.... the title of the recent article in Country Life Magazine featuring two fellow Cotswold Craftspeople. I was pleased to be contacted by the Magazine last month. They visited my workshop and asked about my recent work, especially the work I have been doing at Oxford University in the past year. I was pleased that they featured a photograph of me carving a headstone; headstones often go under the radar in magazines as they might not seem as exciting as larger architectural projects, but for me, the headstones are equally fulfilling and I find each commission inspiring and challenging. Sometimes the smallest projects can be the most meaningful.

This is an extract from the article:

"The Architectural Letter Cutter"

As I approach Fergus Wessel's workshop on the green edge of Milton-under-Wychwood, Oxfordshire, I can hear birdsong and the tap, tap, tap of chisel on stone. Inside, headstones are stacked against a wall: one bears the carved head of a woman in the iconic style of Ethiopian painting above lettering in Anharic script, commissioned by a client in memory of his African wife. Next to it is another depicting a child snuggled up to a toy monkey.

There is such sadness calling at Mr Wessel's workshop door. "I encourage people to take their time with a design," he tells me, " that way you get inscriptions celebrating the life more than marking the death (of a client's loved one) and will mean something to a stranger in the churchyard reading it in 100 to 200 years".

Headstones have taken a back seat recently as Mr Wessel and his assistant Tom Wiggins have spent four years carving 31 gargoyles for New College in Oxford. "The theme became the love of animals, mostly endangered species."