Gold Block Limestone, Guiting Quarry Gloucestershire

A golden Cotswold limestone with a medium grain texture for walling, building and masonry.

Guiting 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 Guilding Gold Block each year.

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Petrographic Description and Mineral Examination of Guiting Gold Block Limestone

Guiting Gold Limestone is orange-brown in colour and consists primarily of ooliths with a number of typically elongated bioclasts. The constituents are held within a coarse carbonate cement and there appeared to be a broad alignment of some of the components. During testing there was no evidence of weathering or deterioration.

In thin section the stone consists of a general assemblage of ooliths, bioclasts and intraclasts with quartz grains forming a notable constituent. Some ooliths show a typical concentric structure but many had a seed consisting of quartz grain, bioclast or intraclast/lithoclast fragnents. Some are also formed around a quartz or feldspar crystal. Bioclasts consist mainly of echinoid plates, bivalves and gastropods and usually show a rim of micrite around the periphery.

Iron minerals are present in small quantities throughout the section which often give rise to the development of oxides/hydroxides producing the distinctive orange colour to the stone. Based on the mineralogy identified the stone has been given the classification of Oolitic limestone.