It seems to me that when it comes down to considering the industrial heritage of Cornwall the role of the quarries and quarrymen is somewhat underplayed. This is no doubt because of the unique importance of metal mining and the extraordinary amount of evidence, both documentary and archaeologically that has survived.
But actually much the same can be said of the quarries. You have only to look around and it’s all there including two great churches eight centuries apart, St. Germans and Truro; farmhouses and farmbuildings; stone walls and hedges; etc. The colours and textures vary enormously. Granite in Penzance, St. Just and St. Ives; yellow-brown soft slate killas in Truro; harder blue slate in Wadebridge and Camelford and brown culm in the extreme north. In a survey made in 1938, 255 quarries having a face exceeding 20ft in depth were recorded.
Tartan Down Quarry in Landrake is a good example. In the 10th-12th centuries St. Germans was the cathedral town of Cornwall. The great Norman church here was built about 1160, is unique in Cornwall, and the masons used the dark elvan stone from the Tartan Down Quarry. What finer reminder could there be?

St. Germans Church.
🔗Tartan-Down-Other-Rock-Quarry-User-Album-Image-001[linkphoto]Tartan-Down-Other-Rock-Quarry-User-Album-Image-001[/linkphoto][/link]

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Well said Carnkie.... I had little or no respect for the hard rock quarries until I went to Hay Tor Granite Quarries (its on here) on Dartmoor and discovered not only the amazing railway but the largly forgotten work of the many hundreds of people who worked in open and terrible conditions to provide the stone that adorns many of our famous buildings and memorials - regardless of whether its Devon, Cornwall or even Scotland they are I fear a largly forgotten workforce when you consider the hundreds of thousands of tons extracted over the centuries!

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Interesting point that Brunel himself selected the stone from Westwood Quarry.

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Just added Cheesering Quarry which as its probably about one of the generally best known Quarry's in Cornwall wasn't on the DB amazingly.

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Carnkie, is this Isambard Kingdom Brunel?
What was the selected Westwood stone used for?

The very same. Apparently the stone is hard brown slate-killas, selected by Brunel for the building of the piers for twenty railway viaducts between Saltash and Coombe-by-St. Stephens, West of St Austell. I believe the bridge(s) are carried on the piers.

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I assume that these bridges are iron.
Is the Royal Albert Bridge over the Tamar at Saltash included?
Is the Westwood Quarry still worked?

Well certainly the St. Pinnock Bridge which is the loftiest of all railway viaducts in Cornwall (151 ft) and the finest remaining of the works of Brunel (excluding Saltash) is an iron-girder bridge. Half a mile to the west is the only similar viaduct but not so high, the East Largin. Along this stretch of railway there are five other notable stone viaducts, all rebuilt from the original timbered bridges.
Not sure about the Saltash, would have to check.
As far as I know it's still worked. I think I spotted it in a list of working Cornish quarries recently.

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Thanks.

I had understood that the majority of the viaducts west of Saltash on the original Cornwall Railway (?) as engineered by IKB were timber trestles on stone piers. Some of these were later replaced by entirely new stone/steel girder viaducts alongside the older structures. At Moorswater (Liskeard) you can still see the original piers to one side of the present structure. Please correct me if I am wrong.

You are right, the timber viaduct piers were not re-used, new were built and the GW slewed the track over once complete, the original vaiducts were then dismantled leaving only the stone basesof the timber viaducts at the side of them.

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I'm certainly not saying you are wrong. The reference I've been using is "Industrial Archaeology of Cornwall" by A.C. Todd and Peter Laws,
The five viaducts I referred to earlier were all rebuilt from the original timbered bridges between 1877 and 1897. They lie between SX135650 and SX195647, and were Penadlake, Clinnick, Derrycombe, West Largin and Wesrwood.
I think I see the problem. Or one of them. Brunel was associated with the first two mentioned earlier, St. Pinnock and East largan in the 1850s but of course he was dead when the others were rebuilt.
Certainly at St Pinnock the iron-girder bridge of 1882 is carried on the the brown-slate of Westwood Quarry stone built by Brunel in !854-5.

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The Cornwall Railway linked Plymouth with Falmouth. The section from Plymouth to Truro was opened on 4 May 1859, and the remainder to Falmouth on 24 August 1863. This was after Brunel's death and so was built under the supervision of R P Brereton.

The route crossed 45 rivers and deep valleys. Of these 42 were crossed by timber viaducts of various types. The remainder were the River Tamar at Saltash crossed on the Royal Albert Bridge, the River Fowey at Lostwithiel crossed by a low three-span viaduct (two spans being timber, the central one iron), and the river and canal at Par crossed on a five-arch low stone viaduct.

Replacement of the viaducts started in 1875 but led to a dispute between the Cornwall Railway and the Great Western Railway which leased the line. The lease precluded the conversion of the broad gauge line to standard gauge, and the Cornwall Railway refused to pay for the widening of the viaducts during rebuilding to accommodate a double line of standard gauge tracks (it had been built as a single-track line).

Following the amalgamation of the two companies on 1 July 1889 all the remaining viaducts were replaced, those between Saltash and St Germans being replaced by a deviation line, the remainder being either rebuilt in situ or having a replacement viaduct built immediately alongside. Because of this, many of Brunel's original piers still remain today.

SEE "CORNWALL RAILWAY VIADUCTS" IN WIKIPEDIA

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Cheesering quarry has a "wr" in it ;)

Does the St Pinnock viaduct still exist as it was in 1854, apart from the obvious changes of course. In other words the last remaing works of Brunel in Cornwall?

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... wr.... ? So it does and I have corrected accordingly!! Ta For That :thumbup:

Edit... strange that cos I used to know that as I had written it in my notes on my various walks correctly... Old age setting in!

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The quoins for two viaducts on the Falmouth branch namely College Wood and Ponsanooth were supplied by my cousins from their Treloweth quarry at Mabe near Penryn.
This is all fascinating stuff but I feel it is getting way O.T for this site

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You are probably right but initially I was merely trying to emphasise the importance of quarries. That's one of the problems (interesting of course) I find with mining history. Everything is interlinked and than the digressions............not by me of course. 🙂
Entered some of the Mabe quarries today but not individually.

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The quoins for two viaducts on the Falmouth branch namely College Wood and Ponsanooth were supplied by my cousins from their Treloweth quarry at Mabe near Penryn.
This is all fascinating stuff but I feel it is getting way O.T for this site

Possibly OT, but to be able to connect a structure to the quarry it came from is a valuable exercise as it links the primary purpose the quarry was worked with something tangible, and is something that can rarely be done when discussing metal mines. I was fascinated to find half-worked moorstones in the Bearah Tor area, nicely cut or dressed, but abandoned and still there to this day. I wondered when I found them what structure they might have been destined for.

This little snippet I've added to the De Link DB might be of interest as I noticed you added some photos.

De Lank quarries in recent years are probably still producing the best Cornish granite available.
Their first internationally known product was the fourth Eddystone lighthouse completed in 1759. The stone for the lighthouse was hewn in a quarry known as 'the Eddystone', now no longer used.
Further examples of the archaeology of the quarrymen are Beachy Head Lighthouse 1901, and the present Eddystone completed in 1882.
The list seems endless. Huge quantities of De Lank granite were exported for constructing the great docks at Singapore and Gibralter and for the Thames Bridges at Putney, Lambeth and Chelsea. The great towers of Tower Bridge are built of De Lank granite. Brunel's son had a hand in the design. They also had an unusual commission from a Yugoslavian steel works.

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