Pootler

Country cottages. Warped ships' timbers, honeysuckle, pixie-cut thatched roof,  a misshapen chimney, the aroma of baking and  Vaughan Williams 'Pastoral' drifting out of the small paned window. Very twee.  Do you ever wonder whether they are really ancient or just more recent fakes?  This post is about the oldest, visible surviving rural housing used by the common people and in particular how much you can see from the road. It is impractical to include much detail in a post aimed at mobile phone readers so  I have added notes and links in a postscript i n case you want to peek behind the floral curtains and take a closer look,  It isn't easy. Timber was the common building material and it lasts well but the main survivors from medieval times are the stone buildings like churches and mansions which I am not concerned with here. There are few details, let alone complete houses, that have survived e xtensions, reconfigurations and improvements; and no clear...

This is a pause in our trudge through the stygian gloom of geological history, to take a closer look at mud, mud, glorious mud, in all its various flavours, gloopy, crumbly and hard in the form of rock. The stuff of Golems.  Apologia. The passively interested reader might find this the most stultifyingly tedious post on this blog, with  graphics that are awe-inspiringly uninspiring. And  I am aware that there is some competition. It is here  for the sake of completeness and  because, worryingly, I think that mud has a story to tell. But you might find it helps you to doze off.    While tootling around the planet on its way toward its current position on the globe, South East England often found itself in a liminal zone between land and sea, sometimes one and sometimes the other, depending on the sea levels. The foundations of our landscape are the compacted sediments of sand, gravel and biological detritus that slowly accumulated on the old sea floors....

  Brass Point nr. Beachy Head Logically, this post should precede rather than follow 'chilling out'. 'The Chalk' hills surround London and the Thames Valley, with rolling downland, capped with pure white stone. The bleached clean bones of old England,  Tolkien's Barrow Downs.   Wonderful stuff.  There aren’t many places in the world where pure chalk rises to the surface and England is blessed with the largest proportion of them.  If you are walking, it is usually dry and springy underfoot and on a bike the slopes are merciful. Cretaceous Earth It's origins are described in the first two posts in my 'Deep Past' series; Links: ' From Hell to High Water '  and ' Coming Up For Air '. It crops up again in my musings on local stone.  Mud   A short reprise. The white chalk of the downland has its origins at the bottom of an ancient sea at  around the latitude of what is now North Africa. It was a long way from land and as deep as the scarps hill...