Purbeck stone Purbeck stone Purbeck stone refers to building stone taken from a series of limestone beds found in the Upper Jurassic to Lower Cretaceous Purbeck Group, found on the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset in southern England. The best known variety of this stone is Purbeck Marble. The stone has been quarried since at least Roman times up to the present day. The Purbeck Group is a sequence of sedimentary rocks that were deposited in a shallow freshwater to brackish lagoonal setting. It ranges in age from Tithonian to Berriasian. Limestone beds are developed at various levels throughout the sequence, each with
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.