Thread: Does Anyone have a Devonshire Oil Stone?

Devon: Home of the Best Sharpening Stone. Earlier on in this thread I mentioned this article, I was hoping for a hard-copy, but seeing as I never heard back from the SOB's at Wiley Interscience who maintain the archives, I went ahead and downloaded the article. Unfortunately, it doesn't make any mention of the Devonshire Oilstone, or any other stone from Devon that may be of interest to us. It is in fact, a very (and I mean very), brief account of the industry of the Devonshire Batts scythestone quarried in the Blackdown Hills of Devon. Wiley Interscience are rather stringent concerning the copyright of material downloaded from their site, so I shant post the whole article but just mention some of the more salient points.

The stones occurred in the Upper Greensands around the Blackborough area, the layers selected for use as whetstones being those containing sandstone concretions with extra silica. The industry surrounding these stones was very long-lived, and unlike the Devonshire Oilstone there was a considerable trade in them. The earliest recorded account of these stones is found in the Bridgewater Port Book in 1690, detailing a shipment of 200 scythestones bound for Bristol. The industry survived well into the first part of the twentieth century, even competing successfully against the introduction of synthetic Carborundum Stones in the period of 1908-1911. The industry finally coming to an end in 1929, following the retirement of the last miner. Apparently, the size of the industry was such, that the waste rock discarded by the miners could be seen as a massive white band below the horizon from which the stones were quarried, and was visible for miles around the region.

One point of note in the article, is that the stone coming from this area is referred to as both scythestones and whetstones. Whilst many of the terms we use to name hones today are interchangeable, the terms had a distinct order in earlier writings, ranging from grindstone as the coarsest, then going up to the finest through: scythestone, whetstone, hone and finally razor stone (although, even early on, hone and razor stone meant the same. The term hone used for describing the finest stones, and razor stone being a type of hone rather than it's own separate entity.) I'm not sure whether the use of the terms whetstone and scythestone in the article means that finer stones, i.e whetstones, were quarried longside the scythestones, or whether the authors simply use the two terms to mean the same thing.

EDIT: You can read more about the Devonshire Batts and the local Scythestone Industry here, http://www.blackdown-hills.net/~pari...ough/index.htm

Regards,
Alex