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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Homes Under the… Microscope
Thanks to the crusading efforts of Beth and, in particular, generous donations of stone by a host of homeowners, we now are starting to build up a useful collection of stone samples from buildings, notably of Old Red Sandstone used in the Bromyard Downs area. Having been ground down to less than the thickness of […]
Bredon Hill Cluster Group Update
Boo & Rob Vernon and Hazel Edwards Bredon Hill lies totally in Worcestershire and is an outlier of the Jurassic strata that forms the Cotswolds Hills. It is capped by Inferior Oolite limestone, which rests conformably on a sequence of Liassic silts and clays. The limestone forms a steep scarp on its northern crop and […]
The Human Cost of Getting Stone
by Anne Spurgeon, project volunteer Quarrying has always been an extremely dangerous occupation and over the centuries many workers have been killed or seriously injured. Until relatively recently we have had few details about the extent of this problem. Just over a hundred years ago, however, the Quarries Act of 1894 brought about an increase […]
Conference Report – Symposium on the Old Red Sandstone, Brecon, October 2014
At the start of October Elliot and Kate presented at the inaugural Symposium on the Old Red Sandstone in Brecon. The Old Red Sandstone is the name given to the rocks formed between about 420 and 360 million years ago when Britain was at the margins of an arid desert. Its predominantly red rocks – […]
A (Very) Short History of the Bromsgrove Sandstone
Here at Building Stones HQ we are busily putting together an exhibition to coincide with our upcoming roadshow at Avoncroft Museum 26th-28th August. Here’s sneak peak of some of the research going into that, much of which draws upon the Reverend Alan White’s excellent historical paper on the Bromsgrove quarrying and brickmaking industry. The Bromsgrove Sandstone […]
Tales from the Archives
You never know what stories you are going to find while researching into the history of quarrying as this tale found by volunteer Charles Clark shows. A letter, found in the Bromyard & District Local History Society archives, dated 1873 from G. Barkley & S. Trickett to one William Finney Esq., contains detailed descriptions, brimming […]