Quarry

“ Emily found a smear of blood on a beautiful trail of yellow convolvulus. We followed the tracks on to the open, where the brook flowed on the hard rock bed, and the stony floor of the quarry was only a tangle of gorse and bramble and honeysuckle.
“Take a good stone,” said I, and we pressed on, where the grove in the great excavation darkened again, and the brook slid secretly under the arms of the bushes and the hair of the long grass. We beat the cover almost to the road. I thought the brute had escaped, and I pulled a bunch of mountain-ash berries, and stood tapping them against my knee. ”

“ At the back of the quarry was an old wood, sloping to the south and breaking off sharply at the precipice where the lime rock had been cut away; this was a wood of oaks with an undergrowth of bracken and male fern, and huge hollies. Here and there large venerable Scotch pines rose above the rounded surface of the oak tops, in some places singly, elsewhere in dark clumps. ”

“ Phares, I can't explain it, but this old quarry has a strange fascination for me. The beauty in its variegated stone with the sunlight upon it attracts me. Sometimes I am tempted to climb up the hill and hang over the quarry and look down into the heart of it."
"Don't ever do that!" cried the preacher.
"I won't," laughed Phœbe. "I don't want to die just yet. But isn't it the loveliest place! I come here often when the men are not blasting. It seems almost [181] a desecration to blast these rocks when we think how long nature took in their making." ”

“ Moreover, the road is so deeply sunken between steep banks, overgrown with hazels, that one is hardly aware how much one climbs, and the wide clear view at the top always breaks upon the eye with a certain shock of agreeable surprise. A little before the top of the hill a road turns off, leading into a long disused quarry, surrounded by miniature cliffs, full of grassy mounds and broken ground, overgrown with thickets and floored with rough turf. ”

“ Others are busily engaged in placing the stony blocks on trollies drawn by horses, that they may be borne along the roads leading from the quarry to the site of the future cathedral. And so, taking a bird's-eye view, we seem to see horses and carts slowly moving on from many a distant quarry, but all converging like the branches of a river to one main channel, and finally depositing their burdens in the stone-yard where the masons are at work. ”

“ This quarry, and one at a short distance, merely supply the blocks of granite, which, being detached from the main stone, are piled upon cars, and sent down an inclined plane to the rail-road, by means of a powerful chain, which acts at once as a support and check, suffering the load to proceed slowly down the declivity, and at the same time sending up from the bottom, upon another track, the empty car from which the granite has been unloaded below, as the buckets of a well are drawn up and down. ”

“ Nearly every Cheshire boy has visited at some time or another a quarry in the neighbourhood of the town or village where he dwells. He will probably have noticed that beneath the two or three feet of soil at the top of the quarry the rocks are arranged in beds or 'strata' piled one upon another in horizontal rows, or sometimes sloping in parallel lines towards the bottom of the quarry. ”

“ The quarry has always been a tolerably productive one, but the commerzienrath took the notion that he had only to quarry deeper and it would yield more abundantly. It has yielded in great abundance--water, which will ruin the whole quarry if your machinery cannot get the upper hand of it. ”

“ That's an old quarry ahead; you can get down it, but it isn't easy. There's the railway in front; there's a devil of a fence, and a devil of a hedge to tackle before you reach it. Then ditto, ditto on the other side, then a brook, then a plantation of young trees which want thinning, and which is not so well adapted to horse exercise as the maze at Hampton Court."
The speaker's knowledge of the country proved to be correct--at least, as far as Philipson and I investigated it, which was as far as the old quarry. ”

“ Fine white freestone abounds in the immediate vicinity (as at Craigleith, from the vast quarry of which, now passing into disuse, the stone for much of the New Town was obtained) and furnishes excellent building material; while the hard trap rock, with which the stratified sandstones of the Coal formation have been extensively broken up and overlaid, supplies good materials for paving and road-making. On this account quarrying is another industry which is seldom dormant. ”

“ But 'twas not for us to guess how the troops were disposed or where the outposts lay. We made our escape through the little garden, and, blundering along the woodland path behind it, came at length to a thicket of brambles over which hung the scarp of the quarry with a fringe of trees above it pitch-black against the foggy moonlight. ”

“ The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then reduced to coarse gravel with sledge-hammers and carted to the other end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have never fully stopped. ”

“ Supposing a large quarry about to be opened beneath the soil, the earth is first removed, and then a sort of inferior stone called “rag,” which generally lies between the soil and the good stone beneath. Large masses of available stone generally consist of distinct strata lying close together in a kind of cemented bulk, and the contiguous surfaces forming cleavages, greatly assist the quarrymen in detaching blocks from the mass. ”

“ A quarry should, if possible, be opened on a hillside, for in this ease it is usually much easier to dispose of the water which necessarily collects in any deep excavation, and which, if drainage by gravity is not afforded, must be removed by pumping, at considerable expense. As it is generally most convenient to operate on a vertical face of rock, the preliminary work of opening Va quarry is usually directed toward the production of this result ”

“ The weather being fine, they went beyond the village and down a lane which led to an old granite quarry on the edge of a fine piece of woods. On reaching the quarry, they sat down upon a large fragment of granite to rest themselves, for their walk made them feel a little tired. ”

“ Its strength consists of three hundred men, together with about the same number of infantry at Camp Smith, at Rock or Dupere Rapid, a few miles above, who are engaged in quarrying stone for a permanent fortification at that point. On visiting this quarry, I found it to consist of a bluish-gray limestone, semi-crystalline in its structure, containing small disseminated masses of sulphuret of zinc, calcspar, and iron pyrites, and corresponding, in every respect, with the beds of this rock observed along the upper parts of the Fox and Wisconsin valleys. ”

