granite Archives - UK Memorials

Why Stone is an Excellent Material for Memorials

Posted on 3rd February 20253rd February 2025 by Kate

When it comes to choosing materials for memorials, there’s an impressive variety available, ranging from metals to plastics and wood. However, stone stands out as one of the best choices. Why? Its very versatile, it can include a wide variety of looks and styles and its exceptionally long lasting. In this blog, we’ll explore why stone memorials are a top contender and highlight the specific types of stone we recommend for memorials.

Slate Memorials

Slate is a timeless, understated material that brings elegance and character to any memorial. Each piece of slate is unique, featuring natural markings that make every memorial truly one-of-a-kind. We offer slate in several thicknesses, including 12mm, 20mm, 30mm, 50mm, and 75mm, along with popular slate wedges. It has a beautiful honed finish that’s not shiny, offering a subtle yet sophisticated look. You can choose between leaving the slate natural or having it oiled for a deeper, darker hue.

Some natural burial sites and churchyards accept slate, but we always recommend confirming with the burial ground first. We can help with any necessary paperwork to ensure a smooth process.

Slate is perfect for deep engraving, with the option of paint filling in any of our stock colours such as Memorial Gold, Silver, Black, White, and Purbeck. Our Memorial Gold and Silver paints even contain real gold leaf for a luxurious touch. Simple images can also be engraved and painted, while more intricate designs can be laser engraved, providing a stunning surface-level finish. For the ultimate personalized memorial, we can combine deep engraving with laser engraving for a detailed and unique effect.

If you’re seeking a vibrant, full-colour memorial, we also offer tough print plaques that can be inset into the slate for lasting colour. For smaller slate plaques, we can drill holes for wall mounting, or you can choose from our range of wrought iron plaque holders to display the memorial. For slate memorials placed on the ground, we recommend using slate risers to gently slope the plaque, preventing water from pooling in the engravings and prolonging the life of the paint.

Granite Memorials

Granite is another popular choice for memorials and shares many similarities with slate, such as a range of thicknesses and wedge-shaped options. It comes in a stunning array of colours, allowing for creative and meaningful combinations. Some of our favourite granite and lettering colour pairings include:

Black Granite with white or gold text
Celtic Granite with black or white text
Dark Grey Granite with gold or Purbeck stone letters
Green Granite with gold or white letters

Like slate, granite can also accommodate simple images, full-colour photo memorial plaques, and mounting options such as holes, stakes, or risers.

What sets granite apart from slate, however, is its ability to feature impact-engraved images. This process creates high-quality, detailed images that are surface engraved onto the stone, perfect for including photographs on the memorial. Additionally, granite can be honed to meet churchyard regulations that restrict polished surfaces, although this is not typically our preferred option.

Conclusion

Whether you choose slate or granite, stone is a durable, beautiful, and customisable material for memorials. Both materials offer a range of options to suit your preferences and can be personalised with engravings, colours, and images. With proper care, stone memorials provide lasting tributes to your loved ones.

Granite Memorials and Plaques

Posted on 3rd November 202224th May 2023 by Peak Online

Each material that we craft with at UK Memorials can make a memorial stand out in its own way, but we’ve always found there to be an outstanding finish to our granite memorials and plaques. Granite has been a long-lasting popular choice for memorials (traditionally and specifically headstones due to its toughness and durability). This is why we have chosen to continue the tradition of crafting memorials from granite – but we also choose to offer granite memorials with a modern twist.

Handcrafted Granite Memorials

Granite has a stand-out, high-quality appearance (particularly when polished by our thorough and expert team). Specialising in bespoke memorials is something that we are incredibly proud of. No two memorials need to look the same, allowing some to honour the traditional layout of a memorial, and others to personalise and modernise a memorial to celebrate the loved one that they’re honouring in a way that feels right for them.

By nature, granite has a natural appearance as a result of being quarried which gives some variation in each piece of stone. Additionally, granite is available in several different colours including shades of black, blue, grey and green – allowing space for our customers a choice when designing a memorial. Our granite memorials and plaques are also available in different thicknesses, shapes (including wedges) and sizes. While we stock some sizes as standard, our talented craftsmen can work with you to achieve the final appearance that you had in mind.

Granite Memorial Wedges and Plaques | The Sign Maker — Granite Wedges

Designing A Bespoke Granite Memorial

Layout and lettering are important features of memorial design. Using a blend of traditional and modern crafting techniques, we can craft granite memorials and plaques that can be cherished for a long time to come. In terms of lettering, we can use a wide range of fonts, and recently we have seen an increase in those choosing to include images in memorials (whether they are photographs or small graphics).

Depending on the level of detail you’d like and the finish you want to achieve, we may choose to sandblast or impact engrave the final design once you have approved a proof copy from us. Impact engraving is still a relatively new technique for us, but one that we have had great success with so far turning out some revolutionary results.

At Uk Memorials, we are proud to craft with quality precision, but we are also proud to be memorial specialists who are able to keep your wishes at the forefront of our craftsmanship and service. Being a family business means that we appreciate the challenges that come with designing a memorial, but we are here to support and advise you throughout the process.

Why Granite?

Granite is a timeless classic of a material when it comes to memorials and plaques. Granite’s effortless ability to honour and celebrate the lives of loved ones has been evident since we first began crafting memorials. This material is long-lasting, versatile in terms of design, and a wonderful way to create a tangible record of a life and legacy.

