KS2 / KS3 PSHE: A career as a stonemason

I didn't know what I wanted to do at school. I was quite good at maths, and you need a certain amount of geometry skills to be a stonemason, understanding numbers. And it was in my last year at school, I did work experience as a stonemason. I did a whole week as a stonemason, then they offered me a job at the end of it, saying that I might have had some sort of natural skill. So I finished school, finished my GCSEs, knuckled down with them, and then came up, and I've worked ever since.

We're sat in the quarry of Ham Hill. These bits here have been pulled out of the floor. So what you can see there is millions and millions and millions of years of history. A stonemason carves stone straight out from the floor into ornamental shapes, nice flowery patterns to go into buildings, really. When you're doing any sort of trade, measurements are key, and you're always taught to check, check, check again before you work it, because once it's worked, it's sort of too late.

Today, I'll be carving a base stone, which a bronze lion's going to be standing on. Over here are the old pieces of plinth. It's about 150 years old, and there were a couple of cracks in it and bits fallen off, so we're just carving a new one to restore the house. I'm drawing on a line that I'm going to cut to. It only has to be rough. They think that the stone we're replacing is 150 years old. We're hoping that this one will last the same, if not longer.

My next job is to do some letter cutting. I've got to carve "Orchard End" on this stone here. We get stone out of the quarry. The large saw tends to cut two sides of the stone, and then they can pass it on to the smaller saws, which will then cut it into a six-sided block, depending on the shape and size of what we need to carve it into. It'll then come to the stonemason to be finished. I've just spun the stone to get rid of any whip marks left from the saw when they cut it, and I've just washed it off to get rid of the dust.

I'm quite laid back, which helps, being a stonemason, to be laid back and relaxed about things. When I did work experience, I didn't really appreciate the patience and the workload in it, but it didn't take long before I did. Yeah, just be patient with it, and it will all come into its own in time. My brother was always a lot better than me at everything we did, so that always kind of put me off, but I found something that I was quite good at.

Once you've finished cutting all the letters, you can just rub the surface of your stone with a diamond-encrusted hand rubbing pad. And that'll just take any more sort of whips out of the surface that you don't want, and then that's the job done. There's always something for everybody. You've got to be able to put in a bit of effort to find it, it won't always find you. And when you do find it, you've got to really go for it and don't let the opportunity go. Everyone gets opportunities in life, but it's just whether they take them or not.