Day 32 : Back to the Staffordshire Building Stones. Off the two formations that are currently quarried in Staffordshire for building stone, this, the Minn Sandstone is the least well known. Fine-medium grained, quartz rich and feldspar poor, a quartz overgrowth cement makes this a very indurate rock. Also contains …
Day 31 : Well, I’ve reached the end of the first month of Rock365. Today I’ve some black and white photography – coal and snow. I was out this morning scouting a location for some potential geological site management for educational use and it was snowing! So here is the …
Day 30 : Lum Edge Sandstone. A medium- to fine-grained protoquartzitic sandstone lacking feldspar. Quarried at Stunsteads and Bradnop for local building stone.
Day 29 : This is the wonderfully named Rough Rock otherwise known as the First Grit. This beautifully dark red, coarse-grained feldspathic gritstone doesn't make a particularly good building stone as it is often poorly cemented. Its main use in Staffordshire is actually for glass sand and it is extensively …
Day 28 : The Cheddleton Sandstone occurs, unsurprisingly around the Cheddleton area. Quarried at Cheddleton, Stanley Moor and Endon Edge it would have been used as local building stone. It is generally finer grained and lighter coloured than the gritstones and lacks the feldspar. The Cheddleton Sandstone passes eastwards into …
Day 27 : He is the Chatsworth Grit again as a comparison to yesterday's sample from Mow Cop. This piece of gritstone comes from Rudyard (where Mr Kipling was conceived), away from the Red Rock Fault, and the rock is less leached. Weathered surfaces are a brick red colour. Note …
Day 26 : A second Staffordshire building stone. This is the Chatsworth Grit from Mow Cop, Staffordshire. This was extensively quarried at Mow Cop for local building stone including that of Mow Cop ‘castle’. The quarries were subject to numerous disputes between the Sneyd family of Keele Hall who owned …
Day 25 : My attention now switches to Staffordshire building stones because of a project that I’m working on. As I’m going to have to photograph these anyway, I might as well include them in Rock365. This is the Kniveden Sandstone, quarried east of Leek and near Wetley Rocks, it …
Day 24 : This breccia is a very immature sediment, with very poor sorting of clast sizes, angular fragments and the wide variety of clast types including limestones, sandstones and siltstone . It is from the Triassic of the Spanish Pyrenees and probably represents an alluvial fan deposit in a …
Day 23 : Some beautiful sedimentary structures in these volcaniclastic sediments from the Lake District. This sample is from near the Rydal Cave on the south side of Rydal Water between Grasmere and Ambleside. The cave was actually a 'slate' mine but as we can see here the rocks are …