Touching History: The Ancient Craft Of Stonemasonry With Andrew Ziminski

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What is it like to work on ancient English churches, cathedrals and stone monuments? How does stone, a symbol of permanence, change over centuries? In this interview, I explore the craft of stonemasonry with church conservator Andrew Ziminski.

Andrew Ziminski stonemason

Andrew Ziminski is a stonemason and church conservator with decades of experience working on some of the greatest cathedrals and churches in Britain. He’s also the author of The Stonemason: A History of Building Britain and Church Going: A Stone Mason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles.

The ancient craft of stonemasonry and how the tools have remained unchanged for millennia
How stone is damaged over time by settlement, weather, and even the metal used to build with
The defining features of Gothic architecture, a movement focused on light and colour, not darkness
Why the “Green Man” carvings in churches are Christian symbols of resurrection, not pagan figures
How ancient churches can feel imbued with the atmosphere of centuries of human experience

You can find Andrew at MinervaConservation.com.

You can find my articles and photos of Gothic Cathedrals here.

Transcript of the interview

Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Jo Frances Penn, and today I’m here with Andrew Ziminski. Hi Andy.

Andy: Hello, Jo.

Jo: Yes, absolutely. So just a little introduction. Andrew is a stonemason and church conservator with decades of experience working on some of the greatest cathedrals and churches in Britain. He’s also the author of The Stonemason: A History of Building Britain and Church Going: A Stone Mason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles. I’m a fan and I have the books right here if you are watching the video. I love them. So thank you so much for coming on today, Andy, I want to get straight into it because —

Part of why I love churches and cathedrals is this sense of timelessness, of being small against the backdrop of history.

How does it feel for you when you are working on these ancient buildings, doing this ancient craft?

Andy: Well, in theory, I should be getting bored of it, I mean, I’ve been doing it so long, but anything but. My interest seems to grow with every project that we work on. We pretty much only work on ancient churches, medieval bridges, and the odd castle every now and again.

There’s always something new to discover, be it a particularly local school of carvers or a type of medieval graffiti that I see carved into the piers of a particular church. There are so many regional variations in the British Isles, in terms of architecture and materials and the approach of the people who built these places, that I’m always sniffing them out. And as I understand more, it makes me want to understand even more, if that doesn’t sound too crazy. I think the day I’ll stop nosing around these places will be my last one on the planet.

Jo: Well hopefully not falling off some spire.

Didn’t you work on Salisbury Spire?

Andy: Yeah, I started my training at Salisbury. I went to a local stonemasonry college because our part of England, the Southwest, is renowned for its building stones. There used to be a very excellent stonemasonry college at Weymouth on the coast in Dorset. From there I went up to the top of the tower, not the spire, but the tower, which is the square section that supports the octagonal base of the spire which is 404 feet tall and the tallest medieval structure in Europe that’s still in its original condition. It’s pretty amazing.

Jo: It is. Salisbury is amazing. And you mentioned ancient churches, so some people listening might be in places where they don’t have such ancient architecture as we have.

What timeframe are you talking about when you say ancient churches?

Andy: The oldest church I’ve worked on is in Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire, again in the Southwest. That was built around the year 1000, and anything from then onwards really.

I tend to switch off with Victorian churches because I’m not really that interested in them. Victorian churches in the UK are generally Victorian interpretations of earlier medieval forms, and I think I might as well just study the medieval form and not the Victorian fakes. Even though their craftwork is excellent. Very often in the churches that we work on, we’re very close to the city of Bath, as you know, it is absolutely groaning with Roman ruins.

It’s not unusual to see Roman material that the Anglo-Saxons reused in their walls or as part of their altars. I’ve done lots of work in the Roman baths in Bath, so I’d say the earliest structure I’ve worked on is the West Kennet Long Barrow, which was built about 3000 BC and has its own postcode. So I’ve worked on a building that’s 5000 years old, and that was quite incredible.

Jo: It is incredible. And just again, coming back to this ancient craft, because the stonemasonry is also ancient. Obviously the people who built these things were stonemasons.

