The English Stone-Slater's Craft

The combination of stone walls and stone roofs, harmonizing as they do with their surroundings, provides one of the most satisfying forms of vernacular architecture wherever it occurs. In England it characterizes the architecture of the Pennines and the Cotswolds and several other areas where suitably fissile sedimentary rocks are available. The term ‘stone-slates’, or in the Pennines ‘thakstones’, includes almost all kinds of fissile rock, ranging from true limestones to true sandstones. They differ essentially from the thin slates of Wales and the Lake District in their mode of splitting for, whereas the latter split along lines of cleavage at high angles to the bedding planes, stone-slates split along lines of lamination parallel to the bedding planes, a process often facilitated by the presence of flakes of mica

Archaeology · Bedding · Fissile material · Geochemistry · Geography · Mineralogy · Mining engineering · Sedimentary rock · SLATES · Architecture · Building materials and conservation · Geology · Historical Architecture and Urbanism · Scottish History and National Identity