Magnesian Limestone

Our first day in England we visited Hilton Castle in Sunderland and received a private tour, as my wife and brother in law are direct descendants of the Baron Hilton who built the castle.  Our tour guides were the former mayor of Sunderland and her husband.  Having an interest in construction I was curious about the stonework, in particular the type of stone that had been used to build the castle.  It was yellowish and mottled, almost as if with fossil impressions, which it was not.  The mortar joints were relatively large and some blocks had what appeared to be chisel marks on them.  Later I found out that this stone is called Magnesian limestone and occurs in a band from the area on the mouth of the river Wear to Nottingham in north-central England.  It is used in thousands of buildings in the area, including the oldest like Saint Peter’s church built in the Anglo Saxon period and the most complex like Durham cathedral built in the Norman period.

Not only was it the major component in many buildings, the coastline between the two rivers, the Tyne and the Wear, is made of it in cliffs about 50 feet high.  At the water’s edge are concretions called cannoball limestone and algae covered rocks also made of the same stone.

Durham

This is a view looking down from the main tower at Durham Cathedral.  The bend in the river Wear is visible beyond.

We drove to Durham from Sunderland in a rented car guided by GPS which drove us into the heart of the pedestrian city.  Fortunately it was early in the day and we managed to find a safe place to leave the car.  We walked through the plaza, which was full of vendors selling things to tourists and then we walked up the hill to the cathedral.  We toured the cathedral and afterwards walked to a pub called Ye Olde Elm and had a pint.

There is so much history on the grounds and buildings of this cathedral that I cannot begin to do it justice.  The principal story is of the founding of the monastery at Durham in 875 AD by monks fleeing repeated Viking attacks on their original location on the Island of Lindisfarne.  The legend is that they found the site of the cathedral on a peninsula in the Wear river after following a maroon cow and being unable to move the bones of their patron Saint Cuthbert once they had arrived.

Roker Pier and Lighthouse

My wife, her brother and our daughter recently traveled to Sunderland England to see my wife's family's ancestral castle in Sunderland England.  I would like to write a few blog posts about what we saw.

We stayed at the Roker Hotel overlooking the North Sea and the Roker Pier and Light house.  The Pier is a curving ribbon of granite ending in a two-toned granite lighthouse.  It is an amazing feat of engineering and took 18 years to build.   It stands against the ferocious winter storms protecting the mouth of the Wear river  which, at the time it was built, was the sight of great industries, coal shipments and shipbuilding.  It was started in 1885 when England was at the height of its imperial power and finished in 1903.  There is an opposing curved pier on the south side which was built after World War I.  The opposing pier is not as well done, a shabby sister to this one, perhaps symbolizing the ridiculous bloodletting of the war that undid Britain.