built of local red brick or sometimes those imported from Holland as return cargos in the woolen trade. Again bricks are a huge subject that I hope to attack at some future date.
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