In his groundbreaking work on The Pattern of English Building, Alec Clifton-Taylor gave primacy to geology in creating the characteristics that enable us to recognise a typical ‘Cotswold’ building by its limestone, an East Anglian house by its flint, or a Lake District barn constructed of slate. But building stones are not coterminous with counties. The limestone belt extends from Portland Bill in Dorset to the Cleveland Hills of Yorkshire. Cirencester and Stamford have much in common architecturally, though they are located more than 100 miles apart. Arguably, Cornwall – almost cut off from its neighbour Devon by the River Tamar – is the one county in England where the geology is sufficiently localised to have resulted in a style all its own.
Grounded in granite
That is not to say that Cornwall’s geology is homogenous, nor that it is exclusive to the county. The most abundant building stone is granite, which comes in a rich variety of colours, from rust red to cream – depending on the ratio of minerals in the matrix that formed when molten magma flowed across the landscape and cooled some 300 million years ago. Granite polishes well, but is extremely hard and difficult to carve, hence it is not easy to create sculptural detail or elaborate mouldings out of it.
