How pinky-brown was my valley
“Home is where one starts from,” says TS Eliot. Home in my case being the Permian-age New Red Sandstone of the valleys of southwest Scotland. [1800 words 7 mins
Geology is destiny, and a place built out of its own bedrock is a place at peace with itself.
My village in Dumfriesshire1 is built out of reddish-brown sandstone, in the spaces of the original ground level between six large sandstone quarries. A hundred and fifty years ago, this place was noisy with the crash of steam hammers, falling silent just twice a day before the sharp bang of the gunpowder blasting. The twenty-house settlement had a pub, and a shop, and a school, and an industrial accident rate running at a death every couple of years.
Two railway branch lines reached us, at slightly different levels. The southern one arrives on an embankment at the back of my garden. The house I live in belonged to one of the quarry masters, with its back door opening towards the two workings.
The nearer quarry is a hollow of trees falling to a black pool. There’s no inflow, the water seeps away through broken stones from the nearby river. Far below the sunlight, it’s seasoned in summer with green pondweed; underwater are shadows of slowly rotting branches and even slower rotting consumer whiteware. Tangled around the quarry top are remains of iron lifting gear, winches with cables five centimetres thick. Half-circle plinths, carved for some town hall or bank, lie in damp leaves, locked to the ground by a century of tree roots.
The ground beyond the quarry is broken bits of stone. This would damage the ankles of any grazing cow, so it’s been fenced off and left as an informal nature reserve. Leave a pile of stones for a hundred years in southern Scotland: what you get’s a wood of silver birch. Here and there, the darker trunks of oak or beech indicate the climax woodland that’ll take over in another couple of centuries.
In late summer the woodland is waist high with male-fern, so that you walk feeling with your feet around the broken stones below. There is a small path I made with a hammer, but only knowing the individual treetrunks will tell you where it is below the fronds.
Flecks of greenish light show between the trees. Behind the birch trunks is a mossed wall of red-brown rock. Tracing the rock wall around its curve reveals that this is the second of the quarries. Tree roots are writhing down the rock face, trying to find some soil: one ancient pine root is thicker than I am. A field drain up above has been leaking for half a century, and the rockface here is bright mosses into which you can sink your hand up to the wrist. In autumn this becomes a small waterfall, and in winter a wall of icicles gleaming between the trees.
Scotland south of the Lowland Valley is shaped by the 400-million-year old collision that joined Scotland and England onto the same bit of continental crust. Compressed and folded sea-floor makes for hilly country, quite unsuitable for canals. But the breakup of the Pangaea supercontinent pulled open the forerunner of Nithsdale as a north-south rift valley.
The rift valley, as rift valleys do, filled up with sand. The sand was there anyway, formed from the crumbling of one of Pangaea’s great mountain ranges. The rock that formed out of the wide-spreading detritus is the New Red Sandstone, so called because of being a mere 280 million years old.2
Three hundred million years later, smoothed and widened by the glacier that’s only just stopped coming down it, the valley made a natural line for the railway. And so from 1849 stone out of my back garden could travel north to Glasgow, and from Glasgow to the world.
When we buy the house (the 10% drop due to the flooded quarry brings it just within our price range) a joke gets handed down by the seller. A geological joke.
From Glasgow, some of our stone crossed to New York as ballast on returning ships. Once there, it was used on the famous brownstone town houses of Brooklyn and Manhattan, alongside local sandstone brought in barges from Connecticut and New Jersey. Today, it’s hard to tell the difference – because there isn’t any. With the opening of the Atlantic, the New Red Sandstone of Scotland was carried away from the New Red Sandstone of America at a rate of 7mm every year. At the end of 50 million years, it was loaded into ships and carried all the way back again.
How many owners does this anecdote go back? The house dates back nearly two centuries, but the joke can’t be any older than the 1950s. That was when sensitive magnetic detectors, used in World War Two for hunting submarines, were turned downwards onto the ocean floor – there to detect the pattern of magnetism locked in the rocks, and so to disclose the sea-floor spreading on either side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Which is what went to confirm that the continents really do bounce around the world like supersize dodgem cars.
But in Plato’s Ideal World, where jokes like mathematical theorems exist independent of merely human understanding, the story goes back 280 million years.
Over a couple of centuries, broken stones and leafmould built up around the former quarry offices. Soon after moving in we summoned a mechanical digger to excavate this back for us, and over the first winter I built a new retaining wall.
