The quest to source our voussoirs has been long and somewhat fraught. What’s a voussoir you ask? It is a shaped block for forming an arch. We could have gone for a rough ring arch, like those built by the Anglo-Saxons at Brixworth church (more photos here) using reclaimed Roman stone and brick, but our hearts were set on a proper stone archway for the gatehouse, as you’d find in any good stone Roman fort. The cost of actual hand-carved stone being prohibitive, Al cast the straight blocks for the pillars out of an artificial stone mix, setting fossils into the surfaces for extra verisimilitude. These are fab but took a lot of work and the making of angled moulds proved too much of a project for us. So there followed a trawl of t’internet for people offering custom cast concrete blocks, and we absolutely lucked out by finding Bespoke Concrete who cast our voussoirs in a beautiful buff artificial stone which looks pretty much exactly like Bath stone.
It was very exciting when the blocks were delivered on Friday; we did our trigonometry as carefully as possible to work out what size and shape the blocks should be to form the arch, and there was no reason to think anything would go wrong with the manufacturing process, but it was a great relief when we saw that they are indeed exactly as we wanted. Top marks to the folks at Bespoke Concrete, they did a perfect job.
