Some landscapes wear their hearts on their sleeves. Topography tells the entire story: hills and mountains, deep valleys, rocky outcrops — geomorphology writ large, geology in plain sight. Think of archetypal English landscapes captured in paintings, film and photography: the Lake District with its mountains, lakes and glacial valleys; the Peak District with its lightdark character of limestone and millstone grit; the West Country with its rolling hills, lush meadows and sandstone-red soil. But other landscapes are not quite so easy to read. To understand the low country of England’s easternmost region you need to dig down to what lies beneath.
In East Anglia, a thick band of chalk lies beneath the surface all the way from the Wash across Norfolk and Suffolk to the North Sea coast. Laid down in shallow warm seas between 135 and 70 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, the chalk is up to 450 metres thick and underlies the whole of Norfolk east of the escarpment that marks the boundary of the Fens. At Great Yarmouth on Norfolk’s east coast the top of the chalk is 150 metres below ground level and overlain with more recent deposits left by the ice that covered the land during the Pleistocene glacial period that lasted until around 400,000 years ago. In the west of the county, the chalk lies in plain sight much closer to the surface. Within the chalk are strata of flint nodules and it is this stone that characterises so much of East Anglia, especially the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk.
Origins
Flint is a curiosity: a remarkably hard sedimentary rock that is born within another much softer one. Like chalk, it is produced from the residue of once living creatures — a metamorphosis from silicarich sludge to amorphous lumps of the hardest of rocks. Chalk’s formation from the accretion of calciumrich shells of sea creatures is easy enough to envisage. Flint, though, requires a little more imagination. Put in the simplest terms, it is generally believed that flint nodules are formed when the dissolved silica released from microscopic sponges occupy the void left by burrowing crustaceans. It is the shape of such burrows that give flint its curiously knobbly form.
Although originating as layered nodules in the chalk, much of the flint found in East Anglia is what may be termed Quaternary. That is, it is rock that over millennia has been shifted from its original setting by means of ice sheets, rivers and ocean currents. It is this flint that lies thickly scattered and plough-broken on Norfolk fields or piled up on Suffolk’s shingle beaches. It is the same flint that has long been gathered for building barns and cottage walls or used as hardcore for road making.
Flint is a curiosity: a remarkably hard sedimentary rock that is born within another much softer one. Like chalk, it is produced from the residue of once living creatures.
Along the East Anglian coastline much of this flint ends up on beaches or on spits: shape-shifting accumulations of pebbles that have been moved and deposited by the process of longshore drift — where inshore currents and wave patterns shape coastal topography. One of the most impressive of these spits, indeed at 16 km long the largest in England, is Orford Ness in Suffolk ( featured in issue 46 of hidden europe).
Orford Ness begins close to the coastal town of Aldeburgh and stretches south like a finger pinched between the North Sea and the course of the Alde and Ore rivers. An eerie ‘Here be Dragons’ territory that has all the characteristics of an island, Orford Ness is a luminous landscape of shingle, birds and secrecy. A former top secret weapons testing site, once firmly out of bounds to the public but now accessible under the auspices of the National Trust, it continues to exude an air of mystery sufficient to make visitors feel as if they are standing on still-forbidden territory. An unremitting soundscape of lapping waves and grinding flint pebbles also has a part to play in creating the eldritch atmosphere that pervades this unworldly place.
Working with flint
But all this is flint in the wild, a stone in its natural habitat. What of the ways this locally abundant resource has been used by man? And what of its use in a region like East Anglia where flint is ubiquitous? Flint is central to the oldest technology on the planet: the exploitation of the stone’s natural fracturing properties to make tools, the first expression of human utilisation of the resources of the natural world.
Stone tools are the deep past’s calling cards, markers of archaic human presence. In 2000 a complete and perfectly preserved flint axe was found by someone walking with a dog at Happisburgh on the northeast Norfolk coast. This chance discovery turned out to be an event that turned the clock back on the first known human presence in Britain to around 850,000 years ago. It was a discovery that took place at a location which stood at the very limit of the habitable world at that time, a place otherwise lost to deep time. The creator of the hand axe was not homo sapiens but a more distant ancestor, most likely homo antecessor, otherwise known as ‘Pioneer Man’.
Flint tools dating from later prehistory — Mesolithic and Neolithic — have been found throughout East Anglia but it was not until the late Neolithic period that flint was extensively mined in the region. Here between about 2600 and 2200 bc, at the Norfolk Brecks site known as Grimes Graves, miners dug pits over ten metres deep to obtain the best quality ‘floorstone’ flint from the chalk below. The arrival of metal-smelting technology resulted in flint gradually falling out of common use until the arrival of the Romans in 43 ad, who made use of the stone’s abundance for building purposes. In Norfolk, locally sourced flint combined with brick was extensively used for building the fort at Gariannonum (Burgh Castle) near the mouth of the River Yare and the walls of the civitas at Venta Icenorum near Norwich.
