Opening of the Prenmôr Quarry

[Grover]

The Tales of Lady Gwenllian

0. Introduction

1. The arrival of Lady Gwenllian aboard the Cedar Serpent

2. Scouting a Site

3. Early Spring in Prenmôr

4. The Fishery and Shrine at Prenmôr

5. Opening of the Prenmôr Quarry

While Lady Gwenllian was helping the villagers of Flewd move to Prenmôr, the last of the winter snows had thawed, freeing the earth for work.  The first order of business for construction was to open a quarry for the massive amount of stone needed.  The local limestone was ideal for building, and its proximity to the castle site eliminated the need to transport stone from great distances, facilitating construction of the main fortress and necessary outbuildings.

Lady Gwenllian hired a number of laborers and a few stonecutters from the areas around Prenmôr.  The limestone was hewn in the traditional manner by hand with pickaxes, roughed into blocks, and then shaped by a stonecutter before being broken out with a wedge and trimmed to final shape.  The finished stones were loaded onto a horse drawn cart and taken to the building site, while loose gravel was hauled out in baskets on the backs of workers.

Spoiler

 

Thanks to Brickbuilt.com for the idea of an ice skate on a wooden haft for an axe.  The pickaxe pieces are fine, but don’t look as medieval to me.

This is a quick build (for me), to try and get more of the requirements of the HSS up, so no border or irregular base.  I did do some research into how stone was quarried by hand in ancient times, so if anyone is interested, the best paper I found was here:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/per-storemyr.net/2015/05/20/new-ways-of-looking-at-highly-organised-stone-quarrying-in-ancient-egypt/amp/

This discusses mining operations in ancient Egypt, but other than the introduction of pickaxes by medieval quarriers, the methods were relatively unchanged for centuries.  A few of the pictures are diagrams of quarries that I tried to emulate as best I could.  This quarry would ultimately be much larger, but I wanted to depict it just as it got started.

I’m still not entirely happy with the foliage.  Ground cover is something I am working on to make look more natural.  I wanted to put more wedge plates down of different colors, but didn’t have enough, so wound up doing a more blocky square plate type of thing.  I was happy to have a few plates and tried to round off some corners with some quarter round tiles, and added a bit of olive green at the edges of the grass.  I was trying to avoid too many colors of grass, but am not entirely sure how it turned out.  C&C welcome, as usual!

 

 

[zoth33]

Lovely little build.  I like the landscaping.    Although the quarry seems a little small, its gonna take a while to get enough stone out of there.  Nice idea though.  

[en_zoo]

Nice work here, Grover! I like how you're starting up with your city, I'll hopefully be soon in the same situation! So, one question first: where is Prenmor located exactly (on the Avalonian map?). As for you uncertainty about the grass colours, that's something I'm still working on myself, but for the moment I think as long as you don't go for more than 3 shades you should be fine (always if they're not too mixed up and you have to consider the colour of the grass too, like in this case). I also found sand green to work well with pretty much every other shade, which is a plus, and its price for the 1x2 plate is now much lower than it used to be (thanks to PaB, I think). So, in this case in particular, you could've added more olive green and left the bright one for the stems = 3 shades total. I normally use dark green only in forest setting; I wanna explore bright green more, though. Hope this helps  As for the quarry itself, I appreciate how you depicted it at its beginning - I think you realised the first 'layer' pretty well  I really like how you researched the whole thing, as I tend to do the same and wondered if I was overdoing it or something...

[mccoyed]

Really like the way the early stage of this quarry is devised. Feels realistic. I also really like the tools you made.

[W Navarre]

Excellent, I like the quaintness and the old style, and how you used bricks, gives it a fun LEGO feel  !

[Basiliscus]

Given your comments about the landscaping I actually think you did a really good job of making this look natural. I like that the path is lower than the surrounding grass (footpath erosion in action!) and the you did well with the layering in the quarry itself. The grass stalks are well scattered and I like you've kept the same types together.

