When we bought our house in Creuse, after the first blush of excitement was over and the hard realities of decrepit cottage ownership (dovetailing neatly with the onset of the recession) had just started to sink in, our eyes lifted inevitably to the state of the roof. All seemed secure, yet on closer inspection there were a few broken battens and a few missing tiles. On top of every thing else, the remaining tiles appeared alarmingly fragile, snapping and crumbling at the slightest touch. We decided to ask the oracle, in the form of our builder, for his advice. He came and duly cast an expert eye. He picked up one of the slipped tiles and gently turned it over in his hands.

“Yes well, you’d be a bit fragile too after a century or two under all weathers. Look here,” he said, pointing to the knub on the back that hooks onto the batten, “the nib has been fashioned by hand, you can still make out a fingerprint.”

He went on to tell us that there used to be several kilns in the area, producing roof tiles, bricks and floor tiles for use in the local houses. There are few of them left now, as with many local industries they have been outpriced and outsourced by the big manufacturers. Of the half a dozen that were in production half a century ago only a handful remain. Some have reinvented themselves such as the Tuileries de Pouligny near Cheniers which is an arts centre and tourist attraction and others continue on as before, fighting on against the prevailing economic winds.

“We’ll get your tiles from Daniel Lagonotte up the road,” the builder pronounced firmly, “Not much has changed up there and those may well be his grandfather’s fingerprints on the tiles.”

It took a while for me to get to see where our tiles were made but finally I managed a visit to Daniel Lagonotte’s tileworks in Le Bourg, St Plantaire. The first time we called was in August, when everything was closed for the holidays. The cavernous brick building was empty save for Daniel himself.

“Come back another time when you can see everything working.”

So we returned in the spring, expecting to see a bustle of workman and activity, only to find Daniel with one other employee.

“There used to be more of us,” he explained,” But my sons aren’t interested in carrying on the business so there are only us two now.”

He stopped work to show us around. In the far corner lay the mounds of ochre earth dug from his own land. It would be sieved then fed into a machine called a pug mill that added water and mixed the clay into a usable consistency. Special adapters can be fitted to the end of the pug mill to shape the extruded clay into different forms. It was a more mechanical process than that which had made our tiles but not by much.

Today they were making roof tiles. A special order for a conservation project; they were made thicker than the modern standard and each tile was scuffed by hand to give it an ‘old’ look that would blend in sympathetically with the age of the building.

As I watched the clanking machine squeeze out a tile and then automatically attach the nib before piercing it with nail holes, I imagined the spirits of the old tilers who had worked here crowding around, itching to get their hands in, to leave their marks on the mustard coloured clay.




As well as roof tiles and ridge tiles, Daniel also makes small fire bricks for bread ovens and chimneys as well as any special commissions. He has just completed an order for a load of specially shaped bricks for a vaulted cellar.

Once the tiles are made and checked, they are then stacked onto metal trolleys to dry, ready to be wheeled into the modern propane fired kiln, sitting incongruously in the middle of the old shed.

“It takes three days to fire a full kiln”, Daniel told us. “Not like the old days.”

He turned and pointed to an enormous, brick tower that took up most of the far wall. It was battered and blackened and looked like something Ork-built.

“That would take eight days to fire, and that’s after three days to pack the wood into the base and load the tiles. It took thirty-five square metres square of timber to fire the same of tiles and bricks.”

We walked down a slope at the base of the tower, through a brick arch and into the darkness. We were now in the base of the kiln itself, where the wood would have been stacked, looking up at the charred walls.

“My clay fires at about a thousand degrees centigrade and it took a lot of expertise and experience to ensure the kiln would fire to the correct temperature. During a firing we would take turns to sleep in the shed to keep watch. Not hot enough and the tiles wouldn’t be fired correctly, too hot and they would melt. Look you can see where the bricks have melted.”

And sure enough you could make out frozen runnels of molten brick running down the sides of the walls.

“This kiln was built in 1848”, he continued with obvious pride but also resignation, “It will never be fired again of course – too much effort and there’s no profit in it.”




We left the darkness of the fire pit and climbed back up the slope into the daylight. Feeling we had taken up enough of Daniel’s time we made moves to leave. On our way out of the shed Daniel stopped at a pile of small fire bricks stacked on a pallet, picked one up and handed it to me.

“Take one of these as a souvenir. We recently started making them again as people are rediscovering an interest in building and restoring bread ovens. Speciality items like this must be the future for us, if there is one. We can’t compete with the big chains and we have to turn a profit or there is no living to be made. I’m hoping I can develop direct sales to customers. After all, these days everyone is going on about sustainability and using local resources, well, this is as local as it gets. Also, this industry is part of the heritage of this area of the Limousin and shouldn’t be forgotten.”

He pointed to the small red brick in my hands.

“When I was little, my Mum would put one of those into the cuisinnière to heat. At bedtime she would wrap it up in a cloth and put it into my bed to warm it up in winter. Works too; keeps it heat a long time a little brick like that.”

We said our goodbyes and shook hands.

“Tell your friends to think about me if they are looking for tiles,” was his parting shot.

I certainly will, and in the meantime I look at the new and old tiles on our roof with a great deal more respect and understanding.