Locating Quarries and Sawmills in Aberdeen City & Shire

In this blog post I will outline my decisions and steps I have undertaken after I settled on my MA topic and present my first personal thoughts on how I see the project (research) developing.

The first thing I decided to execute was to map Aberdeen City & the Shire and find all the quarries and sawmills that are within the two regions. I have located eleven companies taking care of thirty quarries and fifteen companies either operating sawmills or selling timber at seventeen places. I contacted most of them via email (I still have to contact Aberdeenshire council who runs three quarries) and asked them whether they could provide me with some statistical information or any data about the quantities they sell and where the material originates from. From the roughly twenty emails I have sent I received one reply with a minimum of data and one reply mentioning that due to lack of staff they cannot provide me with this information at the moment. I sent all the emails on the 16th of November. The list of quarries and sawmills is attached at the end of the post.

Aerial footage of Findon Quarry, just out with of Aberdeen City.

I am aware that only a week passed since I have contacted them, however, due to the small reply rate, I need to find a different way how to obtain some data. One of the ways is by reaching out the local councils which could, perhaps, provide me with some data. Another way would be through reports I found on forestry, providing a good amount of statistical information. Despite their general focus on the entire UK, data about Scottish forestry is also available. Because the data represents Scotland as a whole, the main goal is to either calculate or find specific information on Aberdeen City & Shire itself. I could create a very rough estimate by using the percentage of woodlands of Aberdeenshire (which ≈7.3%) as a factor to divide the overall data for Scotland accordingly. Nevertheless, this would not provide with an accurate calculation and would not be adequate.

The next step is to contact the City & Shire council and ask them whether they are able to provide any more specific information (even though I did research their websites). I also found another forestry management company ‘Scottish Woodlands’ whom I contacted as well today, hoping they could help me with my research.

In terms of my own personal reflection, I was a little bit surprised by the number of quarries present in the Shire. I imagined there would be less. However, this means that there is a high amount of material sourcing in the region providing employment and supporting the local economy. On the other hand, quarries are not as sustainable as forestry because stone is a non-renewable resource. Of course, the material itself is not particularly harmful to the environment as it is natural, yet the extraction of this material causes concerns to arise. Some of them include devaluation of the natural environment, taking-up land, dust pollution, visual pollution, increased noise, water contamination and other. At the beginning of my research I was considering whether to include quarries or not due to the latter and the fact that I wanted to focus more on renewable resources. The reason why I decided to research them was because of my aim to understand the material self-sufficiency of Aberdeen and the Shire which does include quarries as well. Another reason why I included quarries was because of the abundance of granite in this region. It is a local material and is omni-present in Aberdeen itself. My idea was to use this material in my own work as it reflects the local architecture, allows to diversify the design options and create various and strongly contrasting surface qualities and finishes. Nonetheless, even if I do not manage to gather data on quarrying, I could still use it in my design as it is local – but, I will have to think very carefully about the impacts of sourcing and the shaping of this material in a broader sense.

QUARRIES AND SAWMILLS IN ABERDEEN.pdf

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