Slate quarry

“ Further on are the glistening piles of slate from a disused quarry. The real quarry of Delabole, famous far and wide, is behind, beside the railway, from which one may look right down into it. The road to Tintagel opens out at last and then, if we are lucky enough to be going westward at sunset, we may see suddenly a hazy glow as of a forest fire over all the wide expanse of sea and sky, and outlined against it the great black lumps of rock off Trebarwith Strand. ”

“ The mention of Colonel Bertram's name gained for them a personally conducted tour through the [252] rows of little slate-roofed sheds where skilled workmen strip and chip and shape the flakes of quarried slate till they are the size and form needed for roofing cottages and schools and Nonconformist chapels. Having seen how the slate is treated in the sheds, they were taken into the quarry itself to see how the slate is got.
A big slate-quarry is a very impressive sight. ”

“ 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! ”

“ All the layers or laminæ of slate have a direction similar to those of the veins of quartz, so that the whole mass becomes divided into immense parallel rhomboids. The slate is extracted in blocks of a determinate size, which are then divided into leaves for roof-slates. When the blocks have been drawn from the quarry, if they are left exposed to the sun or the open air, they lose what is called the quarry-water, and then become hard and untractable, and can only be employed as building-stone. Frost produces a singular effect on these blocks ”

“ KILGERRAN FERRY.
After this digression, we will now take a stroll by Teivyside; descending from the village by a steep pathway beside some humble cottages and heaps of quarry refuse. As a result of certain ancient privileges, the townsfolk have gradually converted this portion of the left bank of the Teivy into a succession of slate quarries, whose ragged talus of débris encumbers the water's edge; a sorry substitute for the luxuriant groves that greet the eye wherever Nature has been allowed fair play. ”

“ If dimension stone is required, a deep horizontal groove is cut near the top or the bottom of the bed. The quarry face is then divided into blocks by saw-cuts, channels, or rows of drill-holes, and the blocks are separated by wedging or blasting. As the excavation or stoping progresses, portions of the rock are left in place as pillars to support the roof. At many localities in Europe where roofing slate is quarried, it is found in beds dipping more or less from the horizontal. ”

“ For their jewels will be unfolding presently, to soften the cleft granite with misty green and bring the vernal time to these silent cliffs.
The quarry lies like a gash in the slope of the hills. To the dizzy edges of it creep heather and the bracken; beneath, upon its precipices, a stout rowan or two rises, and everywhere Nature has fought and laboured to hide this wound driven so deep into her mountain-side by man. A cicatrix of moss and fern and many grasses conceal the scars of pick and gunpowder; time has weathered the harsh edges of the riven stone ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 quarries are worked for money, not for art. The stone is cut not that Rodin may make a splendid statue, but that some company may earn a dividend. As you climb higher and higher, past quarry after quarry, it is a sense of slavery and death that you feel. ”

“ Presently the whistle of a siren silenced the music, and with one accord the quarrymen left their work and took shelter. Five minutes later, a detonation and strong reverberations shook the cliff; and when the smoke cleared, Lucian saw fresh boulders lying displaced from their bed, and a fresh scar graven upon the corrugated walls. So the work went on. Danger was always present; but the danger of the quarry is not like the loathsome sleuth-hound of disease which tracks down the potter and the worker in lead. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The specus is six feet high and two feet wide, and it is filled up to nearly half its height by solid clay, evidently the deposit left by the water. The old specus, long after it had been out of use, seems to have been employed by the quarrymen: as it was a tunnel in the tufa rock just high and wide enough for a man to walk in, by cutting away one side they made it wide enough for a horse and cart to carry the stone, and they raised the vault as high as was convenient for the purpose of making an entrance into the quarry. ”

“ For instance, a stone of 90% purity, which is close at hand, will probably be more valuable than one of 98% purity which must be hauled fifteen miles. Bare hillsides or creek banks where a crusher can be set up to handle the stone without extra lifting are preferable for quarry sites. Usually the overburden is less in such an exposed face. Impurities in limestone deposits may be large chert (flint) nodules which can be hand-sorted out, sand grains, clay which settled into and onto the stone during its accumulation, and pyrite (fool’s gold) or other minerals of lesser importance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now he had forsaken the trails of moose and bear and caribou to seek the elusive "color" in the sands of the mountain streams, or the unobtrusive outcrop of the quartz that carries gold. But the old instincts were still strong in him. He felt the lure of a splendid and unknown quarry. He coveted the magnificent head of that calm watcher on the peak; and, having heard that the wild mountain ram of the Rockies was an extraordinarily difficult quarry to bring down, he itched to try his old eastern woodcraft in this new chase and win the prize unaided. ”