How did you decide to get into this, because most people don’t go into stonemasonry?

It’s not a growing profession. It’s so fascinating that you chose this direction.

Andy: Well, a number of factors came into play. My father came here as a refugee during the war. The only options for him as a job were going down the coal mine or working as a stonemason in a granite quarry. We used to go to Scotland and I liked the permanency of the things he made. He was Polish and he’d say, “Son, this will last for a million years,” and they probably will, because they’re built of granite.

So I quite liked the permanency of that from a young age. And I’ve always had a deep interest in history. I thought, how can I draw together the worlds of craft and history? Going down the path I knew a little about from my father seemed like a good way. And 35 – 40 years on, I haven’t looked back.

Jo: I do find it fascinating. I went and did a weekend of stone carving and so I did actually use some of the tools and boy, my body hurt!

What about the physicality of what you do? This is hard material. Is it very physical or is a lot of what you do now with chemicals or how does the job work?

Andy: I’m a conservator first and foremost, and what that means is that my aim is to keep as much of the original as possible. It’s like dentistry, I guess. If there’s a cavity, and the stone around the cavity or the rot is okay, I will fill it using a lime mortar, which is a very ancient technique that the Romans used.

You can’t lift a quarter-of-a-ton-sized piece of stone, you’ve got to use kit. Many people are surprised when I’m on site and my colleagues, half of them are women. Very often I find that women make better stonemasons than some of my more gung-ho male colleagues who just want to bust their backs and destroy their bodies by lifting things they shouldn’t lift.

The tools that we use are unchanged since Roman times or even ancient Egyptian times. The head of my dummy is made of nylon, but the ancient Egyptians used mallets made of palm trees turned on a lathe. So, the materials might be different, but the tools, the form of the tools, the approach, and the mindset are exactly the same.

The way I would approach cutting a block of stone is not in any way different to someone who was cutting a limestone block for the Great Pyramid, or in the Roman Baths in Bath, or in the Colosseum, or at Notre Dame. This is a sort of brilliant handing on of the baton over the generations that goes unnoticed, and I like that about craft skills.

Jo: Are young people coming into it? Is there another generation? Because I feel like that kind of craftsmanship –

Are we losing this kind of craftsmanship or is it still here?

Andy: No, there’s stonemasons in every hedge round here because it’s a stony area. The local stonemasonry college in Bath is really good. There’s no shortage of youngsters coming through at all.

It’s different in other parts of the country where there isn’t such a strong tradition. But certainly around here in Southwest Britain, Southern Britain, and in London, there are lots of stonemasons. But there are other crafts that are suffering from a demise in interest, mainly because people don’t know that these jobs exist, and I think that’s a big problem.

I spent all last week at the Chalke Valley History Festival, educating young people that it’s possible to earn a living that’s good for your soul, good for your body, and good for society by undertaking a traditional craft, be that a stonemason, an oak carpenter, or a stone slater. All church roofs need stone slaters, and that’s an area where there is a real shortage. If you want to become a millionaire in years, become a church stone slater.

Jo: But then, you love the stone now, I guess.

Andy: Yeah, I mean, ’cause our business is tiny, there’s just eight of us and we just go from job to job. We’ve had to become generalists so we can carve pretty much anything. We could rebuild any vault we could repair a hole in a wall and plaster it up. We’ve got a broad range of skills, but we’re not specific and in the craft of ow masonry. There are lots of different areas you can be, you can focus on being a letter cutter, for example, and just do headstones or memorials or you could be a sculptor, of some sort.

Or you could be what they call a Banker Mason. You’re just in a workshop making components to be fitted into a church or a fixer mason. But we sort of have to do all of that. So we’re a bit slower than the people who choose to specifically focus on one of those types of tasks.

Jo: I’m also interested because when I was attracted to this whole area and Gothic cathedrals, it was this sense of things lasting. We think of stone as something that doesn’t change, and it’s used as a metaphor for unchanging and unyielding, and yet your very job is fixing stone.

