Producing high quality riven paving stones is a highly skilled job that our stone masons have many years of experience in.

Below are the steps involved in producing natural-looking riven paving from authentic Yorkshire sandstone.

Here, a compressed air drill is used to create a series of holes across the quarried stone. The line of holes indicate where the mason proposes to break the slab into 50/50 sections.

Using plugs and feathers, the mason then begins to hammer the plugs into each hole.

Once all the holes are filled with these plugs and feathers, each plug is hit in turn…the force pushes the two sections of stone apart.

The feathers at either side of the hole force the slab to crack along the required line as shown here.

The stone is now stood on it’s end for the mason, using only hand tools, to further split this into paving slabs between 1.5” and 3” thick.

Here, the line of the proposed split has been marked along the top edge of the slab.

Once a split appears in the stone and it has started to expand it can be widened using a variety of tools.

Here, the stone mason has split the larger stone slab down into two equal pieces.

This shows the clean finished riven face of the slab with minimal tool marks around the perimeter of the piece.