Page 10 - Oundle Life April 2021

You may think Oundle is old and it is; its origins can be traced back to the 7th Century. Walking around Oundle you frequently lay eyes on buildings that are 500+ years old. Think about that for a moment; if one of the stone masons, who helped to build any
of these structures, were a relation of
yours, then you would likely reference
them with ~18 ‘Greats’ – as-in Great,
great, great...(x18) Grandfather/
Uncle, etc. Truly remarkable!
buildings – dwarfs all contemporary time-based comparisons. I mean, the dinosaurs that roamed the earth during the Jurassic period were gone
a full 65-million years before man bothered to show up. To put this into context, if the Jurassic
But that’s barely scratching the
surface. The origins of our church
date back 1,000 years or ~ 36 ‘greats’
in family tree terms. And yet St
Peter’s is not nearly the oldest architectural element in sight, that accolade must be
given to the beautiful local limestone used to construct every historic building in Oundle.
At approximately 150-200 million years old,
the Jurassic Limestone belt that runs beneath our feet across the county – and from which almost all stone was taken to construct Oundle’s
Larger shell fragments are often conspicuous on weathered surfaces
limestone was formed in the same year that Christ was born, then Oundle’s 500-year-old buildings would be less than two days old today.
Known formally as Great Oolite Limestone, and known more locally as Blisworth Limestone, the characterful stone we see all over Oundle varies beautifully in colour from pale grey, to pale cream, to pale yellow, and
includes many fossilised artefacts to add character and intrigue. Specifically, the Oundle ‘version’ of Blisworth is particular to north-east Northamptonshire, differing from all other varieties due to its relatively coarse texture, full of closely-packed shell fragments set within a sparry matrix. Larger shell fragments are often conspicuous on weathered surfaces where the
10