My One Street 7 : Bricks

My cottage was built for the estate brick maker some 170 years ago when the Victorian model farm, several workers' cottages, the 'big house' extension and many of the walled gardens were all built.

Much of the woodland near the cottage is scarred with deep pits where the clay for the bricks was dug. The soil in my garden is rich with ash from the brick oven.

The bricks produced vary in colour and texture and when the oven got very hot, the silica in the clay melted to form a blue glass- like coating to the bricks. These are known locally as bottle glaze bricks - You can see a couple in the image and they were also used to form feature pillars and patterns in the big house walls.


This image caught my eye this morning as I walked by the tumble-down kitchen garden wall. With the sun shining on the moss covered bricks, their journey has almost gone full circle.

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