Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
this is a ballister from an eighteenth century building this is a blonde sandstone type
from a building from Aryshire, quite a significant building
called Dumfries House.
This ballister was from a bridge, and it's just the bottom half and it was
really badly vandalized
and that's, that's all that's left of it
and so we can
match the stone to this for an existing stone type, which can be
used to either reconstruct the ballisters or repair if there's enough
stone left.
...and put them back in place and restore them.
my name is Emily Tracey, I'm an architectural historian who is a
research fellow placed on the BGS stone team in Edinburgh.
What we do with the building stone team
is we try and match historic stone types
with stone that is currently available today.
If you're using stone which is of different compatibilites or
different characters
different compositions
for restoration work
it actually enhance decay.
So we're trying to raise awareness and ensure that people know that there are
different stone types.
These are a bunch of samples that we have in our collection
which helps us with matching
so that we can identify
a possible match
for restoration work
in historic buildings. The Geological diversity of the British Isles is
extremely diverse
one of the most diverse in the world in fact
And the building blocks of our society of our towns, our villages, our cities
is basically just beneath our feet
so you can begin to create a historical timeline
if you know of
our architectural heritage according to stone types.
This process also helps us
provide stone matching
for new builds as well as construction sites that are in very historic areas
that would like to
not necessarily blend in but just maintain that local character and that sense of place.
This is the block that we obtained and we will be doing c-section analysis
to try to find our stone very valuable stone that will match.
This is a sample that we took earlier from the site
it's a masonry block, right, directly out of the wall.
We can take it out of the wall, turn it over,
take a core from the rear of the sample
but it back into the wall so that no one even notices that we took the sample.
We then take it back to the lab,
we cut the sample right in half
we get a thin section from the sample which we then analyze with a microscope
and that tells us the DNA of the stone type
for future matching with existing stone types today
historically our stone types were exported around the world to
the United States, to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa etc.
so a recent surprise would be we were just looking at a statue of Robert Burns
which is carved by Green Shields, a sculptor in the
eighteenth century in Scotland
and that statue was exported with the family when they moved to Australia
we were able to reopen the historic quarry that was used to carve that stone,
that statue,
and is now being shipped to Australia to fix it
I think the most rewarding part really is just talking to people
who are completely unaware of how local, where their house came from you know
where that school came from, where their church was built out of and how
locally sourced it used to be
so it's really just getting involved with local communities and teaching them about their heritage
and raising awareness as to how special it is
because it's so close to where they were brought up.
The scale of quarrying as an industry in the industrial heritage behind that
no one else is really investigating that and looking into that as much as the
building stone team at BGS is doing so it's very crucial work that's
going on here and is raising awareness and making people that aware the information
is out there that we're trying to provide that to them.