Updated: October 2009

Secrets of the Belstone Stone Masons
(Notes from a guided walk by Chris Walpole with photographs from the Belstone archive)

Eden Phillpott's The Secret Woman (1905) - The birds cawed without ceasing and the music of them chimed with the clink of stonemasons' hammers hard by. Because the sound of steel on granite is a part of the daily din of man at Belstone.

Start by the stocks: The granite seat is a pigs trough turned upsidedown. In October 2000 the DNPA moved one of the posts slightly closer to the other so that the boards would be held move firmly in the grooves; they had to dig a hole four and a half feet deep before the bottom of the post was reached.

William Brock's stoneyard
William "WB" Brock (1826-1913), lived at Tamarisk Cottage, within sight and sound of his stoneworks beside the pound, of which he was also the keeper. Robert Reddaway of Reddaway Farm, a distant relation, tells another story; "he was a big strong man who could box. Still, he used to take his eggs and produce to Tavistock market on a Friday and one time on Black Down top on the way home he was knocked off his horse and robbed by a highwayman."

W B Brock

On August 14th 1879 Mr Brock received some unwelcome news. Only 5 months previously he had paid £1 in rent to the Church thinking that this would allow him to take granite from the Commons for two years, but the notice he received on the 14th from Churchwarden Robert Reddaway changed all that. He read "I hereby deny you to take any granite from the Commons from the Parish Belstone until further notice", and 10/- of the payment was refunded. Of course, stone had been taken off the moor for centuries - how else would the early dwellings, the stone walls enclosing newtakes, even the church itself, have been built - but to begin a commercial enterprise was something new.

Whatever the reason for this rebuttal, Mr Brock, or "WB" as he was known, did succeed in bringing granite off the moor and working it in his yard (ie fine dressing the stone) by the pound between [approx] 1893 and 1910, capitalising on the turn of the century boom in house building and the continuing need for seats, gateposts, troughs, millstones, headstones, rollers, quoins, pillars and other artefacts. After his death in 1913, at the age of 87, these works fell silent. For a long time afterwards a pile of un-worked granite lay on the green close to the Chapel, overgrown with nettles, and a few stones can still be seen beside the pound.

Men working at Brock's Granite Yard

Rose Cottage behind the pound. This was where another stone mason lived - Bert Gratton. He had a stoneyard at Prospect, South Zeal.
Leslie Gratton, who was born at Rose Cottage in 1928, helped his father Bert collect stone from the moor behind South Zeal; "he made two large tortoises designed by a London architect at his Prospect works. The horse that he used with a cart for his granite workings on the moor went to France with him in WW1. When they came back onto the moor he noticed that whenever the horse heard Army firing or shots it would lie down - it had been trained to do this in France.
Bert never added his initials to gravestones as he didn't want to advertise on the dead.

Reddaway's stoneyard on the green
This granite works was that run by William Reddaway and his son, also called William, between 1875 and the Second World War. By February 1939 the "Mid Devon Granite Works", as it was then known, was advertising "headstones, crosses and other materials always in stock, worked by skilled men in Best Devon Granite". The Brocks and Reddaways were related and they did sometimes work together. For instance in 1902 they made the monumental 7' long trough commemorating the coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra which can be seen today in Simmons Park in Okehampton. In its heyday the Reddaway yard employed up to 30 men cutting and transporting the stone. One shilling was paid annually to the Lord of the Manor for "hire" of the green. Sometimes a hundred or more granite blocks would lie at all angles on the green outside Church Haye, awaiting final shaping in the workshed where Town Living Cottage now stands.

Reddaway's Granite Works in its Heyday

Local stone went far and wide and is reputed to have been used on the London Embankment; certainly Sidney Bowden from Sticklepath was at Marble Arch with a 3 ton lorry under contract from the Reddaway yard on September 3rd 1939, the day war was declared.

This burgeoning industry was not without its critics; in 1911 Dora James referred to the yards as "eyesores" and the taking of granite from the moor as "infinitely to be regretted".

William Reddaway also owned The Tors - gave money to workers on a Saturday, got it back off them during the week in the pub.

On many Belstone houses the corner stones and window edges are examples of bunched stone dressing (The Tors and Moor Hall): instead of a flat dressed side the stone masons have left a raised portion on each stone. This feature isn't necessarily found in other areas, ie it was a characteristic of the stone-yards in Belstone. If a house has some granite building blocks like this and some not it probably indicates that the some of the granite was local and some came from elsewhere.

There was a forge in the yard at Town Living. Thomas Chammings (1855-1919) sharpened the granite cutting tools in the 1880s and shaped some of the circular granite balls that top gateways at, for instance, Resugga and Tawcroft. William Mortimore was another local stonemason who cut the granite seat which stands just inside the upper Birchy Lake moorgate. Jack Reddaway worked in his father's yard and laid the paving stones outside Town Living in 1975.

