Time Team: Island of Eels
What is clunch ?
The Shorter Oxford (CD-ROM)
and American Heritage Dictionaries (Web) were
either possibly misleading
or nor clear enough, or with no entry.
"South Downs" by Peter Brandon
page 27 has an explanation.
ISBN 1 86077 069 X
Chalk hardened with gritty bits of shell (species of shell unknown).
Has anybody got any more ?
Cheers
Andy Horton.
Glaucus@hotmail.com
History of Shoreham
History.htm
--------------------------------
Clunch is a hard chalk used as a building stone - see Coombes Church, West Sussex (Adur Valley) and many other similar old buildings.
We usually think of Chalk as a 'soft' material, but it is very variable in colour, composition etc.
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I did not see the programme,
so I do not know in what context it appeared,
but clunch is a very soft
(and therefore not very good for external use)
limestone. It is very fine
and white - in effect just chalk. It occurs in
various parts of East Anglia,
and can be seen quite a lot in and around
Thetford - mostly for property
boundary walls, but also for some building
walls. In Ely Cathedral
it was used for a lot of intricate carving in the
Lady Chapel (if I have remembered
correctly).
Hope that helps. (My Penguin
Dictionary of Geology doesn't give it!)
------------
I have come across the word
'clunch' used to describe the brown masses of
iron-cemented grit, gravel
and sand which was used in medieval church
building in Essex and Suffolk.
As this is an area with little 'proper'
stone, there is a fair amount
of this in Early medieval churches, which is
unfortunate as its not very
stable.
Paul Barford
----------------
Clunch also appears as a
building material in the Berkshire Downs (i.e.
chalkland). As a child
I found the description in Pevsner of a 'clunch and
sarsen hamlet' very funny,
thinking it sounded like something to eat!
Paula Martin
Dr Paula Martin
Duart Point Shipwreck Project
School of History
University of St Andrews
Tel: 01334 462920
--------------------
The NMR Main Building Materials
Thesaurus
http://www.rchme.gov.uk/thesaurus/bm_types/default.htm
gives the scope note
for Clunch as "A hard, gritty,
grey/green coloured form of chalk".
Martin Newman
--------------------
Clunch is chalk lump.
It was a very common building material in West
Suffolk, where it was used
not only for boundary walls but whole houses, but
as it flakes very easily
when subjected to frost it is not very good for
either purpose.
Sandie Geddes
------------------
I'm sure the resident experts
will come back with a textbook definition of Clunch here is my understanding:-
A denser form of chalk (i.e.
Cretaceous Limestone) which has better weathering properties and thus can
be shaped and used as a building stone. There is very little building stone
available in East Anglia apart from Flint, Carrstone (ferrogenous bonded
sandstone) and Clunch and thus most later buildings like Ely Cathedral
use a lot of imported limestone. In Ely there is a band of very friable
sandstone which can be seen in some old boundary walls within the city.
This may represent the southern limit of the Carrstone which occurs in
West Norfolk between Downham Market and Hunstanton (the hill of the honey
coloured stone).
I do not remember if clunch
occurs or is used in chalk areas outside East Anglia. I suspect that
clunch is originally a dialect word and it is good to have the non-natives
puzzling over its meaning.
Denis Smith
------------------
From:
"RUSSELL, Nick" <nrussell@GLOSCC.GOV.UK>
Subject:
Re: Clunch
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charset="ISO-8859-1"
generally speaking clunch
is any sort of chalk building, usually refers to
walls. Doesn't particularly
apply to dressed chalk.
Nick,
------------------
:
Edwin Rose <edwin.rose.mus@NORFOLK.GOV.UK>
Subject:
Clunch
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Well I can only speak for
Norfolk but here, clunch simply means
chalk cut into blocks and
used as building stone, usually in small
blocks with flint galletting/outline.
-----------------
:
Catherine Petts <catherinepetts@HOTMAIL.COM>
Subject:
Re: Odp: Clunch
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format=flowed
It is incorrect to use the
word 'clunch' to describe the stone you mention.
