Barbados
Coral Stone By Sally Miller
Our coral stone is a durable, versatile and very beautiful building material with a wonderful history. It is quintessential Barbados – the coral island of the Caribbean.
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oughly 35 million years ago, the huge tectonic plate below the Atlantic Ocean cracked and started to slide under the newly created Caribbean plate. For the next 34 million years ocean sediments were crumpled together and raised up at about 30cm every 1,000 years. As they got close enough to the surface of the ocean and sunlight, coral reefs started to grow. As a result, the island of Barbados rose slowly up out of the sea – a geologically fascinating island comprised of sedimentary rocks from the sea floor of the Atlantic and almost completely covered in a 10-100m thick cap of fossilized coral limestone. From the time of settlement in 1627, coral limestone blocks were quarried by hand to build just about
Coral stone blocks at Chapel Quarry in St. Philip Photo: Andrew Hulsmeier
everything – stately plantation mansions, splendid churches, over 500 windmills, foundations for wooden chattel houses, guard walls and even stables. The gravel was used to build roads, the marl to fill foundations and the finer dust to make plaster and white lime. Most plantations had their own quarries, making them selfsufficient in their main building material. Today, there is only one coral stone quarry that produces blocks in the entire Caribbean. Chapel Quarry, which is owned and run by the Manning family, produces varying sizes of blocks along with a by-product of coral stone dust. Moving from the days of quarrying blocks by hand, as recently as the 1960’s, to mechanization, was not a simple process. Although the coral stone is considered
Beautiful coral stone work at Cane Heaven showing the pillars, archway and hand carved dining table base Photo: Mike Toy/Reproduced from the book, Architecture and Design in Barbados
148 Interiors