Archive · 29 September 2026
crankle, n.
A crankle is a bend, a twist, or a little crinkle in something that was expected to be straight.
The name
Made from crank.
The word was formed in the late 1500s, when crank received the ending -le, the same ending that turns crack into crackle.
“He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles.”
The wall
One brick thick.
The wall does not follow a straight plan. Each bend is a shallow arch laid on its side, which is why one thickness of brick can stand where a straight wall needs two.
The count
Longer, and thinner.
The wavy wall has farther to travel, and that extra length costs some bricks, but the wall is only half as thick, and the saving is the larger of the two. On a bay that has not been bent too far, the thinner wall uses fewer bricks.
The names
The wall has been known by several names. Crinkle-crankle is an old English name for it, and it was already in print by the late sixteenth century. Later writers also call the same wall serpentine, or a ribbon wall. In Dutch the name is slangenmuur, which means snake wall, and it describes the line of the wall.
Where the bend stands
Suffolk kept the most of them.
Crinkle-crankle is an old name for this wall. Many of the surviving examples are in Suffolk.
The garden
The gardeners who built these walls were also thinking of fruit. A curve of warm brick holds the heat of the afternoon, and the hollow of each bay shelters a tree from the wind. A wavy wall does not always use fewer bricks than a straight one. It uses fewer only when one thickness on the curve is set against the two thicknesses a straight wall requires, and only while the bend stays within a reasonable limit.