Carstone and Chalk

'Carstone I will mention in order to abuse it" 

(Jacquetta Hawkes ('A Land', 1951).

Why not? This orangey-coloured Norfolk sandstone does not look attractive on its own nor does it combine attractively with other materials. It presents a burning, gingery face to the world and does not weather gracefully. It outcrops between Hunstanton and the Nar valley, where several quarries - such as Snettisham and Middleton - specialise in producing blocks of 'big carr' for masonry or 'small carr' for hardcore or shillet walling.  

The Carstone is at its finest and boldest in the famous geological layer-cake of Hunstanton Cliffs. It underlies the Red Chalk and Grey Chalk and forms a sort of solid biscuit base for those more mellow, pastel layers. Its only fossils are worm burrow traces, and it is laced with liesegang rings: patterns of dark and light cementation brought about by migrating iron compounds. Here, it looks like a sort of industrial slag. 

The only way the Carstone can achieve aesthetic lift-off is probably as a crude pigment. It is so gritty that its iron oxide is a chore to extract for creating home-made paint, but its bold, uncompromising colouration lends itself to astonishing, disharmonious juxtapositions in the landscape. At outcrop it colours the soil a rusty brown and on Hunstanton beach it yields a brown, exotic-looking sand. Hawkes called its effects 'strident': sometimes stridency is needed to shock us out of our visual complacency. Consider this photograph taken in the Snettisham Carstone Quarry.   

Image courtesy Frimstone Ltd

Grey Chalk is as different from the Carstone as cheese. It is indeed it looks like a type of moon-cheese, with a glimmering and dulcet milkiness which is readily ground into lime and - in the right circumstances - can be cut into blocks of stone known as clunch. The Grey Chalk and overlying White (Upper) Chalk span over 40 million years of time. They were deposited on the seabed in a world which was much hotter than our own and had a much higher percentage of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Hawkes calls the Chalk the 'prime creation of later Cretaceous times'. Indeed, the carbon dioxide went into the skeletons of countless billions of planktonic marine organisms whose lime-rich remains rained down through the water and were laid down as calcium carbonate mud. The Chalk now forms ancient seabed deposits as far afield as Russia and Kansas as well as the White Cliffs of Dover. 

Hillington Chalk Pit.

Image courtesy West Norfolk Lime Ltd

Unlike the White Chalk, the Grey Chalk does not contain flints. Instead, it has a variety of body fossils such as echinoids and bivalves and is composed of various horizons of harder or softer texture. It has been extracted in a series of quarries along its outcrop, as at Gayton and Hillington. Where they intercept the groundwater, flash ponds may result on the quarry floor and surprise the eye with a tropical turquoise-blue. 

Hillington Chalk Pit.
Photo with acknowledgements to West Norfolk Lime Ltd.

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Some thoughts towards 'EXTRACTION : ART ON THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS' at Groundwork Gallery, King's Lynn, 2021.

Les Rats de Montfaucon

I have been dipping into 'Gleanings in Natural History' by Edward Jesse (John Murray, London, 1834). It is a collection of miscellaneous essays and notes on plants and animals, half bound in green leather with beautifully marbled boards. I have been searching for information about eels. However yesterday I allowed allowed myself to be distracted by stories about other animals. What I read about the rats of Montfaucon made my hair stand on end.

Montfaucon is an area on the north-eastern side of Paris, part of the unexceptional quartier called Les Buttes-Chaumont. As I remember from my days living in the city, its greatest attraction is a public park with interesting rocky terrain, sited in some old sandstone quarries. Two hundred years ago it was a frightful place.

Until 1760 it had been home to the biggest gibbet in France: a square, three-storey building, like a stone-built warehouse with windows, open on three sides with an access ramp to the rear; each window could hold a hanged body, sixty windows all round. A factory of public execution. The smell of the place and the crowd of dogs and carrions birds were atrocious.[1]

Le Gibet De Montfaucon. Image courtesy http://www.parisenbreves.fr/breves/140

At the same time, Montfaucon housed the capital's night soil processing factory, la voirie de matières fécales, at which excrement collected by cart was processed into valuable 'poudrette' fertiliser. It was sited in one of the disused quarries, and consisted in a descending series of linked basins. Liquid matter was gradually drained off, and the solids progressively matured into a nitrogenous earthy material for resale.[2]

Two horse knacker's yards and rendering plants were situated in another quarry. They were able to process 15,000 carcases per year (that means 288 per week; 41 per day). Products included hide, hair, grease and maggots (for fishing and raising poultry). Every night a horde of rats sallied out from drain pipes and holes and stripped the carcases clean of anything edible. Only the bones remained by morning.

