Rock End Moor Gritstone is a coarse grained sandstone
from the millstone grit series, laid down around 350 million years ago
when the carboniferous forests flourished, indeed, fossilised fronds from
the “tree-ferns” of that time are often encountered whilst
the stone is being worked.
The stone is resilient and has great resistance to weathering as it contains
very little mica, which can cause failure in finer grained sandstones.
The photos above show the texture
and grain patterns typical of Rock End Moor Gritsone. The £1
coin shows the scale of the texture images. The fireplace is a
Whiteroyd
under constuction. The final photo is of the Stupa
spire. |
QUARRYING AT ROCK END MOOR
Rock End Moor quarry face. |
Stone splitting in progess. |
The blocks are split from the bedrock using steel wedges driven into drillholes (see below). Once separated, blocks weighing up to 15 tonnes are again drilled and wedged until they are small enough (about 2 tonnes) to pass through a stonesaw which cuts them into slabs to be worked by stonemasons using hammers and chisels, to produce finished work showing the unique, open-grained texture peculiar to this rock. [click on any photo to see the full version in a large pop-up window] |
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1. Drilling holes for the wedges. |
2. Steel wedges inserted. |
3. Wedges hammered in. |
4. Stone starts to split. |
5. Stone is successfully split. |
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Gritstone was widely used for building in the Pennine region from earliest times due to its resilience, its ability to be shaped and its ready availability, outcropping over a wide area of the Pennine uplands. When the industrial revolution brought a new urgency to the building trade, micaceous sandstones came into favour, the mica layers allowing the stone to be easily split into rectangular blocks, ideal for building the burgeoning terraces housing mill workers in the new towns. Gritstone quarries, hampered by the laborious work involved in shaping their material, which doesn’t split accurately and must be worked on every face, went out of business. With them went the livelihood and the skills of a body of craftsmen whose discipline had, until then, had a major influence on the architecture of much of Northern England since the earliest stone building. |
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