Kirsten points out that cob-built houses are an ongoing process of building and repairing that keep people in touch with the Earth and with each other. They can provide good insulation and "breathe" well, allowing air to circulate. Li tells us that she was born in a mud hut in China and spent her first years there, and thinks their shape is much better than buildings with corners - good energy, good Feng Shui. Li thinks houses in Cambridge are much too expensive and would clearly like to build a traditional house herself. But the object this week is not to create a dwelling but a large artwork - a scale model of the university's Northwest Cambridge development.
A typical composition of cob is four parts "subsoil" - sand, gravel and clay without much organic matter - one part sand, and a few large handfulls of straw. Cow dung provides an even better texture, but we will not be using that today. Even the builder's own urine can be used - but this, Kirsten hastens to add, would not be appropriate today - it would only suit a more "intimate build".
Building with cob, she says, requires "good boots and a good hat" - for the building. The foundations should drain well to keep water from attacking the base of the walls, and the upper surfaces of the walls need to be protected by a roof of some kind such as thatch or shingle. The Anglo-Saxons were masters of this sort of building and traces of Anglo Saxon and iron age buildings such as roundhouses have been found close to the site we are going to build on. One of the marks of a roundhouse is the erosion created by rain dripping from the circular eaves.
Glen and Mary arrive and we can have the safety briefing that had to wait for their presence. Their teenage children were supposed to come as well, but apparently could not be persuaded to venture out on a bank holiday morning. We pick some stout gloves and head off to the site to start cobbing.
The site is part of the University Farm, which has been pressed into service for the huge building project of houses, a school and a community centre. Glen has been involved in the planning process and knows a great deal about how the new site will work - its bus routes, a high speed cycle network, and the relationship between the university development and privately funded housing developments.
There is a white portacabin on top of a rise and great signs of moved earth around us in heaps and ridges above a flattened excavated plateau. Some of these heaps - the topsoil - are growing weeds, while the gravelly subsoil which consists of sands and flinty gravels with a little clay has very little growing on it. This is the principle ingredient of the cob.
We collect some subsoil in wheelbarrows, cointing the shovel loads, put in the right amount of sand, and wheel it towards tarpaulins where we mix in straw and water, then do our first "cob dancing" - treading on the mixture till it achieves the right consistency, which Karen says should be "like dinosaur poo". Rolling the mixture in the tarpaulin - a technique apparently developed in the US - we mix it further, then keep trampling, and trampling. We try a "drop test" - making a cannoball-sized sphere of cob and dropping it from waist height to see if it "splodges" in the right way, neither crumbling nor splatting flat like a soggy cow pat. It splodges nicely, though it is a bit soggy at first - more subsoil is mixed in. To get the feel of working with cob we each create a simple "maker's symbol", a small cob sculpture that will go into the finished artwork.
We wheel the mixture down to where the results of the previous week's cobbing - the first week of the enterprise - stand, in magnificent geometrical blocks, on the cleared building area shared with the archaeological survey. The areas for cobbing are marked out with plastic pegs, and those for archaeology with nails and string. Apparently the archaeologists got cross last week because some of the nails got moved. We try not to move any.
We set to work on 1:12 models of a row of houses. This is actually quite a large scale - the walls of each completed house reach 45cm-high, and the pitched roofs will take them 30 cm higher still. Each has been built with about seven successive layers of cob, with each layer allowed to dry fairly firm before the next is built. This is a time-consuming process. Each house has been started by packing cob into a former the shape of the base of the house and continuing upwards. We continue the work, packing the cob in closely with gloved hans and shaping it with plasterer's finishing trowels. Some of the flints in the nearby grvel turn out to be better than our increasingly battered fingers for pressing in the cob tightly. We are off! This is where we get to grips with the texture of cob and its behaviour as we try to shape it.
The days work is only interrupted by an excellent lunch of salad and cheese back at the barn, prepared by the jovial Al and his partner Cindy, and drinks at tea-time. At lunch time Shaun tells us how Nicola Tesla's plans for inexpensive energy are now being widely publicised on the internet, and can be downloaded and implemented cheaply, provided the opponents of this sort of thing don't get to you first. "Sounds like a bit of a conspiracy theory" says Kirsten wryly, and Shaun happily agrees. "It is! It's a massive conspiracy, but when thousands of people know how to do it then they can't keep it a secret any more!"
Over the afternoon we work away steadily, the buildings rising slowly and carefully. We can see that a hastily built wall constructede the previous week has fallen down. "They built it too daintily", says Kirsten, and we try to build with suitably contrasting vigour and determination. There is a lot of laughter, particularly from Li, who finds much to laugh about while continuing to speculate on the possibility of quietly building a house in a modest corner of Cambridgeshire. Glen the planning official is sceptical in a friendly sort of way. Li would include lots of pebble spirals as decoration. "Very auspicious! Very, very auspicious!".
The afternoon passes amazingly quickly and huge amounts of cob are consumed by the model buildings. We are using bricks as fillers to bulk out the solid cob forms. We pack up in a fairly organised way, dividing equiment into wheelbarrows, and back in the barn Karen tells us about cob buildings she has made and shows us some recent artwork - ceramic loaves that elegantly make the connection between bread-making and ceramics. The word "cob" is linked to the old name for a loaf. The ceramic loaves look a lot more edible than the lumps of cob, but I am already developing an affection for this ancient form of building.
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