In the uplands, I’d been used to building dykes – dry stone field walls – with the chunky greywacke. It’s a challenging sort of stone. You can break it with a sledgehammer, but you have to hit it hard and in the right place. And if you hit it in the right place, it’ll break to some usable shape, even if it isn’t the shape you were aiming for. The fracture is usually concave, giving decisive contact with the next stone you place it up against. There’s a momentary sharp whiff of brimstone; this hammer blow, when it works, is as satisfying as a sneeze. And the fragments give a selection of useful slips and wedges.
The red sandstone of the valley floor is quite different. With a lump hammer and a wide blade chisel you can open it into flat blocks along the bedding planes. The opened surface is pink like faded rose petals, sandy under the hand. Sometimes it sparkles in the sun with tiny mica crystals. Then if you want to shape the front face, you carve a groove around it with the wide chisel, and a few sharp blows with the hammer will usually break it along the line you wanted.
It’s this amenable behaviour that makes it so suitable for gravestones and town halls. The Georgian and Victorian houses of Dumfries, Annan and Thornhill are built square and plain, letting the warm colour of the stone do its work – but with a decorative lintel at the main doorway, and perhaps a pair of pillars. It’s the gravestones that are over the top. Older ones are carved with skulls and bones, hourglasses, and angels in long stone nightgowns. Two centuries on, and the wealthy burgesses who share Rabbie Burns’s graveyard in Dumfries have monuments like the end of a shed, carved over with all their ancestors, descendants and achievements – it’s the nineteenth-century equivalent of a Facebook page.
Handsome houses, over-decorated graves – but for drystone walling, it’s boring. The flat chunks pile up like bricks. Most of the work consists of sorting the blocks into matching heights. There’s no making up the levels with thin slips, as anything under a centimetre is going to get crushed by the weight of the stones on top.
For my small wall, there’s plenty of stone to work with. The ground around the two quarries is made of broken stones, needing only the moss lifting off them. A ruined lean-to gives up its nicely dressed stone, useful for wall ends and corners. Here and there is one of the quite different greywacke stones, brought downstream by the nearby river. I ought to put these at the base, to take advantage of their strength in compression. Instead I put the grey stones half way up the wall, for show.
But it’s the various fallen walls around the back yard that are the most interesting to work with. They’re not just recycled, but re-recycled. Some have remains of whitewash on their inner faces, and some have been scored for mortar: they’ve been reused once already, from some vanished building. And then I lift out one wide, flat slab to find its underside carved with two lower-case alphabets. They’re in the satisfying style of the early 19th century, with neat serifs at the corners of the strokes – the serifs, pointed corners, of fonts like Garamond and Times New Roman are originally the tidy way to do it when carving into stone.
The carver has signed his work – John Jardine, a common Dumfriesshire name. But the first alphabet breaks off after two tries at the letter t. Mr Jardine was presumably a quarryman – practising his carving in the moments before the bang of the gunpowder marked the start of the day’s heavy lifting.
These right-sized wall stones: how many times, over 300 years, have they been built into a wall, tumbled down, and then been rebuilt into a different wall – as the quarry traffic shifted from sleds to wheeled carts and then to the railway? Then shifted again during the last hundred years of motor cars and decorative garden features. And how many times to be built again, into the future, before being crushed down for hardcore and lost for ever under some concrete paving?
But this recycling of back garden stones over a few short centuries is just a short-term simile for the recycling of the stone itself. Sandstone (the clue is in the name) is made of sand. And sand, most of it anyway, is made of sandstone. “No vestige of a beginning—, no prospect of an end:” in the timeless words of long-ago Scottish geologist James Hutton.
Cover image, Drumlanrig Castle, just up the valley, built in the 1690s from a quarry a couple of miles away. Possibly designed by James Smith who also did Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh.
As against the Old Red Sandstone, which at 400 million years is still early middle-age in geological terms.
Excellent. As promised I updated my earlier post on the Old Red Sandstone to link to this post of yours. Thanks much! https://richardigibson.substack.com/p/the-old-red-sandstone
Thanks for that Ronald, a fascinating history, and an interesting tale. it has made me wonder about the full timescale of our gritstone house by it's once cobbled lane (but sadly tarmacked over not too long ago).