French Stone Cutter

For Terra...here's one, the piece being cut looks like those that would be called a Key Stone, used in Fireplaces, Doors etc as a Centrepiece...The Tool is a Scutch, I think that's the correct spelling...around 1781 ish

That's one...

Extensive quarrying was done near the city of Aixen -Provence, France between 1786 and 1788, to provide the large quantities of limestone needed for the rebuilding of the Palace of Justice.

In the quarry from which the limestone was taken, the rock strata were separated from each other by layers of sand and clay, and by the time the workmen had removed 11 layers of rock they had found they had reached a depth of some 40 feet or 50 feet from the original level of the area.

Beneath the 11th layer of limestone they came to a bed of sand and began to remove it to get at the rock underneath. In the sand they found the stumps of stone pillars and fragments of half worked rock, the same stone and rock that they themselves had been excavating.

They dug further and found coins, the petrified wooden handles of hammers, and pieces of other petrified wooden tools. Finally they came to a large wooden board, seven or eight feet long and an inch thick. As was the case with the wooden tools, it had also been petrified into a form of agate and it had been broken into pieces.

When the pieces were reassembled, the workmen saw before them a quarryman's board of exactly the same kind they themselves used, worn in just the same way as their own boards were, with rounded, edges.

How a stonemason's yard equipped with the kind of tools used in France in the late 18th century, had come to be buried 50 feet deep under layer of sand and limestone 300 million years old is a mystery even more vexing today than at the time of the original discovery.

For we now know, thanks to advances in geological and anthropological dating, that such a thing is absolutely impossible. And yet it does seem to have happened.

How about this then, incredible...

Ooh, very interesting! Any theories at all?

enjoyed reading this blog.

Thanks Ladies, I started looking for info for Terra, but it's so interesting, and I've learned such a lot from what I've uncovered so far...

Hi Pam, well the info was recorded at the time, I'm sure it must have created a lot of excitement way back when, and stranger things have happened....so why not...

This sounds very interesting, Crissue. Almost like a book story. If you are interested, Kate Moss, English writer who lives in Sussex and in Carcassonne, too wrote bestseller "Sepulchre". It is about a girl escaping from Paris on 1891 with her brother. She hided close to Carcassonne. Here she found sepulchre. The story of the book then develops very interestingly and I will not tell you the end :))) Just for your fun.
I was in Aix-en-Provence and Avignon, in that region and I was really impressed. So beautiful scenery, huge castles, lavender and olive, old Roman bridges and aqueducts. Really, a very nice place. But I did not hear about stone quarry there. So sorry, as for sure I would vist it, knowing this story.
I was away for a week now, so...just curious, why did you start to write about stone masonry? I missed probably something.

Hi Kat, will certainly have a look at the book you suggested...

I posted pics of Our Chateau and the gate House in our Village, which has it's own little story, and the Stone for the Region is Tuffeau...which Terra was interested in the old time Stonemasons etc, so I went looking for info...

Wow! Did you buy chateau? Congratulation! :)))

Hi Kat, noooo, it's the Chateau in our Village...lol...

:)))
Crissue, where did you find those historic pictures?

I took the Pics of the Chateau, and gatehouse myself...

The info, I googled....