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Tim Tatton-Brown has drawn Sherds’ attention to the obituaries that were published in several newspapers last month for the late Trev (Treleven) Haysom (1942-2023), who was, says Tim, ‘a great mentor of mine’. Tim helped Trev obtain planning permission from Dorset County Council to extract Purbeck marble that has since been used in a number of high-profile building conservation projects, including the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries at Westminster Abbey and for the repair of the abbey’s Cosmatesque pavements (see CA 359).
Opening a new quarry in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty is difficult, if not impossible, but it helped that 11 generations of Trev’s family had been working Purbeck stone in an unbroken line dating back to 1698. Walter Haysom, Trev’s father, replaced all the 12th-century Purbeck marble columns at the Temple Church in London and renovated the tombs of the Knights Templar after they had suffered in the Blitz. As his father’s apprentice, young Trev helped to restore the medieval screen at Chichester Cathedral. His son, Mark Haysom, now continues the business, which has grown to include five active Purbeck quarries.
In 2020, Trev published the definitive book on the subject: Purbeck Stone (Dovecote Press), based on a lifetime spent talking to older generations of Purbeck masons and researching all aspects of the industry. He explains that Purbeck marble, so highly prized by medieval masons, is not marble at all – it is a limestone composed of billions of tiny, fossilised snails.
Like true marble, it can be polished up to a fine sheen. He quotes St Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln (1140-1200), who described the stone as ‘flecked with glittering stars… marble of a most noble nature. Of this are formed those slender columns which stand around the giant pillars, even as a bevy of maidens stand marshalled for a dance.’
Trev was also an accomplished sculptor: in 1976, he carved a cross for the church of St Nicholas in Studland, Dorset, with early medieval interlace motifs on three sides and a DNA double helix on the fourth. That suggests a scientific bent, but when Trev was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Technology from Bournemouth University in 2014, his family joked that it had to be for medieval technology, because Trev did not own a watch, a bank card, or a mobile phone, and could not even turn on a computer.
He did, though, have a small museum, known locally as ‘Trev’s Shed’, where he displayed the fossils that he had found while quarrying. In gratitude for his discoveries, palaeontologists named Dorsetodon haysomi, an extinct mammal, in his honour.
Roman masonry recycled
Staying with the subject of stone, Sherds enjoyed a lecture given in Chichester in September as part of the British Archaeological Association’s annual conference by geologist David Bone on the medieval reuse of Roman stone. It is often said that medieval churches, houses, and the city walls were built of recycled Roman stone, but David wanted to know whether this could be proved. Sherds has often asked himself a similar question when walking round his hometown, where the massive and continuous wall that surrounds Cirencester Mansion, along with many an old boundary wall, appears to be constructed from blocks of stone that are similar in size to those encountered in excavations of the town’s Roman buildings.
But similarity does not amount to evidence, so David painstakingly measured the heights and widths of hundreds of individual buildings’ stones of known Roman and medieval provenance and fed them into a statistical programme called a Convex Hull Plot, which measures the degree of similarity or difference between two sets of data and how dispersed the data are in relation to the mean.
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