Waving the flag 

Caithness flagstone has been used for paving all over the world. But the stone is ideal for so much more and substantial investment in the latest machinery by Caithness Stone Industries means it is available to meet the growing demand for it.

If you fly into Wick airport you immediately know you are in Caithness country because there in the airport lounge is a Caithness stone sculpture on which are proudly listed some of the projects for which Caithness Stone Industries have supplied the stone.

And an impressive list it is, too. From the 9-11 garden in Hanover Square, New York, commemorating the British casualties of the terrorist attack in 2001 to the Guild Hall in London, with plenty of major Scottish and Irish projects in between – such as the Scottish Parliamentary buildings in Edinburgh where Caithness stone has been used for paving.

Caithness flagstone has traditionally been used as a paving material and lends itself to that. But it can be – and is – used for so much more. A house built almost exclusively (apart from timber) in the stone by Caithness Stone Industries (CSI) ably demonstrates that.

The house is pictured on the right. The stone has been used for the walls and roofs, quoins, cills, lintels and steps. It forms the hard landscaping in the garden and the interiors also feature it, as flooring (with economical underfloor heating and in conjunction with wood and carpet), worktops, wall linings and shower trays. It has been incorporated into furniture as table tops, shelves, and even the head and foot boards of a bed.

The house is called Devonion House because the stone is from the Devonian geological period of 417-354million years ago.

John Sutherland, an entrepreneur who set up and runs CSI along with six other companies he has established in other industries, says the Caithness stone show house built in 2002 has proved an exceptional success in developing the use of the stone. “It’s really worked for us. It shows what can be done in Caithness stone,” he told NSS.

Some of that range of Caithness stone products can be seen at the visitor centre at the site of the Battle of Culloden in Scotland, where the Hanovarians beat the Jacobites in 1746. The walls of the building are Caithness stone inside and out. The stone has also been used for floors and seats, and the clan markers and a map of the area have been sand blasted into a slab of the stone.

Also a possibility for this Scottish stone is a new monument for John O’Groats. To celebrate the Olympics being held in the UK in 2012, money has been made available to erect something to commemorate the event in different parts of the UK. In Scotland a competition is being held to design a commemoration sculpture for the occasion and CSI’s designers have submitted plans for a monument using their stone. If they win, they will be given £500,000 to build it.

CSI operate from Spittal Mains Quarry, where 800 people would have worked in its heyday from 1850 to 1920 when Caithness stone was being exported to Europe and all corners of the British empire. A legacy of that continues to be a relatively high level of exports, although these days extraction and processing of the stone is achieved by 30 people using sophisticated machinery.

Orders currently being supplied include stone for a church in Australia. CSI also recently supplied stone for restoration work to two churches in Paris and they frequently supply G-bag in Switzerland. As John Sutherland says, the cost of transport is not significant for a premium product.

Spittal Mains Quarry is just about worked out now, but it is where the stone is brought to be processed. And following extensive investment in the latest machinery last year, these are some of the best equipped stone workshops in the UK, with their Monlevi CNC workcentre, Kolb and Accurite saws, Denver polishers, Flow waterjet cutter and Vytec L-Star laser etcher that was used to etch the pictures of the company’s operations on a plaque of their stone at the entrance to their showroom. It is usually used to etch illustrations on the imported granite and Caithness stone memorials and name plates that CSI make.

The Caithness stone processed by CSI comes from various quarries in the area, the main one being Achscrabster. It is a 25-acre site, but to reach 2m of Caithness stone, 30m of stone overburden have to be removed.

The overburden removed to reveal the current beds of flag being worked has been crushed into 2million tonnes of aggregate that are sitting in the quarry waiting for some major projects to get under way. As aggregate it has the advantage (after some debate with HM Revenue & Customs) of being free of aggregate tax, as it is considered to have been produced from waste.

Because the yield of flagstone is relatively small, CSI are constantly on the look-out for new quarry sites, although one advantage of being in the far north of Scotland is that there are not usually any difficulty getting planning permission.

Which is just as well, because CSI’s sales have shown a continual upward trend, with demand continuing to increase even since the start of the recession. Ironically, one of the banks being blamed for the credit crunch that led to the recession has helped maintain that growth because 2,000m² of 65mm thick, calibrated Caithness stone paving was specified for the roof garden of new £560million offices of the Royal Bank of Scotland in the USA. The calibration of the stone was carried out on an Accurite own-brand bridge saw bought for the purpose as part of last year’s investment.

John Sutherland’s interests range from a restaurant and night club to commercial laundry and farming. His latest project is the development of a meat processing factory – he trained as a butcher after leaving school and already has an abattoir.

His move into quarrying came about as a result of a game of dominoes in a pub one Sunday.

As the younger son of a Caithness farmer whose brother was going to inherit the farm, John moved to Australia in the 1970s. He returned to his homeland for a holiday in the 1980s and, liking the changes that were taking place in Britain, remained here and went into property development.

While playing dominoes in a pub he met a man who wanted to sell a quarry. John and his business partner, Patrick, decided that between them they could extract and sell the stone and paid £1,500 each for the quarry. That was in 1989.

One of their first sales was of 15,000m² of paving for the riverside refurbishment in Belfast. They submitted a sample panel. So did 40 other quarries from around the world. “In their good judgement they selected ours,” says John. It was the first of many orders that have resulted in more than 150,000m² of the stone going to the city, the latest being 9,000m2 for Queens Street last year.

London has also received a fair amount of the stone for work such as a water feature at Nelson’s column and paving at Kensington palace.