Dimension stone machines that put on flat or rounded edges, and interconnecting conveyors to move the stone from the slab input to the final tile product. The stone for tiles is most commonly marble, but often is granite, and sometimes limestone, slate, or quartz-based stone. Common colors are white and light earth colors. Much of the stone for this application is produced in Italy and China. Stone monuments include tombstones, grave markers or as mausoleums. After being gangsawed into big deep (up to wide and over 6 inches deep) slabs, smaller saws or guillotines (they break the granite and make the rough
Robert Paterson (stonemason) Robert Paterson (stonemason) Robert Paterson (1715–1801), known as "Old Mortality", was a Scottish stonemason who took it upon himself to travel around lowland Scotland carving inscriptions for the unmarked graves of Covenanters martyred in the 17th century. Walter Scott made him a principal character in his novel "Old Mortality" (1816). Paterson was born near Hawick in 1715. Through the patronage of Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick, whose cook he had married, he obtained the lease of a quarry at Gatelawbridge, but in 1745 his house was plundered by the retreating Jacobites, and Paterson himself, a pronounced Cameronian, was carried off a prisoner.