A question about lime (and mud)

[tom.harrigan]

I'm curious to know about building techniques employed when people could not afford lime. I live in a simple ironstone cottage in north Oxfordshire that doesn't have any lime in its original construction as far as I can tell. Even the cellar (which I discovered last year), with its vaulted ceiling, uses no lime. The mortar (for want of a better word) which in the cellar is very thin, but in the rest of the house can be quite thick, consists of nothing more than the local "mud". The mud when damp - thank heavens my cellar is damp!- is quite sticky. When dry, it just turns to dust and has a tendency to fall away. Thankfully the walls are quite thick, ranging from 20" to 27". On the walls which seem most undisturbed, you find internally exceedingly poor quality stonework, consisting of thin random pieces of stone with very thick mud jointing. Over that there is a mud and straw daub, and over the daub some generations of lime plaster.

It appears that externally lime pointing was employed, however the lime was not structural. It seems to me that lime may have been a relatively expensive material (some things never change), only to be used in the finest houses or where absolutely necessary.

T

 

[MdB]

I think you will find quite a few people here have houses held together with mud/cob etc. Our entire village is for example. It should be made mainly from subsoil, not top soil I believe and should be kept dry not wet (again, I believe as I'm not an expert). Wet mud will squish (that is a technical term) whilst dry mud is a lot stronger. Yes dry mud will crumble if you poke it but there is a simple solution - don't poke it... I guess most walls of this construction would have been rendered in something to protect the internals so it didn't matter if it crumbled a bit.

 

[joechip]

Mine too, c1800 stone cottage in Herefordshire. Some kind of earth render was used and when the rotten plaster came off the earth render had turned to dust.

 

[tom.harrigan]

There's definite signs of squishing in the vaulted ceiling of the cellar, and the "mud" is indeed subsoil. I will use the correct terms in the future!

I don't know the age of my house, and have yet to find a map with it not there (back to 1732). I suspect it might date from around 1650, but there are no records.

T

 

[biffvernon]

There was an article in the SPAB journal, Cornerstones, about a year ago about the earth-mortared vaults in late medieval buildings in Malton, Yorkshire.