Volunteering – Geology

Trilobite from Whitman's Hill QuarryIf you have an eye for stone then we can put you to work recording the stone in buildings. Whether you’ve been studying for 20 minutes or 20 years, we can use your skills and provide training and support.

Below are a list of some typical tasks volunteers interested in geology might choose to undertake. There is no minimum time commitment – you can do as much or as little as you choose, and may do any combination of tasks that interest you.

Possible Volunteering Tasks:

  • Describe the stone in buildings and quarries
  • Quick reconnaissance of a town or areas’ building stone types
  • Collection of samples from buildings or quarries
  • Using computer software to investigate landform data such as LiDAR to find hidden quarries
  • Thin section microscope petrography of samples

 

Related Items

  • Where there’s a Wills there’s a Way

    A brief biography of Professor L. J. Wills by John Gerner, a volunteer. Studying O level geology and inspired by David Thompson, later my PGCE tutor at Keele, I was fascinated by Professor Leonard J Wills’ Palaeogeography. Living close to Hill Top in Bromsgrove I was aware of Wills’ work there. Retirement and the Building […]

  • Hidden History of Malvern College

    Article by James Ferguson, a volunteer. After Great Malvern Priory, three of the most important stone buildings in Malvern are to be found in Malvern College: The first, the Main Building, is the work of the architect, Charles Hansom, in 1862; the second is the Chapel, by Arthur Blomfield in 1896; and the third, the […]

  • Eye spy an Earthcache

    Earthcache is the perfect activity to enjoy the great outdoors, see some interesting geology, and test your knowledge. Why not have a go this summer… Go to www.earthcache.org Written by Dave Stadley, a Building Stones Volunteer.   A couple of years ago, we reported on the publication of our first Earthcache, a variety of Geocache. […]

  • X-rays and Rainy Days

    One of our big challenges on the Building Stones project is directly tracing a stone in a building to a quarry. Detailed fieldwork can be really effective for working out the range of rock types used and to give some idea of the areas these may have come from but, in general, for our project, […]

  • Ludlow, Murchison and the Limestone Conundrum

    In the mid Silurian, about 430 million years ago, the present day area of England lay at the north eastern margin of a continent called Avalonia. To the north lay the Iapetus Ocean and beyond that the continent of Laurentia; made up of parts of North America, Canada, Greenland and what would become Scotland. Continental […]