THE various stone structures around Tilligerry have an interesting history and Tanilba House has more than its fair share of them.

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The original homestead was built from stone retrieved from the site itself or close by around the foreshore.

Burnt oyster shell was used as mortar to point it up.

The arched gates, those at the main road, ‘The Temple’ and other features were added in the 1930s by legendary developer Henry Halloran with a certain Mr Crawley, a local who helped cart rock to the construction sites.

If you look closely, there are two types of stone used.

The rounded rocks are part of the family of ‘conglomerates’ which are cemented into a sandstone-like material which can be easily broken up.

Along Tanilba’s foreshore you can still see large conglomerate boulders put there in earlier efforts to control foreshore erosion.

The other type is an igneous rock and this was blasted from a quarry behind the Vince Woodman oval at Mallabula.
This type of rock is hard and brittle.

When struck with a sledge hammer it actually sends sparks flying.

The last time stone was extracted from this site was in the 1980s when the local fire brigade needed some decorative rock to build a garden in front of the fire station in Lemon Tree Passage.

A friendly RAAF demolition officer agreed to blow it up for them but he needed an excuse to do the job.

Bernie Henderson, the fire captain, rang the base reporting a suspicious object in the old quarry which looked like an unexploded bomb.

Out came the experts and a huge explosion rocked the town.

So much stone was blasted that the firies had enough not only for their station but plenty left over for paving and edging at their own homes.

The edging still surrounds a little garden outside the old station which is now an arts and crafts centre.

Another quarry operated in Lemon Tree Passage for many years.

We might tell its story at some time down the track.

By Geoff WALKER