In the 60's, when I was in my teens, every year I could see people (Gipsies mainly) making mud bricks by the river outside town, they layed them out to bake them in the sun. They made money by selling these bricks and still quite a few houses were built by these mud bricks at that time. Some people still preferred these houses because they were cool in the hot summers we always had. My aunt used to patch up the walls of the older part of the house building by mixing mud and horse manure. I remember her taking a bucket and collecting horse manure from the streets for this purpose. She did an excellent job!