Kirsten had been asked to "tidy up" the straw bales being used as a source of straw for the cobbing. There are around 100 of them so tidying them up was no small feat. We brought stout gloves this morning in order to stop the bailer twine cutting into our fingers as we shifted them; Shaun had thoughtfully brought three pairs of gloves so everyone was equipped. John ("Jez") the digger driver showed us how to bounce bales from the stack using a strategically placed extra bale as a sort of stepping stone or trampoline - you throw the bale you want to move onto the spare bale, it bounces off and travels much further than it otherwise would - hopefully in the direction that you intended.
In this way we constructed a tribute to Carl André who made the famous "Equivalent VIII" sculpture exhibited in the Tate Gallery, using the same ratio of 6 to 10 for the arrangement of blocks. This was not at all pretentious (hem hem) and actually looked quite neat, thus satisfying the twin demands of aesthetics and other people's need for tidy arrangements of things. Then we could roll up our sleeves and get back to cobbing.
I had reached a point in one of the houses I had worked on where I could begin to construct the pitch of the roof. Glen had discovered that the roofs could be constructed in one fell swoop, allowing their inclined surfaces to be worked upon in a single mass. Shaun pointed out - very helpfully - that one of the spirit levels had a 45 degree bubble in it, so before long I was using that level to correct the angles and produce a magnificent and only slightly wonky roof.
I started adding bulk to the walls of another unfinished house when Kirsten summoned us over to a marked out area near the large model of a block of flats which had been laid out yesterday. "We need to construct level walls around this" she explained, "so that we can pour wet cob into the middle and make a nice level surface". With Li and a new volunteer called Sam I began working my way around the edge of the building, constantly using a spirit level to check that the top surface of the wall wasn't getting out of true with respect to the level points that Kirsten had already constructed.
This process had just got underway when it began to rain a little, and anyway it was lunchtime. We headed back to the barn to discover that Cindy and Al had concocted another very tasty lunch with toasted halloumi and olives and salad. Over lunch Kirsten explained that the previous group had presented her with a set of "ceremonial cobbing gloves" of the Order of the Marigold.
We were joined by Michael from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, which is part of Cambridge University's Department of Archaeology. This is a commercial organisation but not privatised, and with strong links with the academics of the Archaeology Department, and has an excellent publication record. Archaeological investigation is required for any new development and while this can be simply surveys and remote sensing, if something is discovered, then the developer must pay for whatever archaeological work needs to be done. On average, Michael explained, an archaeological site is discovered at a rate of about one per kilometer for a project such as a motorway, and archaeological costs can be 3-10% of development costs. However, archaeological discoveries could bring major economic benefits from tourism as well as helping to understand the historical development of a region.
After lunch Michael went to explain some digger work that he wanted done to John, and we met up with him again on the archaeological part of the site, where about ten people were working on the archaeology. He sent us up onto the top of a pile of earth with some boards positioned as a viewing platform while he ran a circle around a dark circular mark on the pitted surface below us. Then he sprinted up the little hill to explain what he had just shown us. "That's the outline of an iron age round house. You can see another one over there and there are smaller ones as well. Those two lines cutting through the second round house are Roman field boundaries. This site was occupied from about 400 BC, up until the Romans invaded in 43 AD. The Romans reorganised the land usage and this site is giving us information about how those changes were implemented. In another part of the site we discovered indications of a Roman field irrigation system, perhaps for asparagus or vinyards".
The iron age people had kept cattle, horses, pigs and goats, and the remains of a dog had also been discovered. We went down to look at one of the round house excavations and Michael explained that the circular mark - about ten meters in diameter - was the drainage ditch maintained under the eaves of the thatched roundhouse to take away the water draining from the roof. In the roundhouse itself people had lived together with their livestock and there were traces of hearths. The roundhouse would have been rebuilt every 10-25 years.
The whole site was marked by pits and trenches thought to be linked to drainage and the storage of crops. Michael speculated that wealthier individuals had a higher proportion of wheat rather than oats in their diet, and the people living on this site were not particularly wealthy. An unusual find had been part of a skull in a pond, perhaps put there for symbolic or ceremonial reasons. Michael stressed the huge difference in outlook between iron age cultures and most contemporary cultures.
Kirsten strode over the site towards us looking stern or perhaps anxious. "I'm not trying to hurry you but it would be good to get some more cobbing done!" Michael grinned and said he would keep the next bit quick, and showed us some iron age, Roman and possibly Saxon pottery in fragments on the surface. They could be identified to build a chronology for the use of the site. Some of the site remained to be excavated and it is very reassuring to know that the information about the past use of this place will not be lost forever. Thanks, Michael, for a great tour!
Back to cobbing and we finished levelling the wall around the model of the block of flats. With Sam I drew a sturdy timber across the surface, filling any holes with cob and levelling it. It is still a rough surface on top, but Shaun will finish the platform tomorrow, using the cob-smoothing skills he has developed working on the houses. Meanwhile Mary has been learning to drive the tipper truck.
We went back to the barn for some excellent drizzle cake and met David, an artist in residence on the site and discussed the span of history covered by this spot, and ate some very tasty lemon drizzle sponge cake prepared by Cindy. Right at the end of the day a Ridgeons low-loader drew up and delivered a pallet load of breeze blocks - to be used as formers to construct the narrow gaps between buildings. But that will be a task for another day!
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| A piece of Roman pottery from the archaeological site. |
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