“ The ancients, instead of opening out a good face, so that the quarries might be worked to any extent with advantage, excavated caverns in the side of the hill, and having arrived at the good sound rock, cut it out by wedges and picks in such masses as they required, so that the inside of the quarry presented a long gallery from whence the stone had been taken, worked in a very regular manner in steps one above the other, without any appearance of waste; in fact, the rock is so solid that when worked by pick and wedge no blasting is necessary ”

“ 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. ”

“ Or were the quarrymen driven from the desert, and the Pharaoh from his throne, by the hungry hordes of Ethiopia, or Syria, or the islands beyond the sea? The great stone may be older than Rameses the Great, or as modern as the last of the Romans; but to give it a date, or to divine its history, is impossible. Egypt{172}ology, which has solved the enigma of the sphinx, is powerless here. The obelisk of the quarry holds its secret safe, and holds it forever.
Ancient Egyptian quarrying is seen under its most striking aspect among extensive limestone or sandstone ranges, as at Turra and Silsilis ”

“ At Aberdeen, we found that many additional quarries had lately been opened, some of them of an excellent quality, and capable of producing larger blocks of stone than granite quarries usually do; but still it is doubtful, as has been formerly mentioned, whether any one quarry will be found to produce a sufficiency of large blocks in any reasonable time; but by purchasing from different quarries, a regular supply may be procured for all the purposes wanted, in case you shall determine upon using the granite in preference to stones from Kingoodie. ”

“ That the spot should have been visited for untold centuries by all the Indian nations, who hid their weapons as they approached it, under fear of the vengeance of the Great Spirit, will not seem strange when the religion of the race is understood. One of the principal features of the quarry is a perpendicular wall of granite about thirty feet high, facing the west, and nearly two miles long. At the base of the wall there is a level prairie, running parallel to it, half a mile wide. ”

“ East of the head of Lake Champlain is Rutland, the centre of the Vermont marble-quarrying industry and the site of the great Howe Scale Works, a city of twelve thousand people. Three-fourths of the marble produced in the United States comes from this district of Vermont, and the Sutherland Falls Quarry at Proctor, near Rutland, is said to be probably the largest quarry in the world. These quarries are in the flanks of the Green Mountains which stretch northward, making the watershed between the upper Connecticut River and Lake Champlain. ”

“ Kelvin breathed a virile grade of tobacco into my face. "Listen, Madison, we have been working this quarry for generations, sometimes more of us working than other times. Today most of us are working getting the stone out. That's the way we like it. We don't want any outsider coming in and interfering with that."
"If this quarry has anything to do with defrauding Manhattan-Universal, I can tell you that I will do something about that!" ”

“ Emlie has been here this evening and drawn up the deeds conveying my north shore property to the New York syndicate. Mr. Van Ostend has conducted all the negotiations at that end, and I have agreed to the erection of the granite sheds on those particular sites and to the extension of a railroad for the quarries around the head of the lake to The Corners. The syndicate are to control all the quarry interests, and Mr. Van Ostend says in a few years they will assume vast proportions, entailing an outlay of at least three millions. ”

“ He tells us that in an old quarry at Syrene there is to be seen an obelisk upon which the workmen were busy, when for some reason they were obliged to leave it only partially cut out. From this it appears that when the quarrymen wished to abstract a huge mass, such as the Needle would be, they marked out the form by cutting a deep groove, in which, at intervals, they made oblong holes. Into these holes they firmly wedged blocks of timber, and then, filling the grooves with water, the wood in time swelled and thus the granite cracked along the outline from wedge to wedge. ”

“ At ten o’clock that night we were well at work. Just on the one hundred metre contour line there was a small quarry, at the west end of which had been the too conspicuous post where the Boche had spotted us. Every loophole must by its very nature be “spottable”; but when the natural ground is so little disturbed that it looks exactly the same as it did before the post was made, then indeed this “spottability” is so much reduced that it verges on invisibility. So, leaving the old post exactly as before, we were building a new one about twenty yards to the west of it. ”

“ He missed that storm of impassioned evangelicalism in which Eesaac Oliver, walking one day on the Porth Neigr road, stopped at the foot of the lane that led to the quarries, suddenly threw up his hands, broke forth, and presently had the occupants of a dozen brakes and wagonettes listening to him in the great echoing excavation of the quarry itself. ”