INDUSTRIES 



The lowest geological formation exposed at 

 the surface in Northamptonshire is the Lower 

 Lias, but no building stones are obtained from it 

 within the county. 



The Marlstone Rock-bed of the Middle 

 Lias — Red Stone. — The geological maps accom- 

 panying the article ' Geology ' in Vol. I of this 

 history will show the area covered by the upper 

 part of the Middle Lias of Northamptonshire, 

 and the uppermost and chief bed of this forma- 

 tion, commonly called the rock-bed, has been 

 largely used for building purposes. The stone 

 is nowhere very thick in Northamptonshire, but 

 varies very much in character ; it may be an 

 earthy limestone, a calcareous sandstone, or an 

 ironstone. It gets very thin and useless for any 

 purpose towards Market Harborough. 



Houses and churches built of the Marlstone 

 rock-bed are always essentially red or dark brown, 

 for the sufficient reasons that superficial Marl- 

 stone quarries, where there is little or no capping 

 of impervious Upper Lias clay, yield a red rock 

 chiefly, and red rock works more easily and is 

 more certain to stand the weather than the un- 

 weathered bluish or greenish rock ; that is to 

 say it is better that all possible chemical changes 

 should have occurred in the rock before it be- 

 comes part of a building. Still, in squaring up 

 blocks of stone the blue interior is often neces- 

 sarily exposed, and stone still blue or green may 

 be found forming parts of quite old buildings, 

 which shows how slow is the process of oxida- 

 tion in some cases. 



The Marlstone rock-bed is never a freestone, 

 and is preferably or necessarily placed in a build- 

 ing as it exists in its natural bed. It has been 

 used for gravestones, doorsteps, and the floors of 

 houses. For the latter two purposes the blue 

 stone is the better, as it suffers less by friction 

 than the softer red stone, and in use becomes 

 very smooth though somewhat uneven. Thin 

 flaggy beds in the Marlstone at Chalcombe, near 

 Banbury, have been used as stone-tiles. 



At a little distance away it is often im- 

 possible to tell a Marlstone from a Northampton 

 Sand building, though in a Marlstone area there 

 is of course much probability that it will be the 

 former. A close inspection is generally sufficient 

 to decide the point, for the Marlstone is nearly 

 always fossiliferous (belemnites being abundant) 

 and the Northampton Sand seldom so. With 

 both of these stones, in the better class of buildings 

 as a rule, all the angular parts, such as corners, 

 door and window recesses, etc., are formed of 

 freestone, either white oolitic or red sandstone. 



Marlstone quarries have been very numerous, 

 but it is doubtful if there is a single one now 

 in work for any purpose in Northamptonshire. 



Other hard beds of the upper portion of 

 Middle Lias have occasionally been used for 

 building purposes, seldom houses, however, and 

 rarely with satisfactory results ; the rocks are 

 generally too shaly or too soft to last well. 



Ironstone Beds of the Northampton 

 Sand — Red Stone. — The lower ferruginous beds 

 of the Northampton Sand have been used 

 for building — that is to say, the beds which 

 are not sand, but are or were oolitic iron ore. 

 This particular stone is rarely used now for 

 building, although an examination of a few old 

 buildings leads one to suppose it was the most 

 commonly used stone in earlier times. It is an 

 ironstone, irregular in constitution and colour, 

 and no doubt difficult to work, but very durable 

 owing to the large percentage of dark brown 

 hematite it contains. 



Before the Tudor Period Northampton would 

 seem to have been largely built of stone, and again 

 after the great fire in 1675 stone was chiefly used 

 till bricks mostly displaced this material, and it 

 is of interest to know where were the quarries 

 which supplied it. The writer can get no 

 definite information on the point, but neverthe- 

 less thinks that they can be located with a high 

 degree of probability. On the area now occupied 

 by Hazelwood Road and the houses and gardens 

 on each side of the street, there used to be a 

 large field known as Manning's Close ; it was 

 fairly level, that level being the level of Water- 

 loo, and so looked at from the iron railings pro- 

 tecting it in St. Giles Street, there was a deep 

 drop, and the large amount of excavated material 

 must have been Northampton Sand. There used 

 to be a similar depressed field on the site now 

 occupied by Messrs. Cooper's (late Manfield's) 

 factory on Campbell Square. Many people now 

 living well remember both of these artificial de- 

 pressions, but no one remembers anything being 

 got from them. Mr. Wm. Hull remembers 

 that there was another large excavation, or 

 partly filled-up one, which gave some trouble to 

 his father (also Wm. Hull) when he was building 

 the county jail on the Mounts, and that he him- 

 self encountered troublesome made-up ground 

 when building the British Schools close by. 

 Where Langham Place now stands was, in the 

 memory of many people, a mass of broken ground 

 known as Stone-pit Close, and the recently 

 filled-up hollow on the Race Course, at the back 

 of Louise Road, formerly fenced off and known 

 as the ' Spencer Plate Grounds,' was most likely 

 another excavation for stone. The ' Hills and 

 Hollows,' an area of broken-up ground about a 

 mile from the Race Course along the Kettering 

 Road, now occupied by the Golf Club, was un- 

 doubtedly made by the excavation of North- 

 ampton Sand for some purpose. 



Although it is extremely probable that all the 

 excavations above referred to were made for the 

 purpose of getting Northampton Sand building 

 stone, it does not follow that only the lower 

 ironstone beds we are here considering were got 

 or used, indeed it is certain that some of those 

 to be described later were also employed for the 

 buildings of Northampton. 



To a certain extent, though not so accurately 



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