Building Stones Can Be of Geoheritage Significance

Abstract

Geoheritage, to date, has focused on local natural outcrops, road cuts, or quarries that illustrate significant features of geology such as rock types, minerals, aspects of palaeontology such as fossils, stratigraphic sequences, and the variety of landscapes that reflect the responses of rocks to weathering and erosion in different climatic and tectonic settings. Building stones (decorative stone and dimension stone) have been recognised as heritage features: culturally, historically, archaeologically, architecturally, and aesthetically. In this paper, the significance of building stones is extended into the realm of geoheritage. They can be of geoheritage significance in that they often contain features important to the Geological Sciences intrinsically, and for education and research and in raising the consciousness of the public, or they may be rare, or of historical and/or cultural value. This paper highlights the geoheritage significance of building stones using a variety of examples and case studies, covering aspects such as following: the idea of in situ versus ex situ rocks; polished/clean rock faces as building stones versus natural outcrops; the geoarchive of building stones showing structures, fabrics, textures, minerals, and fossils; and extensive ‘sampling’ from quarries providing a larger resource of geological information; building stones, especially when cut and polished and even more so where there are multiple surfaces, provide a resource for education, for geotours, and for research and can highlight the diversity of global geology or of local geology to the layman that, if properly presented, can raise the consciousness of the public in matters of Geology, and for the future—how to protect building stone geoheritage.