CHRIS KOENIG recalls the time when Oxfordshire was for centuries a centre of brick-making

There may not be much building going on, at the moment, but any materials used are almost certainly being transported from many hundreds of miles away and probably by road, too, thereby burning up plenty of expensive oil.

This is a comparatively new state of affairs in Oxfordshire, a county so rich in quarries that stone was even transported by river from here to London following the Great Fire of 1666.

What is less well known, though, is that even those districts without quarries, such as South Oxfordshire, had for centuries a thriving brick industry, hence all those lovely mellow buildings in towns and villages there.

From medieval times until early in the 20th century, Nettlebed was the centre of a thriving brick business. The bricks were produced in bottle-shaped kilns like the one still standing in the middle of that village, which was built about 1800.

The Romans, of course, were prize brick-makers (as the remains of all those under-floor heating systems on view at the North Leigh villa, for instance, bear witness) but, along with everything else, the industry went into terminal decline after the Romans left in about AD300.

It picked up again in the 12th century in Nettlebed, and nearby Crocker End, where the Chiltern terrain provided plenty of Reading clay, firewood, and water. Early kilns there made tiles for floors and roofs in order to comply with fire regulations, designed to discourage thatch, which were coming into force in such towns as Henley and Wallingford.

In 1365, records show that the works produced 35,000 tiles for Wallingford Castle. Interestingly, invoices still used the Latin word tegulae rather than brick throughout the 14th century. By 1390 Nettlebed tegulae were selling for 3s 4d (about 16p) per thousand. By 1416 the more Anglo-Saxon word had gained credence. In that year Thomas Stonor paid kiln owner Michael Warwick £40 for 200,000 brykes, and another £15 for transporting them the three miles from Crocker End to Stonor House, where they were used to build the chapel which still stands there, and, incidentally, remains Roman Catholic to this day. Medieval brick-making was introduced to Oxfordshire from the Netherlands where clay had long been used for building, and even today a Flemish style is often apparent in early South Oxfordshire buildings. The Stonor accounts also show payments to Lez Flemyngges.

Certainly, by 1676 Nettlebed brick had become famous for its strength. In that year, Dr Robert Plot wrote in his Natural History of Oxfordshire: "About Nettlebed they make a sort of brick so very strong that whereas at most places they are unloaded by hand, I have seen these shot out of carts after a manner of stone to mend highways, and yet none of these broke."

Pottery - could the word crockery derive from Crocker's End, I wonder? - was also produced in Oxfordshire until the 1920s when it was forced out of business by diminishing clay supplies and competition from Staffordshire. The Nettlebed kiln, though, was converted and used for lime burning until 1938.

Many an American serviceman in the last war, stationed at nearby Chalgrove, must have wondered about the history of the strangely shaped kiln, much as some of us now still wonder about the history of the miniature American castle half a mile away and hidden in the trees on the B481 Stoke Row to Nettlebed road, opposite Merrimoles Farm.