The Great Nottingham Project (part3) Anglo Saxon Burgh

 Another exciting day in Snotingaham 

Why? I hear you cry or maybe not given I doubt people read this but if they do thanks. Anyway today is painting day for the Burgh. The board is covered in sand for texture and I've selected my colours for the painting project. Now as well as sandstone cliffs nottingham is also based on a very heavy clay bed for its soil, heavy enough in fact that if you want anything more than a lawn in your back garden your going to need to either know you plants or be prepared for a lot of heavy digging but before i go off on a tangent about gardening in this fair and beautiful shit hole I call home I will come back to paint and picking colours to use on the board.

So as I said nottingham is a mix of soft sandstone rock and heavy clay,  now while most people think this would mean a reddish colour for the dirt because its clay but not all clay is red in fact clay comes in a broad spectrum of colours depending on the bed rock and mineral deposits in it and the Nottingham ground soil is a thick heavy brown/grey clay that shares a lot of similarities to the soil found around the Somme and Wipers(1) in northern france. So for this project i went to B&Q and picked up a lovely shade of greyish brown colour, I've also added a little bit of a red/brown colour as a highlight colour and the cliffs are highlighted in a deep mustard ochre colour as there final highlight.

Now here some fun facts sandstone isn't always yellow and also comes in three forms of hardness, these are referred to by masons in the medieval period as the the piff, paff and puff. this terms are also used for a number of rocks when grading it for mason work. The piff is the hardest  and was used to build most of the stone work at nottingham castle, the paff is the middle stone and is often used for non vital building and as a filler and the puff is the softest and the easiest to work and is most often used as an interior dressing stone that will then be covered in render. 

Now the reason for this tangent explanation of sandstone and grading it in the medieval masons world leads me nicely into why my sandstone cliffs are not a  bright yellow and why also nottingham hasn't disappeared in a sinkhole of collapsed sandstone caves (for which our city is famous ). Most of the sandstone of Nottingham is in fact more up of this hard core strata of standstone rock refered to as piff by masons in the 12 and 13th century.

Almost there just got to order the last buildings for
the Anglo Saxon Burgh and add the small detail.

1: Wipers is the British name for the town of ypres in Belgium, I've spent so long studying history that alas I often use the name wipers rather than Ypres, I also do the same thing when talking about Byzantion /constantinople/miklagard the modern name of Istanbul is very rarely used if at all in my house.