Burlington Slate Quarries are located near Kirkby-in-Furness in Cumbria, England. The quarries have produced a characteristic blue-grey slate for hundreds of years, with large-scale production starting in the early 19th century, when the Cavendish family organised small-scale quarrying activities by local farmers into a larger group of quarries, which then attracted others into the area to live and work in the quarries from the 1820s onwards.
The quarrying at Burlington can be directly related to the development of Kirkby, which merged from six smaller farming hamlets: Soutergate, Wall End, Beck Side, Sand Side, Marshside and Chapels. The opening of the slate quarry helped merge these together, the name Kirkby dating from the construction of the Cumbrian Coast railway line to the village.
The quarry is not worked on a galleries system, as many quarries are, but as an enormous pit several hundred feet in depth. The quarry operations have spread throughout and under Kirkby Moor, but now production only takes place at the very bottom of the quarry; with the rock being removed via a cutting from a shallower part of the pit.
Typical of many Welsh slate quarries, such as Dinorwig, Penrhyn and Rhiw-Bach, Burlington adopted the use of inclined railways to provide material transport from the quarries. The lowest of the series was the Sandside, which connected Burlington with the port and mainline railway at Sandside on the Duddon Estuary.
Famous quotes containing the word quarries:
“Three million of such stones would be needed before the work was done. Three million stones of an average weight of 5,000 pounds, every stone cut precisely to fit into its destined place in the great pyramid. From the quarries they pulled the stones across the desert to the banks of the Nile. Never in the history of the world had so great a task been performed. Their faith gave them strength, and their joy gave them song.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)