Cotswold Gold Block Limestone, Oathill Quarry Gloucestershire
Oathill Quarry is a leading supplier of Cotswold Gold Block Limestone: a distinctive, dark golden colour stone with a medium grain texture.
Cotswold Gold Block has a distinctive, slightly darker golden or honey colour and a medium grain that’s typical of Cotswold towns and villages.
The block sizes are unusually large for a Cotswold quarry with a block height up to two metres and individual sizes up to 14 tonnes, which means it is useful for a wide variety of walling, building and masonry requirements.
At present, the quarry produces around 6,000 tonnes of Cotswold Gold Block each year.
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Petrographic Description and Mineral Examination:
Oathill Gold Limestone has a distinctive slightly darker golden or honey colour and consists primarily of ooliths with numerous elongated fossil fragments, with a medium grain and typical of most Cotswold towns and villages. The fossil fragments included bivalves, bryozoan and gastropods and usually show a cortex of micrite. Lithoclasts are observed as an infrequent constituent, with these consisting primarily of ooliths and fossil fragments within a micritic cement.
In thin section the stone was dominantly oolitic, with these often being concentric around a seed, mainly micritic and typically no larger in diameter than approximately 0.8 mm. There is generally a moderate level of compaction shown by the ooliths. Many contained iron-rich mineral grains within their fabric which imparted an orange-brown colour to their immediate surroundings. A carbonate cement was present throughout the stone, with this generally being a coarse sparite which contained very finely disseminated iron-rich mineral grains. Due to oxidation, orange-coloured iron oxides/hydroxides had dispersed along crystal boundaries, giving the cement (and therefore the stone) its distinctive colour.
Based on the mineralogy identified in thin section and the texture seen in hand specimen,the stone has been given the classification of Oolitic limestone.