The photo is a little grainy though, I think because the ISO is set too high. I tried to look up the EXIF information on Flickr but it's not there, so maybe check to see how your camera is set up.

Regardless, it's a lovely little freebuild!

[adde51]

Great little build which works surprisingly well at this scale. Maybe try to make the photo a little less bright as the faces on the figs get a bit lost, but perhaps that's just my preference. Anyways, great job

[The Last of Nergoue]

looks great, although i feel like the back side is a bit sharp and flat. 

[Muakhah]

Really nice industrious build.  The pit itself is great with the stone blocks in various stages of carving.

The wagon and the way the scene cuts into the ground is good too.

[Grover]

On 1/27/2019 at 7:09 PM, zoth33 said:

Lovely little build.  I like the landscaping.    Although the quarry seems a little small, its gonna take a while to get enough stone out of there.  Nice idea though.  

Thanks!  It's just opening, as I wanted to keep the build size small, but you're right, there's not much coming out of there yet!

On 1/28/2019 at 9:14 AM, en_zoo said:

Nice work here, Grover! I like how you're starting up with your city, I'll hopefully be soon in the same situation! So, one question first: where is Prenmor located exactly (on the Avalonian map?). As for you uncertainty about the grass colours, that's something I'm still working on myself, but for the moment I think as long as you don't go for more than 3 shades you should be fine (always if they're not too mixed up and you have to consider the colour of the grass too, like in this case). I also found sand green to work well with pretty much every other shade, which is a plus, and its price for the 1x2 plate is now much lower than it used to be (thanks to PaB, I think). So, in this case in particular, you could've added more olive green and left the bright one for the stems = 3 shades total. I normally use dark green only in forest setting; I wanna explore bright green more, though. Hope this helps  As for the quarry itself, I appreciate how you depicted it at its beginning - I think you realised the first 'layer' pretty well  I really like how you researched the whole thing, as I tend to do the same and wondered if I was overdoing it or something...

Thank you!  My plan is to show through builds and narrative the complete construction of a fortress and city.  I'll be very interested to see you do the same and am happy to share my research with you, as I'm always interested to see what people find for historic information!  It may be overdoing it, but I'm all about overdoing things. :-)

Thanks for the tips on the flora as well.  I need to play with the grasses in the future, so I'll try your suggestion!

On 1/28/2019 at 12:24 PM, mccoyed said:

Really like the way the early stage of this quarry is devised. Feels realistic. I also really like the tools you made.

Thanks!  I try to keep the builds as historically accurate as possible while keeping a fantasy element to them.  Credit for the pickaxe goes to brickbuilt, however.  I had to break open my Ninjago City Docks to get that silly chisel, though, as it's super expensive on bricks and pieces at the moment and only shows up in that color in the docks (I wasn't going to use the lavender lipstick from the Friends sets!).

On 1/29/2019 at 11:09 AM, W Navarre said:

Excellent, I like the quaintness and the old style, and how you used bricks, gives it a fun LEGO feel  !

Thanks!

On 1/30/2019 at 2:02 AM, Basiliscus said:

Given your comments about the landscaping I actually think you did a really good job of making this look natural. I like that the path is lower than the surrounding grass (footpath erosion in action!) and the you did well with the layering in the quarry itself. The grass stalks are well scattered and I like you've kept the same types together.

The photo is a little grainy though, I think because the ISO is set too high. I tried to look up the EXIF information on Flickr but it's not there, so maybe check to see how your camera is set up.

Regardless, it's a lovely little freebuild!

Thank you!  I tried to make the taller weeds grow along the side of the road where the ground was disturbed the most, allowing more light for fast growing weeds to spring up among the more established grass.  I also tried to incorporate the dark tan for dry soil and the reddish brown for soil with more water.

