Jul 5, 2026
Walk through downtown Fernie and you’ll notice something unusual for a small mountain town: block after block of solid brick and stone. Most towns this size in the Canadian Rockies grew up in timber and stayed that way. Fernie didn’t — and the reason is written into...
Feb 5, 2026
Cyclopean masonry is a type of stonework found in Mycenaean architecture, built with massive limestone boulders, roughly fitted together with minimal clearance between adjacent stones and with clay mortar or no use of mortar. The boulders typically seem unworked, but...
Dec 4, 2025
What Made Roman Stonemasonry Distinctive? Roman stonemasons inherited techniques from the Greeks and Etruscans and subsequently pushed the craft to new engineering and architectural heights. Their work ranged from finely carved marble monuments to massive utilitarian...
Oct 7, 2025
An amazing archaeological discovery in Romania is throwing new light on the advanced stoneworking skills of the Dacians, an ancient civilisation that thrived in the Carpathian region prior to the Roman conquest. While trekking in a forested area near Hunedoara...
Aug 11, 2025
St Paul’s Cathedral is an icon of the London skyline — as much as the Shard, the London Eye, Big Ben and that building with the three fans that are mysteriously never spinning. Wherever you go, you can’t help but notice its looming spire and majestic dome. However, it...
Jun 23, 2025
A quarryman splits or cuts rock in the quarry and extracts the resulting blocks of stone. The cut or split pieces are collected and transported away from the extraction surface for further refinement. A sawyer stonemason cuts these stone blocks into dimension stone,...
May 21, 2025
Naturalistic foliage was a popular decorative detail in the Gothic period, and small animals, birds and people frolic amongst the leaves and flowers. Sometimes the foliage grew into something else: the leaves at Wells Cathedral grow into the head of a man with...
Apr 25, 2025
Soaring Monuments Heavy stones were brought to the site by water or cart. The masons of Laon Cathedral in France, grateful to the oxen that pulled their carts, carved oxen peeking out of the top of the towers. Scaffolding was used to reach higher parts of the...
Mar 31, 2025
A mason’s craft The medieval mason was not a monk but a highly skilled lay craftsman who combined the roles of architect, builder, craftsman, designer and engineer. Using only a set of compasses, a set square and a staff or rope marked off in halves, thirds and...
Feb 10, 2025
Tuck pointing is a highly-skilled and refined method of pointing, or re-pointing, brickwork whereby a colored mortar joint is placed to match the brick and grooved while ‘green’ or fresh, to receive a separate, and carefully placed, lime putty: silver sand ribbon. The...
