Rock of ages, with fragments of shell and fossil

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/23/country-diary-stalbridge-dorset-rock-of-ages

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Beside our road, on the way south into Dorset, a great length of old and remarkable dry stone walling always catches the eye. Some sections are still compact, three metres high and topped with coping stones, but others are crumbling. The entire wall, five miles long, encircles Stalbridge Park, enlarged and enclosed by an 18th-century owner.

It turns off the main road at the county boundary, where, beside Landshire Lane, parts are reduced to heaps of rubble; on the opposite side, at a blocked gateway, a sign tells you that Stalbridge Quarries, formerly close by (and handy to supply walling stone) has moved. So I went to find it.

Peter Thumwood, the quarry manager, met me and showed me two piles of stone: one of blocks for building, the other of thinner slices for walling. He said that this stone, locally known as forest marble and of the same make-up as Cotswold stone, is hard oolitic limestone, specially prized for its attractive variety of colour and the strength and thinness of the beds, which make it good to work with. In a polished piece you can see fragments of shell and fossil, compressed over 140m years.

I heard that when the former quarry was worked out, the owner suggested to Peter that he should walk the fields and explore for another promising site. And where we stood, in a little hollow, was a shallow rockface with thin, horizontal beds of stone, the relic of another quarry that had been filled in.

That find was the start of today’s quarry, where, in a covered area across the yard, two men were working stone with hammers beside a JCB and two hydraulic guillotines. With the manager, they make up the workforce, busily meeting orders for walls and housebuilding. Depending on the weather, they would reckon to produce four or five tons of stone ready for use a day. To build a four-bedroom house with a double garage you would need 57 tons. How many, I wondered, were required for the high, five-mile wall of Stalbridge Park?

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