The Gwrhyd Blue Pennant quarry in Wales
harvesting stone
Thousands of square metres of the local Pennant sandstone have been used as paving and walling in the regeneration of Swansea. Richard Porch, part of the City Council's regeneration team, visited the quarry that has supplied the stone and found it unexpectedly picturesque.
I never once thought that my interest in all things to do with the built environment would expand to include a quarry on the Neath / Port Talbot / Powys / Carmarthenshire border. But it has.
Gwrhyd Specialist Stone Quarry at Rhiwfawr in the Upper Swansea Valley is something that most people generally do not consider quarries – truly picturesque.
It can be found at the end of a winding and, at times, precipitous country lane lined with sheep 300m up on Gwrhyd Mountain overlooking Cwmtwrch (which, translated from the Welsh, means Valley of the Wild Boar).
The quarry is roughly 12 miles north of Swansea and not far from the small hamlet of Rhiwfawr and the outskirts of Pontardawe.
Its origins are at once romantic and inspiring. In another age it would have been the stuff of fairy tales.
Gwrhyd Stone Quarry began life as a hill farm run by a farmer with four daughters. He had what farmers call a ‘lavatory field', one that was agriculturally useless.
However, below 150mm of topsoil was a gift from the gods in the form of a huge seam of rock that runs right through the farm, near a fault line in the earth's crust at that point.
This rock was laid down from accumulated beds of sand some 370million years ago in the Carboniferous period of Earth's history.
This was when the landmass that Wales was part of was closer to the equator and part of some tropical delta.
When Gwrhyd Stone Quarries' sandstone was still loose sand in a river delta, the majority of the creatures inhabiting the planet were basically large insects.
There were the dragonflies seen in school textbooks with wingspans measured in metres and centipedes the size of draught excluders.
Inundation after inundation caused by typhoons and tropical storms deposited layer upon layer of sand upon one another.
The result after 300million years or so of tectonic plate movement and vast pressures was the subterranean crop of Pennant sandstone that Gwrhyd Quarry now harvests.
It became a quarry because an outcrop of Pennant revealed itself when some topsoil was washed away.
The Davies family who own the farm these days began to dip into it and take the odd pieces for doorsteps, window cills and hearths using a hammer and chisel.
Pretty soon they realised they had an alternative source of income to hill farming and began to take more and more, extracting it the hard way wearing knee pads and wet gear.
The quarried stone was taken away on a trailer pulled by a tractor.
Of the four daughters, two left to lead lives independent of Gwrhyd while Katie and Karen stayed to run the quarry.
Each of the two daughters who remained paid their dues by spending a year splitting stone on the quarry face.
As a result they proudly say they know their product. And their product is a sandstone particularly resistant to weathering that makes a fine paving and building stone.
This stuff really was sand. If you look at it under even a hand lens you can see the individual grains.
In the stone they are bonded together by a natural lime or silica cement. The lovely warm red colour you see most often in sandstone is caused by iron oxides.
If fossils are your thing you are likely to be out of luck in this as any sandstone. What you will see – and in abundance – are marks made by animals that burrowed into the wet sand when it was the bed of a shallow sea or river. You can also clearly see the ripple marks caused by the action of the water.
There are superb examples of this in the Pennant sandstone paving supplied by Gwrhyd Quarry at the main entrance of Swansea's National Waterfront Museum.
Here virtually every stone bears either ripple marks from some Carboniferous riverbed or marks made by tunnel systems, preserved forever in stone and destined now to be walked over by generations of museum-goers.
Although a tough material in use, Gwrhyd's Pennant sandstone is relatively easily won from the quarry.
I watched the skilled operator of a JCB with a pneumatic drill-head peck deftly away at the rock face and saw large square blocks of the stone fall slowly out of the bed.
At times I thought it looked not so much like quarrying (no explosives are used at Gwrhyd) as the quiet dismantling of some vast stone wall.
The nature of sandstone and the beds it comes from means it can be quarried by attacking natural planes in the rock. Very little gets wasted at Gwrhyd. They say only 10% of the stone quarried is not used – a statistic to make many a dimensional stone quarrier, used to throwing away half or more of what he pulls from the face, weep.
What does not get used for window cills, coping stones or paving goes as decorative scree for the garden centre market.
Their main customers are builders merchants and local authorities with additional markets in Wales, the South West (Bristol) and London.
Today, Gwrhyd employ 31 people (mostly local but including a handful of Polish workers) in a beautiful location on the top of a magnificent hill with stunning views of the countryside around.
From the quarry edge you look out over the valley below as if from an aircraft and you can even (on a clear day) see the Bristol Channel glittering away to the south and the pastures of North Devon beyond that.
Quarries tend to be seen as industrialised blots on the landscape, but there is something both romantic and natural about Gwrhyd Quarry, as if the harvesting of its prehistoric sand is an organic extension of the hill farm with its 350 sheep and rare breed cattle.
Gwrhyd Stone Quarry is a thriving business in a beautiful setting, providing rural employment and exporting a natural Welsh product, giving Gwrhyd Farm Pennant sandstone as one of its main harvests.
www.specialiststone.com
Source:Natural Stone Specialist Magazine