The widespread use of flint for building in East Anglia during the mediaeval period has long been noted. In Norfolk, the seafaring towns of King’s Lynn and Great Yarmouth at opposite ends of the county both have impressive flintbuilt civic buildings. King’s Lynn, a one-time Hanseatic port, possesses a splendid 15th-century town hall with fine chequerboard flint flushwork, while Yarmouth’s extensive town walls — along with York and Chester some of the best preserved in England — are also largely constructed of flint.
Elsewhere on the Norfolk coast, in towns like Cromer, Sheringham and Wells-next-the-Sea, and in one-time fishing ports like Cley-next-the-Sea and Blakeney, cottages constructed of flint beach pebbles are a familiar sight. Away from the coast, in the Brecks region that straddles the Norfolk- Suffolk border, the small towns of Thetford and Brandon also have a wealth of flint buildings, the latter being associated with an extraction industry that provided the flint for the firing mechanism of flintlock rifles, a cottage industry that persisted into the 20th century and made a historic connection with the Neolithic mining that took place four millennia earlier at nearby Grimes Graves.
Flint flushwork on the porch of St Mary's at Dennington, Suffolk (photo © Laurence Mitchell).
Flint architecture
Some writers have been disdainful about the ubiquity of flint in the region. The Suffolk writer and naturalist William Dutt, describing East Anglia at the turn of the twentieth century, opines:
“I feel that I have seen enough of flint houses, flint chapels, flint sheds, flint garden walls and heaps of chalk-whitened flint to last me a lifetime.”
Other visitors have been more impressed by the architecture. The equestrian traveller Celia Fiennes visiting Norwich in 1698 remarks on the large number of churches in the city:
“They are built all of flints well headed or cut which makes them look blackish and shining.”
Fiennes was equally taken with some of the domestic architecture she found:
“[…] by one of the churches there is a wall made of flints that is headed very finely and cut so exactly square and even to shut in one to another that the whole wall is made without cement at all they say, and there appears to be very little, if any, mortar; it looks well, very smooth shining and black.”
The building she describes is the Bridewell, a former lord mayor’s residence that now serves as a museum. The wall, which even today is as splendid as Fiennes found it, faces onto a narrow alleyway on the other side of which stands the south wall of St Andrew’s, a flint church in Perpendicular style. Built between 1470 and the start of the 1500s, its walls are a century younger than those of the Bridewell opposite and its masons must have had the older flint wall in mind when they were building the church.
Although civic buildings like Norwich’s Bridewell are fine examples of mediaeval flintwork it is in the churches of the region where the craft reached its apogee. Mediaeval Norwich once had 57 churches within its city walls, 31 of which still survive, and a flint-built church stands at the centre of almost every town and village in the region. In the late mediaeval period stonemasons perfected their skill with ever more elaborate flushwork that combined local flint with imported limestone — highly skilful, painstaking work that reflected the wealth of the church sponsors. But while churches adorned with ornate flushwork can be found throughout the region, in Norfolk and Suffolk another type of structure stands out for the relative simplicity of its design: the round tower church.
A regional marker
Building with flint has its limitations: while its unique flaking properties make it an ideal material for creating sharp edges, the stone does not readily lend itself to making square corners with perfect right angles. This — an avoidance of corners — is most likely the main reason why so many round tower churches were built in the region. With the exception of a few in other English counties and a handful in Germany, nearly all are found in East Anglia. Of the 186 round towers on churches that survive in complete or semi-ruinous form, 126 are in Norfolk and 41 in Suffolk. Almost all date from between the 11th and 14th centuries and some are believed to predate the Norman Conquest.
More than just an expression of religious faith, the flint churches of East Anglia provide focus, they make the landscape human.
Quite why there is such a predominance of round tower churches in the region is not entirely clear. While flint is readily available in East Anglia it is also abundant in parts of southern England where churches of this design are rare. For example, there are none in Kent or Hampshire and only a very few in Sussex. Whatever the reason, flint-built round tower churches are undeniably the East Anglia speciality: in architectural terms, they stand as testament to the purest expression of local vernacular.
It is difficult to imagine rural England without its mediaeval churches, and it is even harder in counties like Norfolk and Suffolk where churches seem to be as much a part of the landscape as the fields and hedgerows. More than just an expression of religious faith, the flint churches of East Anglia provide focus, they make the landscape human. Shaped from the same stone that lies glistening on the fields or grinding with the tide on the beaches, East Anglia’s flint churches serve as enduring repositories of the region’s genius loci.
