It is not, however, so much the general disposition of their main timbers as the varied patterns and devices of the panels filling in the intervening spaces that provides one of the distinguishing characteristics of these Cheshire buildings. As one may often determine a person’s native place by his dialect, so do these lozenges and other chequer patterns enable one to recognise the place of their origin; they are, as it were, a sort of idiomatic architectural expression. When the carpenter had finished the skeleton of the structure, there remained, to complete the wooden walls, the filling in of the interstices of the framing. For this purpose, what is known as “wattle and daub” was commonly employed. By this primitive process clay could be used in its natural state. The method was to make a foundation by interlacing osiers or hazel twigs, thus forming a sort of basket work, and then to daub over with clay mixed with straw or some stringy weed, and upon this put a thin coating of plaster on both the inside and outside faces. In his _Cheshire Glossary_, Colonel Egerton Leigh remarks, “The daub seems to have given a name to a trade,” and in support of this statement a quaint old couplet is quoted:-- “The mayor of Altrincham and the mayor of Over, The one is a thatcher, the other a dauber”; and then follows this favourable comment on the old process: “Clay, being a non-conductor, makes a warm house in winter and a cool one in summer.” Whether this “post and panel” work originally presented the study in black and white it now does, is open to question. Most likely the tarring of the timbers was resorted to rather with the object of preservation than with the intention of producing the contrasted effect between the wood and the plaster, now so conspicuous a characteristic. It may be that the dark brown and yellow ochre colour combination one sees in the corresponding manner of building on the Continent was more like the original appearance of these Cheshire buildings. Space forbids going into side issues and demands the taking into consideration some of the specimens of the “excellent work,” in which the county is so rich as to make the task of selection by no means easy. The mere enumeration of notable examples would occupy many pages, and to deal with them in detail according to their deserts would call for a treatise instead of this cursory survey. But for a complete chronicle, is there not Ormerod’s _magnum opus_?--that mine of information and monument of industry which is indeed itself one of the county’s “memorials”; and for pictorial treatment there is that gallery of vivid illustrations, Nash’s _Mansions of the Olden Time_, wherein are to be seen, splendidly set forth, several of Cheshire’s celebrated “stately homes,” both as regards their outward aspect and their interiors, and containing, moreover, counterfeit presentments of their former occupants in their habits as they lived.