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A West Country Pilgrimage, a non-fiction book by Eden Phillpotts |
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Old Delabole |
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_ Where low and treeless hills roll out to the cliffs, and the gulls cry their sea message over farms and fields, a mighty mouth opens upon the midst of the land and gapes five hundred feet into the earth. In shape of a crater it yawns, and its many-coloured cliffs slope from the surface inwards. The great cup is chased and jewelled. Round it run many galleries, some deserted, some alive with workers. Like threads of light they circle it, now opening upon the sides of the rounded cliffs, now suspended in air under perpendicular precipices. In the midst is the quarter-mile incline that descends to the heart of the cup and connects the works above with the works below; and elsewhere are other gentle acclivities, where moraines of fallen stone ooze out in great cones beneath the cliffs. Under them stand square black objects, dwarfed to the size of match-boxes, which wrestle with this huge accumulation of over-burden. Steam puffs from the machines; they thrust their scoops into the fallen mass; at each dig they pick up a ton and a half of rubbish and then deposit it in a trolley that waits for the load hard by. A network of tram-lines branches every way in the bottom of the cup, and extends its fingers to the points of attack; and where they end--at smudges of silver-grey scattered about the bottom of the quarry--there creep little atoms, like mites on a cheese. Centuries have bedecked and adorned the sides of this stupendous pit; and while naked sheets and planes of colour, the work of recent years, still gleam starkly, all innocent of blade and leaf, elsewhere in deserted galleries and among cliff-faces torn bare by vanished generations of men, green things have made their home and flourished with luxuriance, to the eternal drip of surface water. Ferns and foxgloves and a thousand lesser plants thrive in niches and crevices of the stone; and there is a splendid passage of flame, where the mimulus has found its way by some rivulet into the quarry, and sheets a precipice with gold. By steps and scarps the sides fall, narrowing always to the bottom; but the cliff planes are huge enough for sunshine and shadow to paint wonderful pictures upon them and find the colours--the olive and blue and mossy green, or the great splashes and patches of rose and russet that make harmony there. They melt together brokenly; and sometimes they are fretted with darkness and spotted with caverns, or mottled and zigzagged by rusty percolations of iron. One noble cliff falls sheer five hundred feet to a wilderness of rock, and across its huge front there hang aerial threads, like gossamers, while at its crown black wheels and chimneys tower into the sky. Below, upon the bluff of a crag, there turns a wheel, and a great pump, with intermittent jolt and grunt, sucks the water from the bottom of the quarry and sends it to tanks up aloft. This machine, with its network of arms and wheels, hangs very black on the cliff-side, and a note of black is also carried into the midst of the grey and rosy cliff-faces by little wheels that hang from the gossamers and tiny threads depending from them. They drop to the mites in the silver-grey cheese beneath, and from time to time masses and wedges of nearly two tons weight are hoisted upward and float through the air to the surface, like thistle-down. The quarry is full of noises--the clank of the pumps, the rattle of the trucks, the hiss of pneumatic and steam drills, the clink of tampers and the rumble and rattle of the great rocks dislodged by crowbars from the cliffs. Men shout, too, and their voices are as the drone of little gnats; but sometimes, at the hour of blasting, an immense volume of sound is liberated, and the thunder of the explosion crashes round and round the cup and wakes a war of echoes thrown from cliff to cliff. Once there were dwellings within the cup; but the needs of the quarry caused their destruction, and now but two cottages remain. The ragged cliff-edges creep towards them, and they will soon vanish, after standing for a hundred years. Everywhere the precious stone, now silver-green, now silver-grey, is being dragged up the great incline, or wafted through air to the workers above; and once aloft, another army of men and boys set to work upon it and split and hack and chop and square it into usefulness. On all sides the midgets are burrowing below and wrestling with the stone above; thousands of tons leave the works weekly, and yet such is the immensity of the mass, that the sides of the quarry seem hardly changed from year to year. For more than three hundred and fifty years has man delved at Old Delabole. Elizabethans worked its rare slate; and since their time, labouring ceaselessly, we have scratched out this stupendous hole and covered our habitations therefrom, through the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. Cathedrals and cottages alike send to Delabole for their slates; there are extant buildings with roofs two hundred years old, that show no crack or flaw; while more ancient than the stones that cover man's home must be those that mark his grave, and Delabole slates in churchyards, or on church walls, might doubtless be found dating from Tudor times. Five hundred men and boys are employed at Old Delabole, and their homes cluster in the little village without the works. Their type is Celtic, but many very blonde, high-coloured men labour here. All are polite, easy, and kindly; all appear to find their work interesting and take pleasure in explaining its nature to those who may be interested. The slate fills countless uses besides that of roofing, and the methods of cleaving and cutting it cannot easily be described. Steam plays its part, and the masses are reduced to manageable size by steel saws which slip swiftly through them; then workmen tackle the imperishable stuff, and with chisel and mallet split the sections thinner and thinner. It comes away wonderfully true, and a mass of stone gives off flake after flake until the solid rock has turned into a pile of dark grey slates, clean and bright of cleavage and ready for the roof. Green-grey or "abbey-grey" is the mass of the quarry output; but a generous production of "green" is also claimed. This fine stuff runs in certain veins, and offers a tone very beautiful and pleasant to the eye. Lastly, there are the reds--jewels among slates--that shine with russet and purple. This stone is rare, and can only be quarried in small quantities. All varieties have the slightest porosity, and take their places among the most distinguished slates in the world. _ |
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