“The stonework at Stonehenge is a Gordian Knot of mind-bogglingness”

Ellie Cawthorne: Your new book chronicles your hands-on work on some of Britain’s most significant stone structures. What has that work involved, and why did it inspire you to write a book?

Andrew Ziminski: Over the course of my career as a stonemason, I’ve worked across the scope and spectrum of history. From parish churches to Georgian townhouses, Roman baths and medieval cathedrals, I’ve worked on all sorts of buildings, spanning 2,000 years of history.

When restoring or conserving historic structures, my main concern is to discover why a building has started to fail. Then it’s a case of cutting out and replacing anything that’s decaying, while maintaining as much of the original fabric as possible. You could say that stonemasonry is basically a case of large-scale dentistry. But it’s not just about cutting and fixing stones. One of the most fascinating aspects of my job is observing the different environment, landscape and cast of characters that every single building comes with.

Working people don’t tend to write books, do they? They certainly don’t write books, and that’s something that motivated me to record my impressions