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Participants in Rosanna Martin’s Brickworks field trip and workshop made a fire and a kiln and set out to find out what makes a brick a brick. In sunshine, mist and some proper Cornish rain, they built and lit the kiln on the Friday morning and kept it alight until Saturday afternoon, shaping and adding new bricks as they went. A brick clamp kiln is the oldest way of firing bricks. Bricks are stacked in formation, a fire is lit from underneath and slowly the water content evaporates, the heat builds and the bricks transform from clay into ceramic.