Mandale Derbyshire Fossil Limestone Update 2024
During 2023 Mandale building stone was used on many projects from extensions to multiple housing projects to the Rockmill centre along side the Cupola Heritage centre.
Many of these projects had Gritstone architectural masonry within their design specification.
The Cupola Stoney Middleton
Mandale Derbyshire Fossil Limestone for walling and Derbyshire grit stone masonry complement each other giving a building a very prestigious look as shown on the images.
Rock Mill Apartments Stoney Middleton
When we view the completed building projects, that will stand for many centuries to come, its inspiring to know we at Mandale Stone and Natural Stone Sales have had the pleasure to be involved in creating future historic buildings.
The stone is extracted from Once a week Quarry and Stanton Moor then processed into walling and slabs for further fabrication at our various works.
Mandale limestone is extracted from the Once A Week quarry in the most environmentally friendly way possible. The blocks are extracted by the traditional method of Plug And Feather. This means there are no explosives used, the quarry operative finds the natural bed of the block and drills a series of holes with a compressed air rock drill.
He then inserts feathers, these are two metal shims which are wider at the bottom and tapered , these are then inserted into each drill hole followed by the plug, which is a metal wedge. He then works up and down the line of plugs striking them with a sledge hammer repeatedly . The result is the block eventually cracks away from the main seam and allows extraction to take place.
Traditional Plug And Feathers
Once extracted the production process requires the block to be broken down further into manageable sizes to go through the cropping machine.
A cropping machine is used to create a stone to the sizes for building with. Once the Limestone has gone through the cropper the net result are 3 types of stone ;
- Grade A building stone
- Random building stone
- Drystone walling
There is a subtle difference between Grade A and random building stone , Grade A is better finished ready for laying with minimal dressing and once laid can be brought to courses quite easily. Random building stone are not as uniform in courses therefore can be dressed back to more courses or just dressed slightly to give a more random finish to the walling.
When the quarry man is extracting block he is able to identify highly fossilized material . When this material is extracted, we isolate these fossilized blocks away from the building stone blocks. They are then transported from the quarry to our stone saw site whereupon we use a large frame saw to cut up the selected blocks into slabs. These slab thickness are 15mm, 20, 30mm & 40mm these slabs are used for producing fire surrounds , hearths , memorials, kitchen worktops, tiles and many other bespoke projects.