What changes and damages stone over time? What are you fixing?

Andy: Settlement within the structure is very often a problem. When these buildings were put up, say a Norman church or cathedral in the th century, because they hadn’t quite got the engineering right, they would tend to settle around the central tower. So you get lots of cracks and settlements in the arches. A Norman arch adjacent to a tower, which is semi-circular like a Roman arch, will very often have settled and there’ll be some deflection in the arch, and it’s details like that that always need maintaining.

Different stones erode in different ways in different parts of the country. They’ve historically been subject to acid rain, and in limestones, that causes a particular problem externally, but the core of the stone will very often be in good condition. So that will be repaired, as I mentioned earlier, with lime mortars, or we’ll just do some dentistry and cut out the rot, replacing it with a new piece of stone.

Some stones in this part of the world are very good and some are rubbish. The Anglo-Saxon Church at Bradford-on-Avon has been there since the year and there’s no new stone in it at all. It’s because the Anglo-Saxons had the pick of the quarry. They knew where the best stone was. This is something I’ve noticed: very often Anglo-Saxon churches will be of bigger blocks than their later additions and be of a better quality of stone.

They’re still there and hanging around. So as I say, they had the pick of the stone and it’s gonna be larger and of better quality. Very often Victorian stonework is a bit rubbish and the way that the Victorians chose to build.

If we’re looking at a reproduction Gothic Victorian church, the Victorians wouldn’t have built in the gothic style from an engineering perspective. You have some squared off stones on the inside and the outside, and it would all be tied together in a rubble core so the whole building was, the walls were all unified, but with the Victorians, they would clad a rubble core with stonework and use cast iron cramps to reach into the core of the building and the cast iron corrodes ’cause it’s type of iron and that causes all sorts of problems. So Victorian church generally aren’t that well built.

Jo: I did visit the Salisbury Stonemason’s yard and they talked about that. And how, the metal, basically, like you said about dentistry, you think that that discoloration and the kind of almost rotting, but you mentioned the stone in Bradford-on-Avon.

What is quality when it comes to stone?

Andy: I think what might’ve helped Bradford is it is in a pretty rural area, whereas Bath is an urban area. It’s a very similar type of stone in Bath, but a slightly less durable stone was selected because the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans had the pick of what was available.

What tends to happen in Bath is that the coal that was extracted from the Somerset coal fields was a very high sulfur coal, and everyone was burning that in their grates. Consequently, all the buildings were covered in a sort of sulfation blackened crust, and that weakens the outside of the stone.

With the Saxon Church of Bradford-on-Avon, I think a simplicity in materials has also helped it. The masons who turned up to build this wonderful little building literally extracted the stone from the quarry face that’s still there behind them. They put up this stone structure with stone blocks, but they didn’t use a cement mortar or a lime mortar; they just used clay from the local riverbed to glue the stones together. When we opened up one of the corners where there was a bit of movement, you could just smell the river from a thousand years ago. It was just incredible. So we just knocked it up in a bucket and put it back in.

But I’ve noticed that like on the bridges around Bradford on Avon, there’s two medieval bridges and we’ve worked on both of them extensively, and they were constructed in the same way. So when they were sinking the piers, the central sections that the arches spring from, they would sink them down into the riverbed and of course the river bed’s clay, and there’s just tons of clay coming up, so they would just use that to glue together the stones. So all these incredible 13th century bridges and the adjacent tithe barn. It’s astonishing, isn’t it?

Jo: It’s beautiful.

Andy: It’s just old stone and clay, you know, simplicity and it’ll be there for another thousand years, won’t it?

Jo: I want to come back to Gothic because you mentioned the Gothic, and I love a Gothic cathedral. For people who might not know, many of my listeners are also book people and Gothic literature is dark and quite different, whereas gothic architecture is more about light and airiness and height.

Could you talk about what are the hallmarks of Gothic and some of the places that you’ve worked on?

Andy: I think giving that form of literature the name Gothic is a bit of a misnomer.