Clunch is 'hard' chalk used
as building stone. The stone you describe is a
silcrete. It comes in two
forms and the popular words used for one is
'puddingstone', the other
is 'sarsen'
The use of this material in your area is fully discussed in:
Potter, John F. 1998. THE DISTRIBUTION OF SILCRETES IN THE
CHURCHES OF THE LONDON BASIN. Proceedings of the Geologist's
Association, vol 109, pp289-304
Catherine Petts
-----------------------------
:
Andy Russel <nikita@UNISONFREE.NET>
Subject:
Re: Clunch
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charset="iso-8859-1"
The keep of Guildford Castle
(Surrey) was built of clunch, quarried from
nearby hole in the North
Downs. As its a large square Norman keep and its
still in good condition
clunch can be a very hard stone and weather well. I
have seen softer chalk used
in buildings in Southampton and Portchester
Castle for instance, there
it was used in places where it would not be
exposed to frost. Those
old masons knew their materials!
==================================
Hello,
Clunch
Thanks, I found all the BRITARCH
responses interesting.
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?S2=britarch&D=1&O=D&q=clunch&s=&f=&a=&b=
There was a serious mistake
in my original message that started this theme.
The mistake was the reference
given. The name of Peter Brandon's book
is 'The South Downs'.
Quote for the purposes of review:
Building with Chalk
It has been noted that 'Chalk
(except for a few special varieties), cannot
be successfully used in
building unless it is studied and codified, its
weaknesses understood and
guarded against'. Chalk indeed was usually too
soft and lacking in durability
to be suitable for building, at least for
exteriors, in contrast to
the Oolitic' limestone of the Cotswolds, for
example, which provides
the finest of building stones. There are, however,
some more compact beds of
chalk at the base of the northern escarpment
which contain tiny fragments
of shells and other impurities which produce a
more gritty texture. This
is called 'clunch', a word evocatively conveying
a sense of its soft, yet
dense and resistant quality. Clunch is hardest in
the Western and the East
Hampshire Downs and was widely used for the
exterior walls of farmhouses,
cottages and barns in the Meon valley and
eastwards along the northern
escarpment towards Duncton as at Cocking,
EIsted and Harting. On account
of its inability to resist rainwater, clunch
had to be protected by wide
eaves from rain-bearing winds, and by a
foundation course to keep
it clear of the ground, generally a footing of
sarsen stone. To a lesser
extent it was used near Lewes, as in barns at
Hamsey. Several church interiors
are modelled in clunch, including Burpham
in the Arun valley.
Local builders have now
forgotten how to select or handle chalk, and no
longer trouble to use it,
although there was a local saying, 'Find Chalk a
good hat and shoe and it
will serve You well".
Mitigating circumstances for the original error:
1) The message was
composed whilst the television programme Timewatch was
on. The previous TV documentary
was about a Saxon who had his head chopped
off at Stonehenge.
2) Peter Brandon edited
an earlier book called 'The South Saxons'.
Cheers
Andy Horton
Glaucus@hotmail.com
Manager
"History & Archaeology
(Britain & Ireland)"
Group Home Page: http://www.Jiglu.com/spaces/history/
Group Email Address: British-History@smartgroups.com
'Local name for various stiff clays including marly chalk; probably derived from adjective clunch, 'lumpy; heavy and stiff or close', which is perhaps a contraction of a lost adjective cluntish (cf. Scottish, Scotch; Frencisc, French) (OED). Still used by well sinkers.
1686 Plot, Staffordsh. 132, 'an earth called blew-clunch, 3 yards (Coal Measures)
1712 Bellers, Phil Trans., OED, ' a blewish hard clay; the miners call it Clunch' (Coal Measures).
1776 OED, ' In puddings there's something so clumsy and clunch'
1793 Smeaton, Edystone L. OED, ' What is called near Lewes in Sussex, the Clunch Lime, a species of chalk'.
1817 William Smith, Strat. Syst., ' Clunch Clay and Shale Oxford Clay).
1818 w. Phillips, Geol. Engl. & Wales, 57, ' The lowest beds of the grey chalk, provincially termed clunch' (Cambridgshire).
Graham
Lott
British Geological Survey