As for the ISO, I took a series of pictures with ISO from 8 to 3200 and they all looked the same.  I couldn't figure it out, so just posted what I had.  I later read the manual for the camera and realized I had the settings all wrong, so the ISO was bypassed and I wound up with this.  Ha!  Live and learn, I guess.  I had to use full manual for my challenge build, so hopefully I'll have less exposure on the next set of pics.

On 1/30/2019 at 7:29 AM, adde51 said:

Great little build which works surprisingly well at this scale. Maybe try to make the photo a little less bright as the faces on the figs get a bit lost, but perhaps that's just my preference. Anyways, great job

Thank you!  I am working on the lighting.  Also, the face on the peasant with the blue cap isn't washed out, just super old and worn.  The others are new, however.

On 1/30/2019 at 12:19 PM, The Last of Nergoue said:

looks great, although i feel like the back side is a bit sharp and flat. 

Thanks!  I had originally thought so too, but looking at the quarry pictures, it's kind of the way those things were.  I could probably add some 1x1 tiles or shallow angle plates in there to give it some more layering, so I may do that next time.

7 hours ago, Muakhah said:

Really nice industrious build.  The pit itself is great with the stone blocks in various stages of carving.

The wagon and the way the scene cuts into the ground is good too.

Thank you!  I had fun making the wagon and positioning the bricks within (which are actually held on with studs).  The hardest part was getting the stupid harness to stay tied to the horse!

[Grover]

On 1/28/2019 at 9:14 AM, en_zoo said:

[...] So, one question first: where is Prenmor located exactly (on the Avalonian map?). [...]

My apologies.  I realized that I forgot to answer this.  While Prenmôr is not technically located anywhere since it has not yet reached the first stage of the HSS, I plan on placing it at the mouth of the river indicated by the big red arrow here:

[Basiliscus]

On 2/1/2019 at 8:08 PM, Grover said:

As for the ISO, I took a series of pictures with ISO from 8 to 3200 and they all looked the same.  I couldn't figure it out, so just posted what I had.  I later read the manual for the camera and realized I had the settings all wrong, so the ISO was bypassed and I wound up with this.  Ha!  Live and learn, I guess.  I had to use full manual for my challenge build, so hopefully I'll have less exposure on the next set of pics.

Glad you got there in the end! It takes time and practice to get used to a camera so don't worry about it. I'm hardly a photography expert but happy to help if you want it.

[soccerkid6]

Quarries can be a tricky thing to portray, and you did a great job capturing the look of chiseled stone

Fun use of the ice skate as a pick, and the broken black bar makes an excellent chisel

[Grover]

7 hours ago, soccerkid6 said:

Quarries can be a tricky thing to portray, and you did a great job capturing the look of chiseled stone

Fun use of the ice skate as a pick, and the broken black bar makes an excellent chisel

Thanks, and thanks for your idea of the ice skate pick!  The bar isn't actually broken--it's a black Friends lipstick piece that just came out in the Ninjago City Docks set:

https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=93094c03&idColor=11#T=C&C=11

They're ridiculously expensive on BL right now for what they are and Pick a Brick was worse for a while, but they make great chisels!

[Henjin_Quilones]

I like the humble beginnings of your quarry, and it is much easier to build it at this stage than when it is huge... fewer pieces are needed to show the whole thing. The workers look good, and I like the exposed studs on the blocks indicating that they are ready to be used to build something! 

Have you created an HSS entry yet? If not, you should. 

Edited March 4, 2019 by Henjin_Quilones

[Grover]

On 3/4/2019 at 12:52 PM, Henjin_Quilones said:

I like the humble beginnings of your quarry, and it is much easier to build it at this stage than when it is huge... fewer pieces are needed to show the whole thing. The workers look good, and I like the exposed studs on the blocks indicating that they are ready to be used to build something! 

Have you created an HSS entry yet? If not, you should. 

Thanks!  I didn't want to spend a ton of time just to depict a quarry, so went small.  I haven't done my HSS yet; I was waiting to post until I have enough to put Prenmôr on the map!