The Gothic [architectural] movement is all about light and color. Norman churches are these tall, dark churches that had tiny windows and thick walls. The Gothic movement was all about getting the light, which was the actual essence of God itself, into the church. So they wanted to flood the altar and the church itself with light. Consequently, you get much bigger pointed windows, and windows with a branch network within them to hold the glass, that’s called tracery.

Medieval churches would’ve been highly colored, they would’ve been lit by candles. It would’ve been an incredibly sensory experience to visit one of these places.

So I really don’t get the whole gothic movement at all, really. It’s just completely wrong.

Jo: Yeah, it is a little weird, and I feel that people get gothic architecture wrong because they think of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, for example, and the darkness and all that. But again, that’s not Notre Dame inside and the architectural thing.

Where have you worked on in terms of Gothic Cathedrals?

Andy: I trained at Salisbury Cathedral and spent a few enjoyable years there learning the ropes. I’ve worked at Wells Cathedral in Somerset.

Jo: Maybe you could just tell people about the scissor arches at Wells, because that’s a very special kind of architecture, isn’t it?

Andy: Yes. What tended to happen with Norman churches is they borrowed Roman architectural forms and tried to make them taller. As they got taller and the Gothic system was introduced, there was a desire for Gothic buildings that were built on a Norman core to go even taller. At Wells, they started to build a central tower.

So you look down the main part of the body of the church, that’s called the nave, and you’ve got wings coming off the arms of the cross, if you like. They’re called transcepts and the most sacred part, as I’m sure your listeners know, is at the east end, and that’s where all the chapels are and the altars and all that.

As it went up and they put a lead spire on the top, it just started to sink back down. This deflection I was talking about earlier on the side. The side arches adjacent to the tower, which we quite often have to repair, all started to split and come apart. The thing was about to collapse.

The master mason at that time, a chap called William Joy, came up with this very practical solution of introducing these scissor arches. They’re called scissor arches because they look like a pair of open scissors placed one on top of the other with the loop in the central section. That loop, where you would put your fingers, takes all the strain from all the surrounding stresses.

Scissor arch behind altar, Wells Cathedral Photo by JFPenn

Jo: It’s beautiful. I mean, you said there it was architecturally functional, but it’s beautiful.

Andy: Oh, it’s completely mad. And Wells is so great because of the carving inside.

It’s got this Great West Front, which is the greatest West Front in Britain, and it’s full of incredible carving that’s survived since the 1220s-1240s.

Wells Cathedral west front Photo by JFPenn

The actual carving inside is just as astonishing. It’s a tour de force of the medieval sculptor’s art, this form of leaf called stiff leaf. It’s a composite form, not a real leaf.

You can date any church on the basis of the stiff leaf. The stuff at Wells is the best in the country by a mile.

Did you see the toothache? It’s kind of all these sort of strange cartoonlike carvings of people with toothache holding their mouth open like this.

Jo: There is a lot of comedy in some of these churches that you think, how did they get away with that? I did a carving of a Green Man.

JFPenn's Green Man with petunias — JFPenn’s Green Man with petunias

Could you explain why we have things like a Green Man in a Christian place?

Andy: Funny enough, I have been carving a Green Man all this week at the Chalke history festival. The Green Man seems a pretty uncompromisingly pagan figure, but Gothic stone carving is full of foliate forms. Doesn’t matter where you go in the country, as long as the stone is carvable between 1220s and Reformation, sticking a face in these foliate forms seems a rational thing to do. Stonemasons would just carve and carve and carve.

These faces are not the faces of saints or pagan figures. It just indicates the abundance of nature, but it’s about rebirth, regeneration, and most importantly, resurrection. So, these characters are uncompromisingly Christian in my view. I don’t think they’re a hangover from the pre-Christian days because you don’t see an Anglo-Saxon or Norman Green Man. It just appears with all this wonderfully vital carving that you see in places like Wells.

They’re a really good form in ceiling bosses. Where you have a stone roof vault, to lock all the stones together at the top, you need a really massive, circular feature called a roof boss. Decorating that with a green man is a very obvious thing to do. You’ve got to decorate it with something, and there are only so many lives of the saints you can portray, so the Green Man is very, very common.

