I am seeking information on ancient underground Limestone Mines and Quarries used for building your cathedrals and other great buildings.

I'm a yank, and did a search one time and came up with some great info on limestone quarries literally right under your feet. Some of these were in urban areas, go on for miles, and are incerdible. I remember reading they were used for hundreds of years and I was fascinated by the stone masons symbols used, the types of stone removal infrastructure necessary so that the mines would not collapse etc.

Unfortunately, I cannot seem to locate these pics or information on this site. The pics I found at the time were incredible. I was a spelunker as a young man, but here in the US (Michigan is where I live now, grew up in Kentucky), we simply do not have the cultural/ancient heritage you have in England/Europe. I would give a body for what you have just under your feet to explore on a weekend.

Can someone help direct me so I can at least look on line?
Best Regards,
David

DVD

Welcome to AN

Others will be better placed than me on details of where limestone that was used in cathedrals was dug however looking on the database at Box Freestone and nearby limestone mines and quarries would be a good start.

I believe in general you may be referring to Bath which has many, many miles of mined passages under the streets. My understanding is that a huge porgram of pumping concrete into them for stability is / was being done.

Others will be along to provide better / more detail than me later.

cheers

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Is there any reason why specifically limestone? Underground sandstone quarries played an equal part in the construction of ancient buildings. It's a grossly under-researched area, certainly in contrast to metal mining.

I was also wondering that. Durham Cathedral was built from sandstone although not I believe from underground quarries. If we include sandstone then a couple for starters.
http://www.aditnow.co.uk/mines/Hownes-Gill-Quarry-Limestone-Mine/ 
http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=30749 

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In England, the first significant major use of stone from underground quarries was probably very soon after the Norman Conquest and was of Caen stone imported from Normandy. These quarries still exist, and the stone was used in the construction of the first Norman cathedrals, certainly in the South East, and the White Tower at the Tower of London. The Normans wanted to make the English understand that they were not going to go away. The impression these huge structures would have had on the locals would have been quite intimidating.

http://www.choghole.co.uk/Main%20page.htm 
this is a good site for the bath stone stuff
lots of pics and history and how it was done stuff
you can search for more from the quarry/mine names
http://www.darkplaces.co.uk/phpBB2/portal.php 
this one is good for pics but you might need to register to see them all - use the names from the first one to search with
http://www.mine-explorer.co.uk/default.asp  same for this site
http://www.wcms.org.uk/index.shtml  this is good for the stuff s of london in sandstone

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It is also worth bearing in mind that on the whole, most of the underground quarries we can visit today are actually not that old, and most were dug from the 18th century onwards. Older workings do exist, but are difficult to identify as later working often obliterated the evidence. Unaffected workings from medieval times are rare.

An important thing to remember is that people don't generally mine underground if they can win the stone from the surface, so in medieval times, unless they were trying to get at a specific bed of stone which had a lot of overburden they'd have quarried from the surface.

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The list of buildings that used Portland Stone is very impressive.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_stone#Portland_stone_buildings .

Maybe to underline AR's point they now mine the stone. There was a short film of this on South West today recently.

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DVD – I live in a limestone mining area and would really like to do and/or share some research within a group of interested people.

Limestone mining seems to be a bit of a Cinderella in terms of IA although limekilns are sometimes a surface feature of note. The Bath and West Wiltshire stone mining area is of course very well known and visited but there were extensive mines in many other parts of the Cotswolds and further afield.

This is a good resource for Masons marks, it starts with foreign but has large amount of UK stuff too.
http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/mason-mark.html 

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DVD - how do you define "ancient"? To me it means 17th century or older, but that is a purely personal view. It really defines a boundary between modern industrial and pre-industrial eras.

As you mention cathedrals and other grand buildings, I took this to mean medieval stuff.

With reference to the "link" provided by Carnkie to the list of buildings that used Portland stone, that is found on Wikipedia. There is a glaring mistake in the reference under "Memorials" which states "All grave stones for British personell killed in the First and Second World War are made out of Portland Stone". This information is incorrect, as the order was placed by the Government with a famous Derbyshire quarry, i.e. Hopton Wood Stone quarry sited near Middleton-by-Wirksworth to supply the gravestones which are in fact made of Carboniferous limestone and not Jurassic as the Portland limestones are. Also in this quarry was found one bed of pure marble (i.e. limestone metamorphised by volcanic heat to marble). Work at this quarry ceased in the late 1940's about 1948/49 time.

