Geoscientist Online

Professor John R L Allen explores the history of quarrying through examining Oxford gravestones.

Gravestones tell not just about the lives of people but also, through the materials used, the way in which stone industries developed as navigations and canals were displaced by railways and paved roads, and as stone-handling, ship-building and ship-propulsion improved.  Architects, designers, and monumental masons embraced these opportunities to experiment with new materials.  Clearly evident over the 19^th and 20^th centuries is a trend in Britain away from locally sourced, through regionally to nationally and finally, internationally procured geological materials.

Morgan & Powell

In their recent book, The Geology of Oxford Gravestones,¹ Nina Morgan and Philip Powell, alluding in passing to this issue, give exemplary descriptions of the rock-types used over the last two centuries or so for grave monuments in six Oxford cemeteries and also their dates of application. Four are churchyards, another was administered by a group of parishes, and the sixth is municipal.  

Morgan and Powell discuss the gravestones encountered on trails that broadly range over the physical extent of each burial ground, with some emphasis on the more notable dead, for example, Henry Acland (medical doctor), Adrian Gill (meteorologist), Kenneth Grahame (writer), and John Stainer (composer). Because of this slight bias, these ‘samples’ are difficult to defend as statistically fully rigorous, but on comparative evidence they are representative and indicative, with much when analysed to tell about procurement (see Table).

Table 1. Procurement of gravestone materials by rock-type, burial-date, and number in six Oxford graveyards.  Rock-type: A – Forest Marble/Corallian; B – Banbury ironstone; C – Pennant sandstone; D – crinoidal limestone; E - Portland Limestone; F – Cararra marble; G – Welsh slate; H  – granite; J – gabbro; K – Cumbrian green slate; L – Nabresina limestone; M – gneisses and migmatites.  Source: L – local; R – regional; N – national; I – international.

As early as the 15^TH Century, grave monuments of local shelly limestone were fashioned from the Forest Marble (Middle Jurassic) at Whitney and the even nearer Corallian (Upper Jurassic) beds of Headington.  These have some representation in Morgan and Powell’s trails, appearing last in 1837.

Regionally sourced Banbury ironstone (Lower Jurassic), a ferruginous, coarsely shelly limestone, appeared in the earliest 19^th Century and continued in use to the late 20^th.  Appearing at about the same time, but not seen later than the second quarter of the 20^th Century, is Pennant sandstone (late Upper Carboniferous), the local building-material of choice in 19^th Century Bristol.²  Especially popular in the mid-19^th Century, this grey, lithic sandstone dotted with coalified fragments and sometimes clay-ironstone contributes to many Berkshire churches³ and appears plentifully as kerbing in Reading⁴ and also, for example, in central Oxford and Henley-on-Thames.

Popular

Several materials that became popular appeared in Oxford burial grounds in the third or fourth quarters of the 19^th Century.  Their sources were regional to international.  Responding poorly to the urban environment, Lower Carboniferous crinoidal limestones, probably from the Derbyshire Peak District, have a fleeting presence.  Portland limestone (Upper Jurassic), probably arriving by sea⁵ either through Southampton or London and then rail, was used as late as the third quarter of the 20^th Century.  Italian white marbles – symbols of goodness and purity – corrode readily in Oxford but were exploited in a small way up to the third quarter of the 20^th Century. 

Welsh slate can be smoothed but not polished, and so is little evident.  Granites were always popular because of their hardness, resistance to weathering and decorative qualities when highly polished.  Pink Peterhead (Devonian), grey Aberdeen (Devonian), and megacrystic Shap (Devono-Carboniferous) granites made early appearances and white, megacrystic rock (Permo-Carboniferous) from Southwest England⁶ was occasionally used. 

In recent decades Norwegian larvikite (Permian)⁷ and Finnish, blood-red ‘Balmoral’ granite (Precambrian)⁸ have appeared.  From the middle of the 19^th Century onwards, British and overseas granites were traded by sea into London by numerous companies, for example, A & F Manuelle Ltd of Throgmorton Avenue, with far-flung quarries in Scotland, Guernsey and Norway.

Granite is not the only igneous rock represented at Oxford.  Polished, black fine to medium grained gabbro, at the opposite end of the compositional spectrum, was increasingly used from the first quarter of the 20^th Century.  That widely exploited for kerbing, for example, in Edinburgh and Reading⁹, could have come from commercially important Norwegian sources¹⁰.  More remote suppliers lie in southern Africa and India.

Slate

The last few decades have seen the use of semi-polished, Cumbrian green slate (Borrowdale Volcanic Series, Upper Ordovician), Upper Cretaceous Nabresina limestone from the Adriatic region, and assorted garnet and other gneisses and migmatites.  These latter clearly arrived from areas with a long and violent geological history, such as southern Africa or, nearer to hand, Scandinavia.

Morgan and Powell’s survey allows a trajectory from local to international to be painted for one use of quarried stone in one particular place (Table 1).  Among other uses for stone is road-making and kerbing, on the face of it, a very different application from monumental masonry.  Nonetheless, a similar trajectory of procurement can be established at least in the Berkshire town of Reading, even to some of the details of timing.¹¹   It seems important that other sites and applications should be investigated, in order to obtain as full a picture as possible of an extractive industry too often taken for granted.

References

1. Morgan,N. & Powell, P. 2015. The Geology of Oxford Gravestones (www.gravestonegeology.uk)
2. Lloyd Morgan, C. 1885-8. Bristol building stones. Proceedings of the Bristol Naturalists Society (3)5(2), 95-115
3. Allen, J.R.L. 2007. Late Churches and Chapels in Berkshire (Oxford)
4. Allen, J.R.L. 2015. Kerbside Geology in Reading, Berkshire (Oxford)
5. Stanier, P. 2000. Stone Quarry Landscapes (Stroud)
6. Floyd, P.A., Exley,C.S. & Styles, M.T. 1993. Igneous Rocks of South-West     England (London); Stanier, P. 1999. South West Granite (St. Austell);
7. Heldal, T. & Neeb, P.R. 2000. Natural stone in Norway: production, deposits and   development. Norske Geologiska Underesøkelse Bulletin 436, 1-15.           Ramberg, I.B. 2008. The Making of a Land: Geology of Norway (Trondheim)
8. Price, M.T. 2007 Decorative Stone (London)
9. Note 4
10. Heldal, T. & Neeb, P.R. 2000.  Natural stone in Norway: production, deposits and develoments. Norske Geologiska Undersøkelse Bulletin 436, 1-15
11. Note 4., fig. 21.6