Cobbing day two

Cobbing in Northwest Cambridge - day two

Kirsten and Natalie looked thrilled as a white van pulled into the car park opposite the barn. "Digger John! Digger John!" Natalie shouted.  From the van a black labrador - Pyro - and an elegant doberman - Ralph - hurled themselves out and immediately made their way over to where they knew there might be food at the back of the barn, making a thorough inspection of the area. But there was only our early morning cups of coffee. Glen was not able to be with us today but his wife Mary was, for the morning at least. We were also joined by Reece, who looked slightly dubious about the whole thing, but this could easily be attributed to nerves. Shaun was also there and we were all ready to get cobbing again.

John gave us a stern introduction to the dangers of the mechanical digger. "It can chop your legs off easily" he pointed out cheerfully. He told us to grip a handle on the side of the cab if we were talking to him as he operated it, and to watch out for the bucket and arm swinging violently sideways. "I might use some non-PC language to tell you what to do", he said "but it's just to make it more memorable".

"Who would

like to drive the dumper truck?" asked John, who looks and sounds really quite a lot like Martin Freeman. No one else seemed to be jumping at the chance - Rees being young had never learned to drive - so I volunteered myself. "That's the stick that turns up the volume" said John, pointing to a sort of joystick on the side of the steering column. "Er ... what do you mean?" I asked, dimly. "It makes it go faster". "What about all these buttons?" "There's a horn that goes beep, and the others operate the bucket". It really did seem straightforward, so having strapped myself in I headed gingerly up the hill. At one point the motor slowed, so guessing that it was in too high a gear, I slowed down and this succeeded in getting it over the brow of the hill. So far so good!

Kirsten explained that she wanted us to trim the building models we had constructed the day before. Wet cob is a somewhat fluid material and it is quite capable of bulging and slumpring overnight as it dries. I shaved and cut away at some of the walls I had made yesterday, trying to bring them into line, and used a spirit level to check. This made it clear that there was a more serious problem with two other model buildings: the walls were tapering in towards the top. I poured water on to soak the existing cob and then applied coatings on the outside to make the walls more vertical. I'll find out tomorrow if these wall additions have stayed in place as they dried. I managed to add another layer to a house as well. Rees, learning about cobbing for the first time, was carefully adding a layer to one of the other houses, meticulously making the walls absolutely straight. "Another perfectionist" said Kirsten in triumph. I somehow suspect that I was not considered the other perfectionist.

But in any case other, larger plans, were afoot. Kirsten was planning to set out the floor plan of a block of flats. We used formers consisting of planks with small horizontal attachments which could be stood on, to hold the main part of the former vertical. The vertical section had to be placed on top of the strings oulining the floor plan of what will be a large block of flats in the Northwest Cambridge development. Kirsten had laid out mounds of cob  around in the interior of the floor plan and we scooped and pressed this towards the formers to make vertical walls precisely following the outline. Next we forked a much larger amount of cob into the interior of the floor plan. After lunch we were going to trample this to make the base of the new large building. "I want to set out the floor plans for all the buildings on the site, even if  we can't complete all the models", said Kirsten, recognising the daunting scale of the task ahead of  her over the next five weeks.

Lunch was an excellent spicy vegetable soup, again prepared by Cindy and Al. Ralph and Pyro, the two dogs, joined us for the meal and were rewarded with a few tasty scaps. Li was quiet today, perhaps exhausted by her relentless work yesterday, but still asking questions and making observations about the legal technicalities of building. "You can't build secretly, no", she said, "nothing must be hidden".

A huge, twenty ton orange digger had pulled onto the site during the morning and had been busy reshaping the topsoil ridge or "bund" that ran along one side of the site. The driver, Ricky, stocky and jolly, joined us for lunch and told us about the fifteen  ponies and horses he had kept at one time. One of them, which he said had "an upper lip like a camel", had repeatedly freed himself from a farriers "twitch" - a loop around the horses mouth used to control a horse while it was being shod - just by twisting its lips and was able to untie knots with them. It had also walked upstairs in his house one day!

I was expecting to trample the foundations of the block of flats in the afternoon but instead John took me over to the digger and told me to wait while he cleared the topsoil around an interesting pit that had been dug, originally with the plan of using it to mix cob. He  made it safer by reducing its steepness. I took some photographs of the stratigraphy inside the pit, which showed variations in the current speed of the water laying down the sands and gravel - presumably glacial washout sediments.

I was given careful instruction in the use of the digger - in particular not to grip the control levers, and to brace hands while operating the caterpillar tracks. The number of different movements - activated by moving the levers forward, backwards or sideways - seemed bewildering at first but before long I was mixing cob in the skip that was being used as a large mixing bowl for cob, and which was clearly more effective than the pit ever could have been - for one thing, any water put into the pit would have quickly drained out through the gravels at its base.

I learned how to load the dump truck with the digger and took loads down to where the cobbers were working on the block of flats.  In this way I escaped some of the hard physical work being done in the afternoon - Lee was so exhaused she sank to her knees at one point - but the concentration required to operate the digger made up for this evasion. At the end of the cob mixing by digger I was so phased out I couldn't remember anyone's name for about ten minutes.

After the end of the day's work we cut some plastic sheeting to cover the remaining cob mix made that day, and as we left the site I spotted a medium sized ammonite mould among the pebbles. The ammonite pebble must have split open late in the transporation process because the outside surfaces were fiercely eroded and rounded, while the ammonite mould retained a lot of detail - it should be possible to pin down the species. We have been told to "tidy up" the straw bales on the site so we have decided to make an impression of the famous Tate "pile of bricks" installation, but in straw.  We admired Ricky's work on the great earthwork bund at the side of the site, now shaped into a gently curving viewing platform. That was itself a remarkable and artful creation.