“ The removal of the block from the quarry where it was excavated to the place of its destination, and the raising of fragments of stone to considerable heights, could only have been effected by the co-operation of thousands of men, for no kind of elevating machinery or lever was then known. ”

“ The first bud on the Indian-willow brings the first inhabitant back to the Porte-of-Waves, Francis Lee, superintendent of the mica quarry. The quarrymen follow in batches; the willow-tassels see them all there; the wind-flowers witness the defile of the first shift through the pines. ”

“ I tell you, Art, it will well repay the trouble if we can find it. A limestone quarry here would be pretty well as valuable as a gold mine. Nearly all these promontories on the western coast of Ireland are of slate or granite, and here we have not got lime within thirty miles. With a quarry on the spot, we can not only build cheap and reclaim our own bog, but we can supply five hundred square miles of country with the rudiments of prosperity, and at a nominal price compared with what they pay now! ”

“ I found an excellent quarry not too far away, and from it I got several tons of stone that was easily shaped and squared, and there is very little art needed to deal efficiently with such monoliths as I had laid on the slope of the mound—the work occupied a man and his boy just three days. ”

“ The boys manifested their satisfaction at the announcement by applause. It would be fun to tow the caisson up the lake, and get it through the creek, to the quarry. But why was it going to the quarry?
"We shall load the thirteen stone posts upon it, and bring them down all at once," replied the principal in answer to this question. "It is built [Pg 242] of tun timber, and the sticks needed to raise it to the proper height as a wharf will be placed inside of it."
"Tun timber; what is that?" asked Ben Ludlow. ”

“ Anything seems easy after sled-dragging over hummocks and crevasses, and the constant nerve-strain in jumping crevasses so as not to slip in making the spring. Quarry Mountain is the barest I have seen, a raw quarry with infinite abundance of loose decaying granite all on the go. ”

“ The land is defendants' own and we do not claim any rights over it, but it is close to our ancestors' graves, and is certain to injure the fêng-shui. We should not object to a quarry on the far side of the hill, which cannot be seen from the graveyard. Our ancestors left word that if a quarry were opened on the far side it would not matter. ”

“ Each quarryman and his partner, or partners, hold the little independent working allotted to them apart from the remainder of the quarry. This obviously prevents blasting and each block of stone is cut out by manual labour. ”

“ A colony of substantial three-room houses, two large boarding-houses, a power house and, farther up beyond the pines, a stone house and a long low building, partly of wood, partly of granite waste cemented, circled the edges of the quarry.
The usual tale of workmen in the fat years was five hundred quarrymen and three hundred stone-cutters. This population of working-men, swelled to three thousand by the addition of their families, increased or diminished according as the years and seasons proved fat or lean. ”

“ When a quarry had given out, its galleries were filled up with the refuse of the neighboring ones—chips left over after the squaring of the blocks; so that, in many cases, the color and texture of the chips do not correspond with those of the quarry in which they are found. This layer of refuse, transformed by time into humus, and worked upon by human and atmospheric forces, has given the valley a different aspect, so that it looks as if it were the work not of quarrymen, but of nature. ”

“ When we see a stone building, we know that somewhere, far or near, a quarry has been opened. The courses of stone in the building may be compared to successive strata, the quarry to a ravine or valley which has suffered denudation. ”

“ He had been at work in his quarry on the vestiges of creation; the quarry lay at an outcrop of that northern hill overlooking the valley in which she lived. Near by was a woodland, and she had come out for some work of her own in which he guided her. They lay on the grass now side by side.
"I am working on the plan of our house, Pansy. I expect to begin to build in the autumn. I have chosen this spot for the site. How do you like it?"
"I like it very well. For one reason, I can always see the old place from it."
"My father left his estate to be equally divided between Rowan and me. ”

“ Adjoining this quarry on the north is a field where a number of graves have been opened. They he in clusters, and are cut out of the solid rock, which here crops up to the surface. This field is bounded on the north by a ravine, beyond which the land bears the singular name of Δραπέτης—"the Runaway." From the quarry the district of Damos extends downwards towards Linaria, forming a sort of lingula of rock jutting out into the plain in a direction north-west by south-east: on each side is a ravine. ”

“ The quarry itself is merely a piece of moor that has been trenched to the depth of some five or six feet from the surface, and that presents, at the line where the broken ground leans against the ground still unbroken, a low uneven frontage, somewhat resembling that of a ruinous stone-fence. It has been opened in the outcrop of an ichthyolite bed of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, on which in this locality the thin moory soil immediately rests, without the intervention of the common boulder clay of the country ”

“ One sometimes sees a house rising, the stone being taken from a deep quarry close to it: the same crane often serving to lift a block from the quarry, and to place it in its permanent position upon the advancing wall. We have said how rich is vegetation all along the Frith, until we reach the sandy downs from Ardrossan to Ayr. All evergreens grow with great rapidity: ivy covers dead walls very soon. To understand in what luxuriance vegetable life may be maintained close to the sea-margin, one must walk along the road which leads from the West Bay at Dunoon towards Toward. ”

“ Our first excursion will be to a locality where an open cut has been made for the purpose of carrying on quarrying operations. The accompanying photograph has been so taken as to include both the top and the bottom of the quarry (Fig. 1) . Let us first inspect the rock in the lower part of the quarry. The existence of planes of fracture, or joints, crossing the rock in various directions, dividing it into blocks, early attracts our attention. ”