A HIGHLY-POLISHED ACT: Achnaba Stone®is putting Argyll on the map
The unique grey-green stone from Scotland is becoming a favourite with designers - as seen at Wimbledon and the Natural History Museum
Achnaba Stone® from Argyll has been used to enhance the glamour of Wimbledon and the gravitas of the Natural History Museum in London. It is a green schist, a grey-green coarse grained stone quarried near Lochgilphead but a dry, factual description fails to convey the unique beauty of the stone which can be used for everything from driveways to tiles and fireplaces.
The quarry is owned by MacLeod Construction Ltd, a major construction company in the west of Scotland, famed for its pioneering work with timber framed homes.
CED Stone Group in London used the full beauty of the Achnaba Stone® when tasked with finding a suitable material for Wimbledon to use in a redesign and refurbishment of a public area near to Number One court.
This is a very busy part of the famous club site, a meeting point for people coming to and from the different courts and there is a bar area nearby.
What impressed the Wimbledon members was the way the green complemented its famous purple and green club colours.
‘CED told us there is no green stone similar to it in the UK,’ said Greig MacLeod, business manager of MacLeods.
The firm started quarrying in the early 1990s for aggregate and building stone, for drives and drainage, and as a filling material; this type of stone has been used for years as a walling stone as can be seen in Inveraray Castle.
Now the Achnaba Stone® is used as a dimension stone, where it is cut and prepared using modern processing equipment.
Tradstocks in Stirling cut and prepare the stone and it is through this company that CED sourced the stone.
For Wimbledon, a considerable amount of Achnaba Stone® was used; MacLeod’s quarry team selected the parts of the raw seam to be extracted and these were cut to size and prepared by Tradstock.
Wimbledon also commissioned a huge slab to be carved with the club crest and this sits in pride of place in the centre of the development.
Greig MacLeod said: ‘Achnaba Stone® takes a wonderful polish, it really comes to life.’
This quality makes it a stone to use in many areas of the home not just for landscaping and driveways.
‘Because it polishes so beautifully, it makes a superb slab, for floor tiles; we have seen it used for a tabletop and it looks excellent in fireplaces and hearths.
We are seeing a lot of inferior foreign stone being imported into the UK market from China and elsewhere at the present and it just does not compare to the quality of Achnaba Stone®. This truly is a quality local product.’
The interest now being shown by the design world in Achnaba Stone® will, McLeods hope, be translated into extra jobs at the quarry; they are already looking at better extraction methods to quarry the seams of the beautiful grey-green stone.
‘It is early stages yet, the market has just been tested but what we are seeing and hearing is very exciting,’ said Greig MacLeod. The feedback from CED Stone Group and Tradstocks is excellent.
The stone can also be seen at the Natural History Museum in London where part of the access ramp in front of the building was upgraded using Achnaba Stone® as perimeter slabs.
Once again they chose the stone through CED for its unique colour which complements the materials used in the facade of the world-famous museum.
To meet the growing demand and interest in this unique stone, random building stone and aggregate will be sold, as it always has been, through the MacLeods quarry and the supply of stone for dimension stone production will be exclusive to Tradstocks with sales of paving, flags or setts through CED Ltd.
‘IT TAKES A WONDERFUL POLISH’
‘THERE IS NO GREEN STONE SIMILAR TO IT IN THE UK’