It may seem that traditional building techniques are quickly disappearing as Bermudians rush to build bigger and fancier houses, but at least one builder is trying his best to preserve our architectural heritage.

Stonecutting and traditional building techniques are a particular passion of builder Larry Mills.

"My father wasn't a stonecutter, but I grew up listening to him talk about how he laboriously cut all the slate for his roof," said Mr. Mills. "I ended up with his old stone cutting saw. After years and years of asking for it he said I could take it and put it up on my wall."

Mr. Mills has three sons of his own and while they don't necessarily want to be stonecutters, he has made sure they understand what stonecutting was.

"Just by exposure, they understand how it was done," he said. "I have made sure they fully appreciate the hard work that went into it."

To preserve the steel saw, Mr. Mills puts a little bit of olive oil on it. His saw and other building implements were on show at a recent Bermuda Garden Club open house at Old Walls in Warwick. There, his lecture on traditional building techniques held people spell-bound.

One of the highlights of the Warwick tour was a traditional Bermuda stone cottage that looked as though it had been at Old Walls for centuries. In reality, Mr. Mills helped the former property owner, Sanders (Sandy) Frith Brown, to build it just ten years ago.

"The house was built entirely out of Bermuda stone, which is a feat in itself," said Mr. Mills. "Sandy also used Bermuda cedar for the woodwork."

Building a traditional Bermuda cottage was truly a labour of love for Mr. Brown. Mr. Mills said building an authentic house cottage took a great deal of patience, labour and money.

"I take my hat off to Sandy Brown for doing it," he said.

There are many challenges when building a traditional house, including red tape over planning.

"Many of the early buildings weren't built to modern building codes," said Mr. Mills.

"You end up with these quaint little cottages that you really can't reproduce today because of modern demands for space," said Mr. Mills.

?If you want to build a traditional house today, you also want to think of the dimensions and proportions that were used 150 years ago. That was a challenge in itself that we all recognised and tried our best to overcome.?

Mr. Mills said because resources were taken from the immediate surroundings, and older buildings had softer lines and were less intrusive.

?I often ask myself if these modern, straight-lined buildings will settle into our landscape as much as the cottages did that were built in the past,? he said.

Mr. Mills is quite humble, and wanted readers to understand that he is not an expert, just someone who is very interested in traditional building techniques. He has spent a great deal of time shooting the breeze with the real experts, the old-time stonecutters.

?It is the art of it that I appreciate,? he said. ?Most people don?t realise how much physical work and skill went into stone cutting. I read an article recently that said stonecutting was the backbone of our society. In many ways it is true.

?If they hadn?t cut stone what would they have done? Maybe they would have had log cabins. Most people don?t realise how labour intensive it was and how skilful it was.?

Mr. Mills said he is always interested in hearing from people who were involved in stonecutting, and he encouraged those who were involved to give him a call.

?There was a man I met called Edward (Buzz) DeShield who cut stone,? said Mr. Mills.

?He had ninety percent cut out one of the last blocks in Bermuda. He never quite pulled it right out. It is still sitting up there in Warwick. That would have been in the 1980s. He passed on a lot of his stone cutting skills. He had a group of men who used to gather in his barber shop at Cedar Hill at night. Percy Lambert was another stonecutter with a lot of stories.?

There are different qualities of stone in Bermuda. Some areas have harder stone, and other areas have very sandy stone.

?In central Warwick on the Belmont side there is a vein that goes down there that is hard as iron,? Mr Mills revealed.

?It can?t be cut by hand. Bailey?s Bay is known for its hard stone. Dockyard had a hard head up there that they used to build a lot of the Dockyard. Southampton is a very sandy parish and you hardly get any decent stone up there.

Mr. Mills said you can tell a lot about quarrying in an area by the nearby stone walls, or the lack thereof, because stone for the walls would have been trucked from a short distance. For example, stone blocks in walls in Bailey?s Bay, Hamilton Parish tend to be hard and jagged-edged. Stone in other walls tends to show more geological stratification.

?The kind of stone that is produced today from quarries is quite different from when stone was cut by hand,? he said. ?It tends to be a lot more geometric, more edgy and square. When it was cut by hand, the stone was irregular. It tended to look a bit softer-edged.

?In the old days, a firmer stone was something that would hold up better to the weather, but you wouldn?t want to cut a really firm stone into slate. You would want medium firm stone for slate.?

He said in large quarries today, you can often see several different time periods of stonecutting.

?If you look at the highest part of the quarry you can see where the original stone cutters used chisel and saw,? he said. ?If you go to the middle layer you can see where chainsaws came into being. I?m not sure when this was, but I think it was the 1940s or 1950s. Then if you come down into the third generation of stone cutters you can see where they started to use the power and downcut saws.?

Although he is fascinated by stonecutting, he said he would never want to do it for a living.

?Let me pay respects to those stonecutters,? he said. ?It was hard work. There was a particular breed of person who took to it. You had to have mental as well as physical strength. In many cases the person wasn?t particularly powerful, but a common denominator was mental strength. It was tedious work.?

In the old days, quarries were usually set into an incline of a hill. Quarrymen started with a very small block, and the blocks got bigger the further into the hill.

?This work was done by a cross-section of Bermudians,? Mr. Mills said.

?Black Bermudians did stone-cutting. A lot of Portuguese did stone cutting and a lot of West-Indians came here and did it. It went right across the board; it wasn?t exclusively any one type of person.?

He said traditional houses were often built near quarries, because of the logistics of getting the stone from the quarry to the building site.

?You would have chosen a piece of land that had good arable fields on it and hopefully cedar trees and hopefully stone nearby to build with,? he said. ?Living by the ocean wasn?t the original settler?s ideal plot, whereas today we tend to think of the view first and our roof going off later.?

Mr. Mills said some modern houses are not as weather-proof as the older ones, because they are built in exposed locations.