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| 2 - Hartshill Quarry | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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Hartshill has existed as a village since Roman times. Until the 1800s most people in Hartshill were farmers. The Jee family owned a lot of the land in Hartshill and they started Hartshill Quarry on their land. A lot of people came to Hartshill to be Quarrymen so Hartshill grew much larger than it had been.
The Picture above of Jees Granite Quarry shows how large the quarry pits quickly became. The Quarrymen only wanted to dig out the granite. The rest of the earth and rock they dug up at the same time but didn’t want was called spoil. Find out what they did with all this spoil by listening the Quarrymen. Find out by listening to these quarrymen:
As
the Quarrymen said there was nothing else to do with the spoil
except build up big piles of it next to the quarries. These were
so steep that engines couldn’t get up them. Instead winding
gears had to pull the trucks up the tracks as shown in the picture
below.
Instead of engines, the trucks would have been pulled up the tracks by cables from winding gears at the top because the spoil heaps were so steep. Hartshill Church was built with the stone from Hartshill Quarry. The stone from the quarry wasn’t usually used for building as it was too hard and difficult to carve. To find out more about what Hartshill Stone was used for click on Bridge 32.
What about now? The mound is known as ‘Jee's’ after the local family who owned one of the quarries from the early 19th century until 1970. It is now such a well-known landmark that local people do not want to see it removed!
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