Cob: Quiet List

[kathryn marsh]

>
>If anyone has read this far :-)...can you tell me if I use boiled 
>linseed oil on
>the poplar (they will be stripped of bark and allowed to dry over the winter),
>do you think that would help to preserve them a bit?
>

Some fifty years or so my grandparents lived in an A frame wattle and 
daub cottage in the English fens - the house is alas now gone in the 
fifties zeal to demolish the unhygienic but the relevant points of 
the construction are as follows.

The house was believed to have been built (from evidence in manor 
rolls etc) some time in the late 12th/early 13th centuries. The 
surrounding land was peat which was only finally fully drained in the 
early 20th century although water rose half way up the walls in the 
floods of 1947 and 1953 to my knowledge. Demolition revealed that 
the oak A frame timbers at each end had each been floated on a 
cowhide filled with melted tallow. About two feet of pea gravel had 
been laid over the peat before the timber frame had been put in. At 
some time an oak central post (18 inch diameter tree) into which the 
spiral staircase leading to the attic floor was pegged (probably 15th 
century judging by the construction techniques in the attic floor) 
had been added. This had simply been sunk through the gravel and had 
rotted right through when I was a child so that the staircase was 
actually suspended from the floor timbers above - a very unnerving 
experience for a small child going to bed as it swung freely from 
side to side and had no hand rail!

The rest of the construction was a double willow wattle construction 
with clay infill and daubed and whitewashed coating inside and out. 
Almost three feet thick at the base tapering to 12 inches at the 
eaves. My grandparents were very careful about the maintenance of the 
whitewash for obvious reasons. On occasion the coating would be 
damaged and some of the cob would crumble, sometimes revealing sound 
willow wattle and sometimes falling into holes right through. When 
the latter happened it was my grandmothers practise to stuff the hole 
with crumpled newspaper and fill in with more clay brought from the 
banks of the nearest dyke where it was regularly dredged out to keep 
the drainage open. She then simply whitewashed over as soon as it was 
dry.

Worked fine for seven or eight hundred years. Had better U values 
than the 1940 mass concrete that forms the core of our present home 
too. Especially with goose down beds and quilts.

kathryn