His 35 years of experience as a builder have brought Mervyn Cawley a strong appreciation and deep respect for Cotswold stone.

He explained: "I feel really connected to it. When I first moved to Shipton-under-Wychwood when I married, I realised we had come to live in an area with some of the best stone in the Cotswolds.

“From my home I can look out over the hills towards Burford and Taynton, from where stone used for some of the famous buildings in Oxford was quarried.”

Mr Cawley has spent the whole of his working life in building. On leaving school he attended West Oxfordshire Technical College in Witney (now Abingdon and Witney College) to follow courses in building construction and technical drawing.

“I got started as a small builder, doing small jobs, based where I was living in Eynsham. I have been self-employed virtually from the start of my career,”

he said.

“I do not work with a big core of staff. I use a network of people I know and I tend to tailor my team for any particular job according to the work.

“As time has moved on I have become more of a site manager. Over time I have learned a lot about the various aspects of work with stone, including roofing and the techniques of plastering and the materials used.

“I have always maintained my drawing and technical skills and have used them to draw details for customers. As a builder I have both technical and hands-on ability. It is rather like the way it was in the age before professional architects when a builder had to develop his plans for himself.

“And this is a better way for customers to put forward their own ideas as to what they would like included in the design.”

Mr Cawley has seen many changes in the building industry over the past 25 years.

“Planning issues have been one of the factors that have caused the most changes,” he said.

“Regulations have become much tighter than they were in the earlier days.

“Conservation areas started just as I was starting up in business in 1978. They have had a big impact on my work and I am very conscious of the specific requirements for the types of stone used in a conservation area.

“There are building regulations relating to stone. When I was coming into the building industry you were able to use a real full-depth stone. But nowadays it is cut smaller by guillotines until it is just the thickness of a brick. You do get more use out of the same quantity of stone, but it has caused considerable change.

“Stock bricks are roughly the same size. They do not look as random nor have the natural beauty they did. That is one of the losses which has come with modernisation.”

Not that Mr Cawley is against progress.

“I am not a dinosaur. I have upgraded my technical drawing skills on to computer aided design and I have found the development of modern tools has proved valuable in some areas.

“We can cut stone details such as flooring in a way that we couldn't do in the past and the advent of power tools has had an immense effect on everybody’s work.

“There is a tool for every possible job these days. They are taking out a lot of the hard work but the skills of the hand-craftsman are going.”

Mr Cawley, 60, has been joined in the business by his son John, 32.

"I am passing on my knowledge to him," Mr Crawley said. “I am able to teach him things I only learned by chance."

His interest in stone has led Mr Cawley into studies of it and of Jurassic limestone where it occurs elsewhere.

"There is a similar stone in the Loire Valley in France, although it is a little whiter," he said. "It was used in the building of the French chateaux. There is also a similar stone in Italy."

He enjoys seeing the differences in building styles and has noticed that in other parts of Europe there is more of a continuation of tradition than in this country.

"In Brittany, they are masters of blue slate, and in the various regions of France, there are differences in details, in the cutting of the stone, and on the lead guttering." he explained.

“They all have a consciousness of their own regions — it is in the DNA of the people. In the UK regionality does not seem to be of so much importance."

But it is the stone of his homeland that has the greatest draw for Mr Cawley.

"I have occasionally talked about moving away — but the one thing that I would miss most is the stone," he said.