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The material
This is one of the earliest materials to be used for building. In the past, craftsmen often used local stone for their buildings but for some of the more important buildings, such as cathedrals and palaces, stone was either imported from another part of the UK or from Europe. We have been using this material for a very long time. Examples of prehistoric stone houses and farmsteads can still be found in places like the Shetland Islands, Northern Ireland, Wales and Devon and Cornwall.
Where available
Nowadays, it’s not so easy to find UK quarries with a ready source of traditional stone because so many of them have been closed down for so many years. Efforts are made to re-open quarry sites but sometimes we have to source a similar stone for repairing historic buildings. Stone was widely used across most of the UK except for the East and South East of England where stone is rare and had to be imported. It was common to use stone for the main load bearing walls but to infill with flint, a locally available material
The Skill
There are a variety of skills that stone masons need today to repair, conserve, restore and clean masonry structures. All stone masons need to understand the various types of stone and how they react to various conditions. You can choose to specialise in either banking, fixing or cleaning stone façades. Or you can become a dry stone waller, building hedges out of stone without the use of mortar. Flint–knapping is another highly specialised skill. You need to be able to break or ‘knap’ the flint so that it can be set flush facing outwards on the wall.
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