Seagrave or Bishop Stopford School in Kettering. Pre-school and early years' education for ages 2 and up is catered for by St Michael's playgroup, rated "Good" by Ofsted in July 2014. Finedon Ironstone The dark brown ironstone that underlies the parish is one of Northamptonshire's more durable building stones, unlike much of the ironstone elsewhere in the county which can become crumbly or delaminate. The 14th-century church is built mainly from this stone, which is presumed to have been quarried locally (with paler coloured limestone of Weldon Stone around the windows and door.) Other older buildings in the town also use the local ironstone, notably the vicarage and a house opposite the church built in 1712 as a charity school for girls. The various works of the Dolben family also make use of the ironstone. Chemical changes within the stone, while it was still in the ground, have resulted in a hard crystalline mineral version of Limonite which bonds the particles together, creating a harder, more durable ironstone, but which was still workable when lifted from the ground. An Enclosure map of 1805 records two stone pits in the town. Quarries In the early part of Britain's Industrial Revolution, the Northamptonshire ironstone was ignored as a source of iron ore because unlike areas such as South Wales and the north of England, it had no coal to power the furnaces. In the mid 19th century the railways arrived, which meant that either the ore could be taken to distant furnaces, or coal brought to furnaces near the iron deposits. Both happened at Finedon from the 1860s. Glendon Iron Ore Company Quarries in the Finedon and Burton Latimer area, began with the workings of the Glendon Iron Ore Company, who in 1866 built the Finedon Furnaces, near Finedon station, along the eastern side the Midland Railway that had opened in 1857. Furnace Lane still runs through the industrial estate where the furnace once stood. The open-top furnace produced pig iron from 1866 to 1891, and numerous quarry pits to the north, east and south of the town were engaged in the laborious task of clearing back overlying rocks (sometimes up to 25 feet thick) using wheelbarrows and planks. The underlying ironstone was then loaded into wagons which used a series of tramways to get the ore to the furnace, or later processed at a Calciting plant and then transported by rail