Telephone: 01769 561355 | Email: sales@uk-memorials.net | https://linktr.ee/thesignmaker

Crafting Bespoke Memorials with Impact Engraving

Posted on 16th June 202216th June 2022 by Kate

At UK Memorials, we pride ourselves on crafting bespoke memorials that are reflective of the loved ones that our customers are honouring. As a result, we have crafted some truly unique pieces over the years – memorials that we are proud to have brought together using a blend of traditional and modern crafting methods by our top-performing craftsmen. Because of the expertise within our team, we enjoy trialling new techniques that enable our memorial tributes to meet and exceed expectations.

Being client-led pushes us to be constantly looking to better the way we approach crafting our memorials. Most recently, we found that individuals were approaching us wanting clearer imagining and refined details to push the design of their memorials to the next level. Impact engraving has proved itself to be the best way to achieve the results that are greatly sought after.

The Process Of Impact Engraving

You might be wondering what makes impact engraving different from other engraving techniques? How does impact engraving mark with great precision that standard engravers? Ultimately, it is thanks to the work of a high-speed needle that enables the impact engraver to work to such proficiency. The consistent finish of impact engraving is crafted by the needle repeatedly piercing the surface of the material. Though granite is the material that we trialled this new technique on – we hope to experiment with impact engraving across different stone types to see if it proves successful for other memorials too.

We have been using this new machine for a few months now, and we have received some great feedback about the designs crafted by impact engraving. Despite using this same technique across a number of pieces, each design has a unique appearance (check out our gallery here) as we are able to alter the needle movement’s strength and frequency. These alterations mean that our team can create character and depth with designs, particularly images, and we can craft memorials that are exquisitely detailed.

Working With Uk Memorials

Crafting a unique memorial is about more than just the design, we also believe that the craftsmanship of these pieces can make a substantial difference. We want your memorial tribute to stand out for all the right reasons – something that we hope we achieved across all of the signage that we are privileged to work on.

If you’d like to know more about the way that we craft our memorials, then please do get in touch with us. If you’ve reached our site and you’re looking for a memorial piece – rest assured that we are a safe pair of hands for a high-quality memorial that has been cared for at every stage of production. We’d love to hear from you and work alongside you on a piece that we know means much more than being just a memorial.

Lawn Memorials

Posted on 13th August 202013th August 2020 by Kate

Welcome back to our blog, we hope you are all well. Today we wanted to bring you a blog about Lawn Memorials and the different types we make.

What are Lawn Memorials

Lawn memorials are thicker stone or wooden plaques that are placed in lawn areas to remember and cherish a loved one. They are very in keeping with the natural surroundings that they are so often placed in. Some natural burial sites will allow lawn memorials but others choose to celebrate their loved one in gardens or sentimental places and a lawn memorial is a beautiful way to do this.

The Types of Lawn Memorials we craft

When it comes to lawn memorials here at UK Memorials we craft either wooden or stone lawn memorials. Both are beautiful materials with very different qualities, but both can be truly bespoke and unique thanks to the help of our highly skilled designer who can help to create a lovely design.

Wooden Lawn Memorials

Our wooden lawn memorials are made onsite by our skilled carpenters from raw timber to finished memorials. You can choose to have your lawn memorial in one of three beautiful timbers Oak, Iroko and Balau.

Oak is very traditional with a beautiful grain. It is a very hard and durable timber but just like all timber does require regular maintenance to keep it from water damage. With Oak, we will either treat with Satin Varnish or Devon Oil depending on your requirements.

Oak lawn memorials are traditional material and a very popular choice here at UK Memorials.

Iroko is a stunning, rich timber with a pretty grain. Again this is a fantastic hardwood which is very stable and naturally oil which makes it an excellent choice for outdoor use. Because it is so naturally oily we only treat with an oil and do not varnish. The colour in Iroko can vary from a light golden brown to a dark chocolate brown colour.

Iroko memorials show case a beautiful redish brown colour and weather well.

Finally, we have a timber called Balau. It is not as pretty as Oak but it is a very hard, stable wood that weathers well in wetter conditions. It is full of its own natural oils which makes it a good choice for lawn memorials. The colour will vary from a light yellow-brown to brown.

The wooden memorials can have the wording/images simply lasered onto the wood which is a very popular option as it is very natural and provides a brown/burnt finish. While others like to have the wording/images painted.

Balau Lawn memorials are an excellent choice due to their natural oils and longevity.

Stone Memorials

The other option available for lawn memorials is stone, here at UK Memorials we create stone lawn memorials in either slate or granite. Slate is a very popular choice because it has a very understated, elegant look. The slate lawn memorials can come in 20mm, 30mm, 50mm and 75mm thick and can be cut to virtually any size but we do have some standard/recommended sizes on our website. Some customers choose to simply have the wording blasted and left while others like to have the letters painted. We have a good selection of stock paint colours to choose from. Finally, with slate lawn memorials we recommend treating them with oil for a darker finish, however if you would prefer to have them left natural we can do this as well.

Lovely, high-quality slate lawn memorials made in North Devon at UK Memorials.

As mentioned before we do also make lawn memorials from granite. We stock 4 main different granite colours including, Celtic Grey, Black, Classic Dark Grey and Kerula Green. Granite is a lovely, rich material that oozes quality. It comes in a range of thickness and sizes all of which can be seen on our website. Again, just like the slate some customers choose to have the lettering left natural while others choose to have it painted. Popular combinations include Black Granite with Gold lettering and Celtic Grey Granite with Black lettering.

Beautiful, high quality granite memorials crafted by our Stone Masons here at UK Memorials.

Further Information

We hope you have found today’s blog insightful and if you would like to know more about our lawn memorials contact us using any of the methods listed below.

Website

Tel – 01769 618585

Email – sales@uk-memorials.net