The knacker's yard at Montfaucon (Parent-Duchatelet, 1827) Image courtesy http://insitu.revues.org/10512

A knacker's shed at Montfaucon, 1831. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes the rats themselves fell victim to campaigns of extermination and commercial exploitation - as many as 2,500 could be killed in one night, tackled with a poisonous mixture of arsenic and flour or by dogs, sticks and flaming torches. Their miserable skins had some value. The tricky thing was not to provoke them into making a panicky exodus into surrounding housing estates.

When the wind was in the north, all Paris suffered from the suffocating stench of Montfaucon. As the population of the city grew, people lost patience with the place. Also, the rats were becoming a mortal danger, and not just to lone drunkards and tramps. Buildings and public infrastructure were being undermined by their burrowing.

The trigger for change was an outbreak of cholera in the city in 1832, leading to a public health campaign and a final decision to close the site. The night soil processing was moved to the Forest of Bondy, some 15 km east of the city. But what of the knacker's yards?

The question had evidently been debated for some time, as Edward Jesse wrote:

The most interesting account of rats I have met with, was made some time ago in an official report to the French government. It was drawn up in consequence of a proposition made for the removal of a horse slaughter-house at Montfaucon, to a greater distance from Paris, when one of the chief obstacles urged against such a removal, was the fear entertained of the dangerous consequences that might result to the neighbourhood, from suddenly depriving these voracious vermin of their accustomed sustenance. (p.311)

The writer Théophile Gautier (1838) likened the potential rat problem to a volcano - 'Naples has its Vesuvius, and Paris has its Montfaucon', he wrote [3]. He dramatically explained the situation for prurient readers:

The rats of Montfaucon are no ordinary rats; the abundance and quality of their food has developed them prodigiously; these are Herculean rats, enormous, huge as elephants, ferocious as tigers, with teeth of steel and claws of iron; rats that make one or at most two mouthfuls of a cat; the fields they cross are trodden down as though an army had passed through with its artillery, baggage train, ammunition wagons and field smithies; the clay they carry on their feet gives this trackway a greenish hue that distinguishes it from other paths: these routeways, toughened as if by tarmacadam, terminate at subterranean ratopoli with immense tunnelworks where innumerable gnawing and devouring populations swarm…

Those who dine like Belshazzar at Montfaucon, suddenly missing their sustenance, will come into Paris to eat human instead of horse meat.

Montfaucon was finally closed in 1849 [4], and re-opened as Buttes-Chaumont Park in 1867. I have not been able to find an account of the closure of the site. I suspect the feared rodent apocalypse never happened. Dogs, poison, sticks and flaming torches can accomplish great work.  

If pure stench and carnal corruption are revelations of Hell then Montfaucon was surely a Hell on Earth. Sad to say, it was not an exceptional one. There were in those days many fragments of living Hell in the world, where living things were tortured or recycled without compassion by their fellow beings or obliviously by the plutonic processes of decay and putrefaction. The slaughterhouses of Regency England are a case in point. Today such facilities are sanitised and closely regulated, as are facilities for sewage processing and capital punishment. Today they are conducted pretty well out of sight and mind. However, we need the story of places such as Montfaucon to remind us of the existential truths our civilisation has masked, and indeed what civilisation has accomplished over the last two centuries. Is there such a thing as progress? I think the story of Montfaucon is clear evidence that there is.

Who can say what further progress may yet be made in the spheres of justice, waste disposal and animal rights?

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References

[1] - Le Gibet de Montfaucon, at: Plateau Hassard: Le Blog - http://plateauhassard.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/le-gibet-de-montfaucon.html 
[2] - La Voirie de Montfaucon, at: Plateau Hassard: Le Blog - http://plateauhassard.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/la-voirie-de-montfaucon.html 
[3] - 'La Ville des Rats', by Théophile Gautier (1838) - http://www.theophilegautier.fr/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/La-Ville-des-rats.pdf 
[4] - La Voirie de Montfaucon, at Wikipedia - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voirie_de_Montfaucon/