Jo: I did also want to ask you, because in Churchgoing, talking about the more spiritual element, you said,

“Atmosphere should have its own entry in this book, it’s usually been as tangible a presence as anything else.”

What kinds of those experiences have you had and why do non-religious people love these places and feel something in these places?

Andy: It’s such a personal thing, isn’t it?

I go into a church at six in the morning in the middle of winter. It’ll be cold and frosty, and the heating won’t be on, but the sun will be coming up and will radiate through the east window. These first glimpses of the day will light up the motes that are floating around in the church, and you can’t not be moved by these places.

I refer to the walls of a church as like an old-fashioned night storage heater that slowly releases the births, the deaths, the coming together, the tragedy, the pathos of life that’s taken place since these places first went up seven or eight hundred years ago. I don’t have a particular faith, but I know there’s something else going on.

Jo: It’s interesting you say “like the storage heater,” and I feel too that when there is emotion in a place, it sort of becomes imbued with it and you can perhaps sense some of that emotion.

What’s interesting is some places you go and you really do feel something, and other churches, you know, there’s this idea of dead churches. There are some that clearly had worship in them but do feel dead. And other ones you go in and you are like, “Oh yeah,” like Wells just has such a feeling in it. Then you go in somewhere else, like St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, and I don’t feel anything there.

Why do you think we feel things in some places and not others?

Andy: I’m completely with you about St. Paul’s. It’s weird, isn’t it?

I worked there for a while and it was very interesting. The guy who was teaching me was the master carver there, and he’d been there since he was a boy. His education was rebuilding Christopher Wren’s City of London churches after the Second World War. He would send me off every lunchtime to go and look at a different church, and I found more of that vibe going on in the churches really than the cathedral.

That said, you’ve got to pay to get into Westminster Abbey, which I find so appalling. But Westminster Abbey, talking about atmosphere, it’s in the middle of busy London and it’s just the most atmospheric of all. It’s not a cathedral, it’s a Royal Peculiar, which means it’s the church of the Monarch. I’ve shivered a few times in there over the years when I’ve managed to blag my way in for nothing through the gift shop.

Jo: How interesting. I mean, that really has a lot of famous burials, and I’ve got some photos there of these skeletons. There’s some really good sculpture there. But it is interesting, and you are not religious, you’re not a Christian?

Andy: I am a bit, but not really.

Jo: It’s interesting how we feel that in stone.

So, we are almost out of time. Apart from your own books —

Stonemasonry books

What are a few books you might recommend that feature stonemasonry or architecture?

Andy: Everyone on the planet has to read A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr. It’s a novella about two First World War veterans, one working as an archaeologist and the other is a wall painting restorer, working together in a church. It’s the most wonderful short read that really fills in a lot of spaces if you’re trying to understand what our medieval churches are about.

To understand old churches now, they’re a machine of sacredness that was designed before the Reformation. There’s a really brilliant book by a chap called Eamon Duffy, and it’s called The Stripping of the Altars. It’s very entertaining, and every page is a winner.

I also recommend Country Church Monuments. And King of Dust by Alex Woodcock is a lovely book. It’s very specific to Cornwall, but it’s thoroughly recommended if you want to understand the weirdness of the area.

And this one, Old Parish Life: A Guide for the Curious. It’s just wonderful. This chap has been spending his whole life raiding old parish accounts. Tell me when to stop and I’ll read you a random thing. It’ll be worth it.

Jo: Go … stop!

Andy: Burial before the reformation. In 1556, there was a payment to Phelps, the tinker for the mending of the corpse bell of 12 shillings.

Jo: That’s awesome, I love a corpse bell!

Where can people find you and your books online?

Andy: My Church Going book is selling really well and it’s available in all good bookshops, I imagine. I guess you can get anything from anywhere, can’t you?

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for your time, Andy. That was great.

Andy: Thanks, Jo.

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