Cottage Building in Cob, Pisé, Chalk and Clay

about the country, and to "dump" on the site in some lonely situation where cottages or a small-holder's house and outbuildings are, to use the conventional phrase, "urgently demanded." Therefore, to the unfeigned amusement, nay, contempt of all my architectural friends, I spent a great deal of my leisure in the years before the war in racking my brains in the search for cheap material. My deep desire was to find something in the earth out of which walls could be made. My ideal was a man or group of men with spades and pickaxes coming upon the land and creating the walls of a house out of what they found there. I wanted my house, my cottage in "Cloud-Cuckoo Land," to rise like the lark from the furrows. But I was at once dissuaded from my purpose by cautious and scientific persons. The chemists, if they did not scoff like the architects, were visibly perturbed. "Your dream is impossible," they said. "Nature abhors it as much as she used to be supposed to abhor a vacuum. If your soil is clay, and you