Tag Archives: sandstone

Saltpans or fish-tanks? Stone basins on a Solway shore

Along the top of the shore between Maryport and its golf club is a high and wide promenade, constructed in the 1930s from an astonishing volume of concrete. At weekends it’s a perfect walkway for families with pushchairs, small hairy … Continue reading

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Snippets 10: stone stoops

Gateposts don’t normally attract our attention, so it is easy to miss the fact that many of the ‘posts’ supporting field gates on the Solway Plain are not posts at all, but are the traditional red sandstone pillars – known … Continue reading

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The Solway viaduct

(Note: for a longer and fuller account of the design, construction and demolition of the Solway Junction Railway and viaduct, a research project by myself and James Smith and supported with funding from the Solway Wetlands Partnership and the Heritage … Continue reading

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Snippets 8: A non-conformist on the shore

‘Brockram’ and ‘breccia’: the first word suggests something that is solid and long-lasting, the other has a hint of transience, of frippery. But Brockram is a form of breccia; it looks like a congealed and lumpy mess of porridge that … Continue reading

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The Walls of Parton

‘Are you looking for the old port?’ The man seemed to have appeared from nowhere, yet he was tall and strongly built, white hair sticking up straight, not easy to overlook. ‘Port?’ I was bemused – I’d been poking at … Continue reading

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Some things I didn’t know about sand-ripples and the sea

‘ … the tide holds back from the flat wet sands / That darken from tawny to brown, where little pools / Are stranded like starfish in the rippling ribs’.  Norman Nicholson, The Bow in the Cloud (I am grateful … Continue reading

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Sandstone, ‘smooth as walnut turned on a lathe’

“Fine sandstone is quite silky, you get a crisp image, the maximum sculptural effect. With sandstone there’s no reflection of light to distort what you see.” Sky Higgins, sculptor. “Red St Bees’ is a fine-grained stone, dull red in colour… … Continue reading

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