Cob: Horse Manure

[Shannon C. Dealy]

On Mon, 21 Jan 2002, Darel Henman wrote:

[snip]
>   The fellow I had talked to, had been involved with restoring historic
> buildings back in England and though his particular specialty was in the
> oak timber framing, he mentioned that where his from they would use
> horse manure in their cob.   
> 
>   Is this a local custom?  Does this add the cob (daud)'s durability
> and/or water strength?
[snip]

I hadn't previously (that I can recall) heard of anyone deliberately
adding horse manure to cob (though from my experience with plasters I
don't doubt it could be used to improve the mix), but for what it's
worth, a traditional method of mixing cob was to use a horse on a
turnstile going around in circles trodding on earth to which water and
straw are added.  Given this traditional mixing method, manure is going to
be a small but inevitable part of cob mixtures for many historic buildings
:-)

Shannon C. Dealy      |               DeaTech Research Inc.
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