Monday 16 May 2011

Bricks

Today I've begun work on a website for a builder, tidying it up and adding a little bit of zip. Copywriting is my bread and butter work, and it's not much different to building really - lots of painstaking repetitive tasks, with the occasional opportunity for a bit of creativity and excitement.

As well as writing I sometimes teach brickmaking to school children at Bore Place. It's one of my most favourite things. They absolutely love the chance to get utterly filthy and to make a brick, something really important, a skill that could actually be useful. Almost all our houses round here are made of brick - the soil is heavy clay, and every village used to have its own brickyard (if you've only got a horse and cart and muddy tracks you don't want to lug those bricks far once you've made them).

I'm not much of a brickmaker, to be honest - this is one of mine, and it's flatter at one end than the other, and has a corner missing where I didn't fill the mould properly. But I'm proud of it, and love the fact that I made it, from clay dug out of the ground below the old winter housing for the cows, mixed with a bit of sand and soot (that's what made the dark patch). It's good to know too that it was fired in the Bore Place kiln by my friend Mary.

In this picture it's sitting in our courtyard, which is made entirely of Bore Place bricks. We watched them being made in the brickworks that was there until a couple of years ago. Brett the brickmaker showed us how to throw the clay into the mould sat on top of the stockboard with its ridge to form the frog, then scrape off the excess with the strike and lay it out on a pallet to air dry for a few days. In the dairy walls at Bore Place you can see paw prints where cats walked over the drying bricks before they were fired.

A really good brickmaker could produce between 3500 and 5000 bricks in a 14 hour day, with the help of his assistants - it takes me and the children an hour to make 30, so you wouldn't hire us if you were building a house. Maybe a very low wall?

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