HERE in Craven we are surrounded by stone.

Most of us live in stone houses and aspire to live in converted stone barns, we walk on stone pavements and often drive on roads where beneath the black bitumen lie beautifully dressed stone setts. Yet do we ever stopped to think where all that stone came from?

The answer is that it came from the ground, blasted and torn out and dressed by hand in an age before modern machinery made the work more bearable.

Now the hard working life of those old time quarrymen has been captured on canvas by Craven artist David Hoyle. He was commissioned by a major building supplies company to produce the impressive and remarkably detailed watercolour.

Previously David had produced works that captured life in a joiners' shop, on a building site and on the farm, all before the advent of modern machinery. The joiners' shop and the building site both reflected his own working life as a skilled joiner and cabinet maker, running a business in Bank Street, Barnoldswick for many years.

However, for his latest work David needed to carry out much more research into the quarrying industry and exactly how the work was done. He has a craftsman's meticulous eye for detail and would be mortified if his finished painting contained an error.

"A lot of it is what I remember from my youth," said David, who was born and bred in Cowling.

"There were three quarries in Cowling alone and another big quarry in Eastburn. At each one there were lots of different jobs carried out, often depending on the quality of stone, and I've tried to include those different trades in the painting."

David furthered his knowledge of the industry through studying old photographs and speaking to quarry workers, some retired and some still working.

"I've learnt an awful lot and it's been a lot of fun," he said.

His painting shows slabs of rock torn from the quarry floor, pulled out by steam-powered coal-fired cranes, "riven" (split) and dressed into paving slabs. Other workers are busy dressing stone blocks for the building trade, as the boom in textiles demanded ever more mills and rows of terraced houses for the weavers.

The joy of this painting is in the detail, from the different strata of shale and rock in the quarry wall to the quarry horses and the workmen's tools, all carefully researched. The labourers stand in cheaply-bought clogs while the skilled masons are marked out by their leather boots. Even the gaffer is there in his bowler hat, the only man in the picture with his hands in his pockets!

David stressed that the old standards of craftsmanship in his painting are still available. Indeed, part of the picture shows a mason cutting and dressing a stone sill - a job done just a few weeks ago with the finished sill destined for Burnsall School.

The acid test of David's work came when he took the finished picture for close scrutiny by the quarry workers he had talked to.

"I told them if I'd got anything wrong I wanted to know, but they seemed very impressed. In fact, some of them want copies," he said.

Although the original is for a commission, David hopes prints will be available later this year for the growing number of people who collect his work.