The Museum of Bath Stone (the story of Combe Down and its stone)

Contrary to opinion, I don’t spend all my time chained to a computer, and I am trying to write shorter blogs.  This is a small, interesting Museum about one of my niche subjects where I was kindly taken on Saturday 16.8.25, by Roger Gosling, of South Gloucestershire Mines Research Group. It has informative displays and a good collection of artefacts.  The volunteers were all very welcoming and knowledgeable. There is a well-produced video of the stabilisation of the stone mine carried out to prevent collapses, costing over £150 million. Some houses only had three or four feet of rock directly under them due to the quantity of Bath stone extracted. The bats, protected, can fly about in there, the closed quarry that is, happily undisturbed.

There is more a lot more information on the excellent website at https://www.museumofbathstone.org/

Jenn, one of the volunteers, and I spoke about the difficulty of finding information about quarrymen’s wives. Or any poor men’s wives. Working class men turn up, usually to do with accidents or petty crime, but women are largely invisible. If women have an occupation on the census, it is usually “wife”. OK, you may find the odd “laundress” which is posh for “taking in washing”, pre-modern appliances, but occasionally something a bit more interesting turns up. My grandmother’s grandmother Elizabeth Cook, who was married to Hugh Brain, a Hanham quarryman, was “a maker of artificial flowers to sell”. From a more distant ancestral family, the Pillingers who lived at “Box Quarries” – yes that is the actual address – Job Pillinger, son of Job, son of George, were all stonemasons. I know little about their wives except their names.