Go into churchyard to find gravestone with Reddaway name on the front or back. There are Reddaway names (a form of advertising) on at least three gravestones:
1. Henry Westaway, 2nd row, 4th from entrance gate
2. John Isaac, 2nd row, 2nd from church
3. William Pike, 1st row, 2nd from entrance gate

Walk up to Watchet and out along the cart track to the Tors End quarry.
This quarry lies at the north end of the Belstone Tor clitter, almost on the edge of the granite/Culm Measures shale boundary and about 250 metres south east of the Nine Maidens stone circle. Here can still be seen a row of eleven holes in the back-wall stone, cut as part of the splitting process. Two of the stones close north east of the quarry have bits of iron embedded in them - these are not remains of 'tares' but maybe are some sort of support fixings for a derrick or winch that swung out over the quarry to help move stones. This quarry was known as "Sand Pit" by William Reddaway whose men brought the granite back to the village on the track around Watchet Hill. The carts would be reversed up against a small wall built so that the quarry base level was the same as the back of the cart; the cut blocks could then be moved from the grassy centre of the quarry (probably using granite rollers) with minimum effort.

Splitting granite; needed skill in looking for the lines of weakness in the grain of the rock - not just a matter of bashing it hard ….
Before 1800 the method was the 'wedge and groove' - grooves of 3" depth at about 3" apart were cut with the end of a pick. Then wooden wedges were inserted, soaked with water and allowed to expand overnight …. In winter the water would freeze, thus aiding the process. At other times someone might have to continually wet the wood to stop it drying out.
Another early way of splitting was setting fire to wooden wedges - ie using heat to split the rock.

Plenty of examples around here of the tare and feather method of splitting. The jumper made the initial holes 3" deep; this was a cast iron rod about four feet long with a big ball of cast iron half way down. The worker would jump this up and down on the chosen spot with a bit of turn of the implant as it hit the granite, and over time a hole would be made. In the 1880s a Cornish worker made a 2.5" hole with 113 jumper 'blows'. Fine dressing would be done by hammer and chisel.
At the Cheesewring on Bodmin Moor four men cut a block 55 cubic feet in 15 minutes, ie equivalent to a 6' x 3' x 3' block (eg a gatepost)
Roughly, one cubic foot of stone weighs a hundredweight.

Good example of granite block split in various directions: just above the Tors End quarry and also on right just after beginning of descent from Watchet

Down to abandoned apple press/half cider press above Resugga (just above the ivy-topped tree)
A good example of a quarter part of a cider press can be seen among the jumble of rocks about 100 metres south-west of Resugga. These artefacts on the open moor were obviously fine dressed here 'on location' rather than being carried to the stone-works for that purpose - probably because the stonemason knew it was easy to remove the finished product
The split holes in the quarter apple press rock above Resugga were not neat round holes but cruder elongated oblong holes. This is indicative that they were made by the wedge and groove splitting process which pre-dated the tare and feather method, ie this rock was worked before about 1800. The same shaped splitting holes were also evident in another rock nearby which has a stunted holly tree within the split. This leads to the theory that the rocks in this area were all worked in the pre 1800 period, ie all split by the old method; this would make sense as this area is closer to Belstone village than the Tors End quarry etc further out onto the moor, and might thus have been worked first.
A suggestion to explain the positioning of the apple press holes - ie on the sloping side of the rock - is that the rock was split by fire not water. Normal wedge and groove has wooden blocks inserted in the holes which are soaked with water; left overnight to freeze they expand and split the granite. But this wouldn't work on the sloping side; this may have been split by setting fire to wooden blocks and using heat to split it.

Across and up to trough on slopes of Belstone Tor (up path almost until level with Watchet summit)

Along to the small 'quarry' above the track to Taw Marsh
One of the quarries where piles of small stones can still be seen lies just above the track to Taw Marsh, about half way between Birchy Lake moorgate and Irishman's Wall.

Holloway Parson rock - crude 'B' carved into it, on the river side, by William Brock?

Down to Reddaway/Brock forge, fireplace, enclosure
Some one hundred metres upstream of the enclosure is another inscribed stone, with the letter "B" standing for William Brock, who worked the granite yard in this enclosure with William James Reddaway in the second half of the 19th century. Also on this stone is a benchmark symbol.

William Reddaway snr also converted the old sheepfold beside the Taw at Holloways Field into a blacksmiths forge and stoneyard. Jumper tools, hammers, chisels and other tools would have been made and stone from the immediate area transported back along the track to the lower Birchy Lake moorgate for fine working in the village. As at "Sand Pit" quarry, there are many examples hereabouts of split and discarded stone. This enclosure has now reverted to a sheepfold where William's great grandson Michael Reddaway still gathers his sheep for dipping, in the ruined shadow of the great fireplace at the heart of the forge.