A Crowland Chronicle

There's a Crowland-related story here that might interest a few of you:

I love these slightly rough-and-ready bricks, made probably circa 1690, removed from a rather troubled wall and now being stored, to be put back once some pretty urgent repairs are completed. It's amazing to me that a few of those involved in making them may have remembered the Civil War — perhaps even the Siege of Crowland in 1643.

Now that they are structurally stable and also properly watertight, I hope that over the next few months, we can restore the lathe-and-plaster / reed-and-plaster here, and bring these attic rooms back into use.

Debate continues regarding this gable wall. The crack to the left in the photo, probably caused by decades of rainwater falling on the foundation at a single point, is large and growing larger. Meanwhile the gable itself has been, as you can just about see in the photo, badly repaired in the past using inappropriate cement. There's a school of thought that the best answer is to take the gable wall down, numbering the bricks (seriously — this has been done before) and rebuild it, on a better foundation, using an appropriate lime mortar. Not an easy choice, though.

Although this is very much a work in progress — we are still awaiting window glass, and the painting is ongoing — at least it's starting to come together. NB the collyweston slates on the roof will darken quite a bit once they "weather in", so the fascia board supporting the gutters — an exact replacement of the 1920s version that was there previously, but that had rotted away — won't look quite so prominent.