Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Jo Frances Penn, and today I’m here with Andrew Ziminski. Hi Andy.

Andy: Hello, Jo.

Jo: Yes, absolutely. So just a little introduction. Andrew is a stonemason and church conservator with decades of experience working on some of the greatest cathedrals and churches in Britain. He’s also the author of The Stonemason: A History of Building Britain and Church Going: A Stone Mason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles. I’m a fan and I have the books right here if you are watching the video. I love them. So thank you so much for coming on today, Andy, I want to get straight into it because —

Part of why I love churches and cathedrals is this sense of timelessness, of being small against the backdrop of history.

How does it feel for you when you are working on these ancient buildings, doing this ancient craft?

Andy: Well, in theory, I should be getting bored of it, I mean, I’ve been doing it so long, but anything but. My interest seems to grow with every project that we work on. We pretty much only work on ancient churches, medieval bridges, and the odd castle every now and again.

There’s always something new to discover, be it a particularly local school of carvers or a type of medieval graffiti that I see carved into the piers of a particular church. There are so many regional variations in the British Isles, in terms of architecture and materials and the approach of the people who built these places, that I’m always sniffing them out. And as I understand more, it makes me want to understand even more, if that doesn’t sound too crazy. I think the day I’ll stop nosing around these places will be my last one on the planet.

Jo: Well hopefully not falling off some spire.

Didn’t you work on Salisbury Spire?

Andy: Yeah, I started my training at Salisbury. I went to a local stonemasonry college because our part of England, the Southwest, is renowned for its building stones. There used to be a very excellent stonemasonry college at Weymouth on the coast in Dorset. From there I went up to the top of the tower, not the spire, but the tower, which is the square section that supports the octagonal base of the spire  which is 404 feet tall and the tallest medieval structure in Europe that’s still in its original condition. It’s pretty amazing.

Jo: It is. Salisbury is amazing. And you mentioned ancient churches, so some people listening might be in places where they don’t have such ancient architecture as we have.

What timeframe are you talking about when you say ancient churches?

Andy: The oldest church I’ve worked on is in Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire, again in the Southwest. That was built around the year 1000, and anything from then onwards really.

I tend to switch off with Victorian churches because I’m not really that interested in them. Victorian churches in the UK are generally Victorian interpretations of earlier medieval forms, and I think I might as well just study the medieval form and not the Victorian fakes. Even though their craftwork is excellent. Very often in the churches that we work on, we’re very close to the city of Bath, as you know, it is absolutely groaning with Roman ruins.

It’s not unusual to see Roman material that the Anglo-Saxons reused in their walls or as part of their altars. I’ve done lots of work in the Roman baths in Bath, so I’d say the earliest structure I’ve worked on is the West Kennet Long Barrow, which was built about 3000 BC and has its own postcode. So I’ve worked on a building that’s 5000 years old, and that was quite incredible.

Jo: It is incredible. And just again, coming back to this ancient craft, because the stonemasonry is also ancient. Obviously the people who built these things were stonemasons.

How did you decide to get into this, because most people don’t go into stonemasonry?

It’s not a growing profession. It’s so fascinating that you chose this direction.

Andy: Well, a number of factors came into play. My father came here as a refugee during the war. The only options for him as a job were going down the coal mine or working as a stonemason in a granite quarry. We used to go to Scotland and I liked the permanency of the things he made. He was Polish and he’d say, “Son, this will last for a million years,” and they probably will, because they’re built of granite.

So I quite liked the permanency of that from a young age. And I’ve always had a deep interest in history. I thought, how can I draw together the worlds of craft and history? Going down the path I knew a little about from my father seemed like a good way. And 35 – 40 years on, I haven’t looked back.

Jo: I do find it fascinating. I went and did a weekend of stone carving and so I did actually use some of the tools and boy, my body hurt!

What about the physicality of what you do? This is hard material. Is it very physical or is a lot of what you do now with chemicals or how does the job work?

Andy: I’m a conservator first and foremost, and what that means is that my aim is to keep as much of the original as possible. It’s like dentistry, I guess. If there’s a cavity, and the stone around the cavity or the rot is okay, I will fill it using a lime mortar, which is a very ancient technique that the Romans used.

You can’t lift a quarter-of-a-ton-sized piece of stone, you’ve got to use kit. Many people are surprised when I’m on site and my colleagues, half of them are women. Very often I find that women make better stonemasons than some of my more gung-ho male colleagues who just want to bust their backs and destroy their bodies by lifting things they shouldn’t lift.

The tools that we use are unchanged since Roman times or even ancient Egyptian times. The head of my dummy is made of nylon, but the ancient Egyptians used mallets made of palm trees turned on a lathe. So, the materials might be different, but the tools, the form of the tools, the approach, and the mindset are exactly the same.

The way I would approach cutting a block of stone is not in any way different to someone who was cutting a limestone block for the Great Pyramid, or in the Roman Baths in Bath, or in the Colosseum, or at Notre Dame. This is a sort of brilliant handing on of the baton over the generations that goes unnoticed, and I like that about craft skills.

Jo: Are young people coming into it? Is there another generation? Because I feel like that kind of craftsmanship –

Are we losing this kind of craftsmanship or is it still here?

Andy: No, there’s stonemasons in every hedge round here because it’s a stony area. The local stonemasonry college in Bath is really good. There’s no shortage of youngsters coming through at all.

It’s different in other parts of the country where there isn’t such a strong tradition. But certainly around here in Southwest Britain, Southern Britain, and in London, there are lots of stonemasons. But there are other crafts that are suffering from a demise in interest, mainly because people don’t know that these jobs exist, and I think that’s a big problem.

I spent all last week at the Chalke Valley History Festival, educating young people th