Mandale Carboniferous limestone, with its 365million-year-old fossils of sharks teeth, crinoids, brachiopods and corals, is one of the UK’s distinctive regional stones. NSS visited the company that produces it from high in the Peak District National Park.

The UK does not produce a lot of stone but the stones it does produce are among the most attractive in the world. One of them is Mandale Fossil.

The shallow, tropical sea in which the beds of Mandale Fossil Carboniferous limestone originally formed 365million years ago must have been teeming with life, judging by the remnants of it preserved as fossils in the distinctive stone from the Peak District National Park today.

These days, what was once the seabed is high in the Derbyshire hills, although the quarry from which the stone is won is, like many dimensional stone quarries in the UK, little more than a scratch in the landscape, practically invisible from whichever direction it is approached until you are almost upon it.

The stone is distinctive and rare. It is never going to appeal to those who cannot see beyond the Star Galaxy that all their friends have. But for those with a more developed aesthetic and, it has to be said, deeper pockets, Mandale Fossil is in increasing demand.

It is now not only available from Natural Stone Sales, the company in Derbyshire that processes it, but also from London wholesaler the Marble & Granite Centre, where large quantities of polished random slabs in 20 and 30mm thicknesses are available from stock (you can see them at www.themarbleandgranitecentre.co.uk). The slabs are also stocked by McMarmilloyd, the stone wholesaler in Marlborough, Wiltshire, that has made a speciality of sourcing exclusive building stones from all around the world.

Natural Stone Sales was established in 1997 by Richard Bean as a sales agency for gritstone paving. As the reputation of the company grew, it started to receive enquiries for other stone products and from the autumn of 2000 it began to expand and develop the sales of other stones.

As the company grew, Natural Stone Sales needed to invest in more equipment and these days operates from two sites equipped with a BM 40 frame saw, GMM Brio and Tecna secondary saws, a Prussiani Golden Plus CNC workcentre, Thibaut T108 polisher, and an LCH 711 edge polisher, as well as having a Haith cropper in the quarry producing building stone for house building, and dry stone walling and copings for field walls. Dimensional blocks are extracted when the quality of the stone allows.

The Once-A-Week Quarry was added to Natural Stone Sales’ business in 2001, when the previous operator decided to move to France. Richard Bean liked the idea of controlling his own supply of an exclusive product, even if operation of the quarry is restricted because it is in the National Park.

The quarry is leased from the Chatsworth Estate, which remains a good customer for the Mandale Fossil as well as other stones processed by Natural Stone Sales.

Like just about all dimensional stone quarries, there is quite a lot of stone that cannot be removed as large blocks and the walling for local farmers helps to use some of what would otherwise be waste.

The best of the stone, from which polished slabs of up to 3m x 1800mm are produced, is sent to Italy to be sawn and polished – because, in spite of the equipment that Natural Stone Sales operates, the Italians are much better equipped to polish slabs of that size. Natural Stone Sales processes smaller blocks and the slabs of imported granite, marble and (increasingly) engineered quartz that it supplies.

In spite of the restrictions on production, Richard Bean believes there is potential to expand the market for Mandale Fossil and is now also using it to make a range of tiles and fireplaces at the upper end of the market. Mandale tiles will definitely not be in the Turkish travertine price bracket and if you want to know how much you will have to pay for a Natural Stone Sales’ fireplace you have to ask because each one is unique. Many of them are inlaid with semi-precious Blue John stone from the caverns in Castleton to make a truly distinctive Derbyshire product.

The company is now concentrating on expanding sales of its Mandale Fossil and as well as having slabs of it on display at the Marble & Granite Centre and at McMarmilloyd, has installed bar tops of it in the local Barringtons’ Whitworth Park Hotel. It can also be seen as table tops in the Shallimar Indian restaurant.

Both these establishments have allowed Natural Stone Sales to display an A5 picture frame containing information about the Mandale Fossil stone, and the latest development this year has been to add QR codes that can be scanned by patrons on their mobiles and tablets (see the box below).

The QR codes can now be seen wherever Natural Stone Sales promotes itself, which includes its advertisements in local publications such as Derbyshire Life and Country Images.

Richard believes having the stone displayed locally has paid off. “I was in the Shallimar last night and in the time I was there two separate groups of people came in and were talking about the table tops, trying to identify the fossils in them.”

Although the Mandale Fossil is hard and takes a high polish, it is not as hard as granite and while it has been used successfully for kitchen worktops (suitably protected by appropriate Dry Treat products that The Marble & Granite Centre supplies), it also lends itself to vanity tops and shower enclosures in bathrooms, which is an area being targeted.

The aim now is to get the Mandale displayed in retail outlets – an early success has been at Kitchen World in Mansfield, across the M1 in Nottinghamshire.

The growing emphasis on reaching the consumer reflects a change in the workload of Natural Stone Sales. Historically, 90% of its work has come from contract work, but with fewer houses and commercial properties being built there has been a big swing towards working directly for the householder in the home improvement market, which now accounts for 60% of the company’s turnover.