Many thanks to Professor Mark Gardiner and Jenne Pape for their talk last night on Lincolnshire’s Medieval Timber Buildings.
It was about the construction of timber buildings, how and when they were built and why there are so few left here in Lincolnshire. Cruck-built wooden buildings give you a wider open space inside compared to box-framed ones and can use less timber. From photographs of a partly demolished barn taken in 1966, a lot of research and close study they able to understand the construction of most of the building.
There was of course a themed cake from the Artisan Bakery of Firsby which was cut by Mark and Jenne. And a rare sighting of the Artisan Baker himself resplendent in a Christmas Jumper.
This was a great talk - Not least because it showed us the details of the demolished 14th C base-cruck barn at Ketsby, but also because it made us think and wonder just why Lincolnshire has so few surviving medieval buildings when compared with the rest of England. The distribution maps were quite remarkable.