The hard landscaping market likes flame textured Blue Pennant paving but Forest of Dean Stone Firms had none to offer. Now it has.

Nick Horton, the Managing Director of Forest of Dean Stone Firms, knew he was missing out on sales by not having flame textured Blue Pennant paving on offer. But his attempts at flaming his Forest Pennant sandstone had simply caused it to blow apart.

He knew the stone became harder the further down he went into the Bixhead Quarry that his Forrest Pennant comes from and he wondered if the stone further down still would be hard enough to flame.

There was a (relatively) easy way to find out because the stone at Bixhead was once mined and a mine opening still existed at the quarry, albeit largely blocked off.

“A light went on in my head,” says Nick. “I thought I had to go down and have a look.”

He obtained permission last year to open up the portal and started to clear away the undergrowth and remove the debris from the mouth of the mine. “We took a block off the edge of the portal and it flamed like a dream, so I told my guys to start digging in the quarry.”

He was encouraged by an article he found in the Gloucestershire Society for Industrial Archaeological Journal of 2007. It was an interview with Jakob Schwarz, who had worked underground at the quarry in the early 1950s. Mr Schwarz recalled how he and his colleagues had been instructed to undermine the quarry face to get at the ‘big stuff’.

The mine opening at Bixhead is higher up than the floor of the quarry, but over the portal is a bed of murl, which does not appear in the quarry, so there is presumably a fault between the old mine and the current quarry area, even though the mine opening is only 50m away at its closest. Nick believed the beds he was looking for would be found lower down in the quarry and has gone down another 20m.

“Having dug for king and country we now have six beds of this stone and from the evidence in the mine we would expect to find another 10 because there’s about 30m of this blue stone in the mine,” he says.

With no shortage of the stone, the company has bought a Pelligrini flame texturing machine to create the flamed Blue Pennant paving so clearly in demand.

As in earlier days, Forest of Dean Stone Firms is expecting to mine the stone eventually, although there will be enough of it in the existing quarry to last for the next three years at least.

The company will then start to go underground by entering the walls of the quarry about 30m below the surface.

Opening a new mine rather than trying to use the existing one is safer and will comply with today’s standards more easily. It also avoids issues with the bats that now live in the original mine.

Winning the stone from the Bixhead Quarry has always involved the removal of about 20m of hard overburden rock before reaching the Pennant. There are then the upper, middle and lower beds of Pennant to go through before reaching the hard Blue Pennant beds, so mining is expected to be the most economical method of extraction of the blue stone from new areas where the overburden has not already been removed.

Because mined stone will be sawn out using a Fantini saw, waste will be reduced and it is predicted that recovery rates will be as much as 75%, which is high compared with opencasting.

That will only help Forest of Dean Stone Firms’ already impressive record for environmentally friendly working that includes its own carbon-free hydroelectricity generating plant, opened in 2011.

It has also introduced soft-start to its saws and has assessed its carbon footprint while working towards the British Standard PAS 2050 in conjunction with consultants David Dowdell and Clive Onions, both formerly with Ove Arups.

Then the information gathered and collated had to be verified, which was carried out by CICS, part of CERAM.

FoD Stone Firms had hoped to use the information towards a BREEAM rating for its stone but the BRE, which awards BREEAM ratings, would not accept the company’s Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs), so would not award a BREEAM rating.

Nick is not happy about that and says there are too many different standards and methods that make it difficult to compare one company with another or one product with another. Yet green issues are still important, especially in the London market.

The CE Mark might make comparisons clearer and Forest of Dean Stone Firms has had all the tests carried out in order to obtain CE Marking, although Nick says customers do not mention it in spite of it having been a legal requirement on many building materials since July 2013. Customers simply expect suppliers to have complied with whatever laws exist about the supply of their products.

“I find it easier to say this is what we have and this is what we do than try to explain CE marking,” says Nick.

He would like to have been able to offer flame textured Blue Pennant throughout 2013 and feels he is now 12months or so behind the curve. But he expects to catch up by being able to offer an economically viable source of the paving for large commercial packages.

The move is part of a more general attempt by Forest of Dean Stone Firms to expand geographically. The firm’s growth in the past few years has come largely from South Wales and the South West of England. But the company has permission to extract 25,000tonnes of stone a year and is currently selling 10,000tonnes. In order to expand it wants to be accepted in a wider area.

Last year it appointed John Quinn (ex Marshalls and BBS) to increase its presence in the South East and London. It has also started looking overseas by exhibiting for the past two years at the Marmomacc stone exhibition in Verona, Italy, with Nick expressing the intention of becoming the Pietra Serena of the UK. “Other parts of the World use quite a lot of blue paving,” he says.

He mentions Pietra Sienna because that is what Apple stores had used for flooring until the company switched to Forest of Dean’s Mixed Pennant for the Covent Garden store. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, liked it so much he also wanted it in the new store in Prince’s Street in Edinburgh. Nick hopes to supply more Apple stores.

“The Apple store was the beginning,” says Nick. “I had to think about redirecting business away from a predominantly local demand. The introduction of a blue flamed product is part of the natural progression towards that.”

The move into the South East and London seems to have been more successful than the move into the international market so far. Nick says his company already has 10 major schemes to supply in the UK and is fighting for more, although it is not easy to move people away from Yorkstone.

“Everyone’s mindset is on Yorkstone. It’s like trying to get people to change bank accounts. And we are the new kids on the block. But we’re finding people are opening up to the suggestion.

“And we are not just offering Blue Pennant – we do a mix as well. I’m now confident we have a viable and commercial supply of Mixed and Blue Pennant.”

For more about Forest of Dean Stone Firms, you can watch a video it has posted at bit.ly/FoD-Pennant.