The People We Meet - Drumhead Quarry

The Drystone Company visit Drumhead Quarry

There are many other industries that intersect with drystone. This gives us the welcome opportunity to meet a lot of different people as well as learn (at least a little) about their profession. Although we use a lot of fieldstone, sometimes the job calls for a different stone type and so last week when planning a new project, we decided to visit the quarry where our stone was going to be coming from. Drumhead quarry is only 30 minutes from our project enabling us to feel happy that we are doing our best to maintain high levels of sustainability within our practice.

Drumhead is owned and operated by Davie and Tish, a husband and wife team. When we arrived we had a great chat with Tish who kindly showed us around the amazing buildings on their land (currently for sale!) and I took far too many photographs of their beautiful Hydrangea as well as the outer of a spiral staircase section.

The sandstone from Dumhead is ‘Cowie Rock’, a pale-coloured sandstone in the Upper Limestone Formation (Clackmannan Group). Drumhead has been supplying stone since the early 18th century and the quarry’s sandstone was the first ever shipment along a newly built Union Canal in 1822. That shipment made its way to Edinburgh, building some of the first parts of The New Town.

Davie took us up to his stone yard and we discussed our needs for the project. It is pretty amazing to see the stone you will be using sitting in the earth prior to extraction. Below are a couple of portraits of Davie (shared with permission). We were also very happy to be shown photos of the many structures that the Drumhead stone has built including projects in Australia and the U.S.

Thanks so much to Davie and Tish for having us. We’ve already started building with the Drumhead stone and we look forward to sharing what we build, maybe we'll do a good enough job to be featured in the photo album!