Roger the Cat - about 1964 with my ex and Dr. Trevor Ford (PDMHS and Leicester University) we explored a tiny stone mine at Stonesfield in the Cotswolds, it was shallow workings, accessed by a small shaft approximtely 20/25 deep, it dropped into a small chamber with no workings off, and had obviously been mined for stone for slating roofs in the locality. Trevor thought that this was how the village got the name of Stonesfield. Afterwards Trevor wrote an article about this mine (from memory I think it could have been in a Cave Research Group publication) and around the same time published a detailed report (again I think a CRG publication) on the quarries of Portland Bill in Dorset, of which I have a copy. Portland Bill is worth spending a day on exploring, not only does it have quarries inland and on the the cliffs from where the stone was loaded onto boats, but there is the Portland Museum given by Dr. Marie Stopes (who incidently was a Doctor of Geology) with it's stone collection, and the church of St. George's (now closed and only open at Xmas and St. George's Day 23rd April for services)with it's graveyard and wonderful carvings on the tombstones.

I suspect that there are some more incorrect assumptions in that Wikipedia link with regard to the older structures mentioned in London.

Roger the Cat:

If you haven't come across this book, I can highly recommend it.

http://www.moorebooks.co.uk/shelves/cart.php?target=product&product_id=18545&category_id=329 

Many thanks for the information, Peter.

There is also a little book by David Bick on the ‘Gloucester& Cheltenham Tramroad and the Leckhampton Quarry Lines’ (ISBN 10: 0853613362) which I must investigate further.

I was thinking particularly of your research into the chalk mines around Riegate as a good template for my local investigations, which I regret I have hardly touched.

The remains of the surface quarries around Leckhampton Hill which supplied stone for Cheltenham are still visible and accessible, including the famous ‘Devil’s Chimney’. There was also an incline which ran, I believe, from the quarries to what is the main Leckhampton – Cheltenham road near Tramway Cottage.

Further south in the Golden Valley around Stroud, there were extensive networks of tunnels under Minchinhampton and Rodborough commons, and the Rockness area near Nailsworth and Balls Green in the Avening Valley. I am not able to find anything on the internet which is very informative about these and most of the entrances mentioned in caving reports are stated to be on private property and are considered dangerous.

I live above an old quarry at Chalford just outside Stroud which must be nearly 200 years old or more as the house built on the floor of the quarry below must date from the 1830's if not earlier. As in a number of cases in Chalford, there appears to be a heading in the rock face which in this case is used by the current owner as a garden store. It would be intriguing to find out if it leads anywhere!

Nick

For Chalk Mines, read Firestone Quarries ! 😉

Otherwise, you flatter me. 😞

As a very brief aside, the link below goes to the summer 2009 edition of the ‘Nailsworth Fountain’ and tells of the sad story of Mr Tadeuz Zurek who was a local 'character' and judging by the picture of the wall he built, an accomplished mason. It is an example of perhaps why locals have shied away from the stone mines in the past.

I think there was another incident at Rockness involving 3 boys who were lost in the underground chambers and were rescued due to the persistence of cave rescue personnel despite objections from the police attending the incident. Rather reminiscent of the Worrying Shaft Incident in the post.

http://www.aviq36.dsl.pipex.com/fountain/ISSUE%2047%20r%20.pdf 

DVD - how do you define "ancient"? To me it means 17th century or older, but that is a purely personal view. It really defines a boundary between modern industrial and pre-industrial eras.

As you mention cathedrals and other grand buildings, I took this to mean medieval stuff.

Until twenty or so years ago, 'Ancient = pre-Roman; 'Dark Age' = Roman to Conquest; 'Medieval' = Conquest to roughly Henry VII; 'Early Modern = roughtly Henry VII to circa 1750.

However, 'Dark Age' fell from favour and 'Medieval' was stretched back to end Roman, often divided into 'Early Medieval' for the pre-Conquest period.

A degree of fine-tuning tends tio be used in these otherwise general terms by using 'High Medieval' (roughly 1300 to Henry VII; 'sub-Roman' (roughly first 200 years after Roman), and so forth.

I am pretty sure DVD did not mean pre-Roman when he wrote "ancient"...... 🙂