KEYSTONE HEIGHTS – Traveling around the world gave Adam Batchelor the inspiration to develop a passionate craft for stonework and later a mastery of the ancient art.

Now a devotee of both blacksmithing and stonework, he works out of a 2,400 square-foot workshop in Keystone Heights with his forges for metalwork and his tools for chiseling arrowheads and spearheads. He’s done stonework since 2002 and blacksmithing since 2015. Early on, he saw primitive stonework in museums, voraciously read about the subjects, and the next thing he knew, he was making them.

“I got interested because I was like, ‘How do they turn rocks into spearheads or knives?’” he said. “The whole art was lost at one point.”

The two arts are far from easy or simple. It took him three or four years of toil to make the work acceptable and involved burns, effort and sweat, Batchelor added. Now he uses online platform Etsy to sell his items.

“It is hard. It is difficult. You can’t buy your way into it,” he said. “Eventually, it’s not ugly and it’s something someone could buy.”

Stonework was critical to ancient civilizations, like the early Vikings and the Egyptians.

“That’s the perfect age where stonework became as high level as it could before metal happened,” Batchelor said.

He joked he has been asked about the History Channel’s hit TV show “Forged in Fire” several times. Batchelor’s blacksmithing is more about crafting useful items rather than weapons, he said. However, the show has had a profound impact on driving more people to make knives and has a positive impact overall.

“Many bladesmiths wouldn’t have gotten started if not for the show,” Batchelor said.

As for Batchelor’s process, it’s a combination of mental and physical strength to complete something.

“It takes really intense focus, and that’s for either of them, stonework or blacksmithing,” Batchelor said. “You shut the whole world out around you. At the end of it, you’re mentally wiped out. I enjoy learning new stuff, I don’t want to do the same thing every day. I’ll challenge myself with something else.”