Like the Quarryman’s Walk, Camp Hill School Quarry Garden was created to reflect the history of quarrying Hartshill. The Garden recreates and interprets a Quarry Rock Face and will also serve as an outdoor class room for the school for years to come. The Quarry Garden Design was based on the ideas of pupils and teachers at Camp Hill.

Quarry Garden Masterplan

The physical improvement has transformed an unimaginative, expanse of tarmac and security fencing into an area that will enhance learning and hopefully help to improve pupil performance.

Before the Quarry Garden

The finished Quarry Garden at Camp Hill School
The Active Quarry		The Quarry Face Garden

The school now has a valuable educational resource where future generations of children can continue to learn about the aggregate industry. The garden incorporates local aggregate, and is planted to reflect the biodiversity of a regenerating quarry. There are three main areas within the garden:

1. The Active Quarry – an active area representing a working quarry, featuring an activity trail following the different stages of extraction, interpretation/art panels, vehicle tracks, dumper truck toys, and tactile paving (a granite sett path)
2. The Quarry Face Seating Circle – a teaching space enclosed by locally sourced stone stacked to recreate a quarry rock face, a falling rock danger sign to mimic those seen at quarries, seating, an interactive interpretation board, and trees to reinforce the space
3. The Regenerating Quarry – an area representing a regenerating quarry featuring native planting, a wildflower meadow, pioneer tree and shrub species, along with tyres donated from a local quarry to illustrate the vast scale of quarry machinery, and an interactive interpretation board.

Follow this link to more on the Quarry Garden.

Follow this link to find out more about how Groundwork works with schools on grounds improvement projects.

The second element to the Quarry Garden project was an educational element of class room sessions in which pupils learnt about where aggregate comes from, how it is used and what the benefits are. The children examined how a landscape changes through the extraction process and what benefits this has on a community. The project linked to the curriculum through literacy, citizenship, mathematics, geography and history and the children learnt about the dangers of the sites and how to respect and enjoy them.

Children show off their Quarry Safety posters

This project has been a real success. The children have really benefited from the educational sessions and have learnt a lot about the aggregates industry which sits on their doorstep. The messages from these sessions have been complimented and reinforced by visits to quarry and landfill sites where the children got to experience and learn about the industry first hand. The children are now much more aware of the dangers of quarry sites and this message will be spread to other pupils through interpretation in the Quarry Face Garden. We hope that this will help to prevent any further accidents, or at worst, fatalities in the area.

Follow this link to find out more about the class room sessions.

These two elements of the project were combined through the work done in class room sessions. For example the children created fossil clay tiles, recycled musical instruments and mini beast mobiles that are incorporated in to the Quarry Garden.

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