The Collaborative International Dictionary
Whinstone \Whin"stone"\, n. [Whin + stone; cf. Scot. quhynstane.] A provincial name given in England to basaltic rocks, and applied by miners to other kind of dark-colored unstratified rocks which resist the point of the pick. -- for example, to masses of chert. Whin-dikes, and whin-sills, are names sometimes given to veins or beds of basalt.
Wiktionary
n. (context quarrying industry English) Any hard dark-coloured rock.
WordNet
n. any of various hard colored rocks (especially rocks consisting of chert or basalt) [syn: whin]
Wikipedia
Whinstone is a term used in the quarrying industry to describe any hard dark-coloured rock. Examples include the igneous rocks, basalt and dolerite, as well as the sedimentary rock, chert.
Usage examples of "whinstone".
He reached the low summit, and flung himself down on a patch of thymy turf between the whinstone screes, with his face to the valley.
The pale blossoms starred the glades and the sides of the dells, clung to tree-roots, and climbed into crannies of the grey whinstone rock.
Beside one of the granite boulders Barton found a few chipped hunks of whinstone lying together in the peat and hidden by a mat of swamp grass.
After a careful look at the whinstone fragments Milt determined to consider the corner found.
They closed in upon a knoll and found him standing twenty feet about them on a great cube of whinstone, completely masked by a surrounding clump of black spruce.
They all had their book-bags, pockets, and arms filled with stones lately broken for mending the turnpike road, mostly granite, but partly whinstone and flint.
With the dawn they were climbing among shale and whinstone under the wall of a dark monocline where turrets stood like basalt prophets and they passed by the side of the road little wooden crosses propped in cairns of stone where travelers had met with death.
The stars burned with a lidless fixity and they drew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the uttermost ridge to heaven, a barren range of rock so enfolded in that gaudy house that stars lay awash at his feet and migratory spalls of burning matter crossed constantly about him on their chartless reckonings.