the Oyma site coming out of buxton. does anyone know when it was first opened?

I believe the present big complex of quarries dates to the early 1950s under ICI - the permissions were certainly in place, that's why the national Park bundary around Buxton is so oddly shaped, it was specifically drawn up to exclude most of the major quarries. I don't know when earlier quarrying, started I think Buxton Lime Firms had a number of smaller sites in the area in the first half of the 20th century and I think there's some quarrying on the opposite side to Ashwood Dale quarry on the 1898 OS.

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cheers, we went up the other day to inquire but the manager wasn't on site.

the reason behind all this is we are trying to find where they quarried the stone for the building of taddington bypass in the 1930's

As highways were the responsibility of the Highways/Surveyor's Department of Derbyshire County Council, and presumably the Taddington By-pass was constructed between the two world wars, along with much other needed road construction at this time around the UK, e.g. The Winchester By-Pass being the first ever by-pass constructed in England in the 1930's; why don't you pay a vist to the Derbyshire Record Office at Matlock to see if any of the County Surveyor's Department's records that could give you a clue as to where the stone was purchased have been placed there? Prior to 1956 Derbyshire County Council with all it's departments was sited in St. Mary's Gate, Derby and moved to it's present location at Smedley's Hydro, Matlock during that year. The DRO is found in New Street, Matlock in the old Ernest Bailey buildings. Just a suggestion!

p.s. AR - similarly the quarries in the southern part of the Peak, i.e. Cawdor quarry, Matlock, the opencast on Masson Hill, all those in Matlock Bath, the Via Gellia etc were all carefully excluded outside the proposed Peak Park Boundaries. I worked in the DCC's Architect's Department at the time the Peak Park came into being and I clearly remember the Chairman of the Directors of Derbyshire Stone Ltd., presenting a brand new chain of office to the then Chairman of Derbyshire County Council who was Charles White from Starkholmes and who incidently was the person who instigated the move of the County Council from the County Town which is Derby to Matlock.

cheers, we went up the other day to inquire but the manager wasn't on site.

the reason behind all this is we are trying to find where they quarried the stone for the building of taddington bypass in the 1930's

I did wonder, I've been following the thread on UKC http://ukcaving.com/board/index.php/topic,9452.0.html  with interest, although the most recent evidence suggests that the press reports describing the cave as being "in Taddington dale" were way off the mark, Taddington dale is the valley between Taddington village and where it meets the Wye near Dimmins dale.

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yes its me + servo looking :p

i was just ruling out ashwood dale as i dont believe with the kit oyma have at that site, and it being relativity small that they've been working it for at least 80 years. unless there very lazy. i said to servo that during the 30's theres no way they hauled stone all that way for 1 mile of carriageway. but that user mark thinks it is. and shows pics of a hole in a freshly blasted face.

like i said, just pretty much trying to disprove what the user mark has stated.

AR - Thanks for the link to ukcaving website. Oh dear! Please do not take Mr. Brindley's newspaper articles as being gospel. He was still around writing when I first started mine exploration in 1951 and we learnt to take his articles with a pinch of salt, they could be very exaggerated on occasions. It was he who wrote the article about the "barking dog" of Jugholes Cave, and the lead miner being lost there, boiled alive in thermal springs and exiting from a sough tail in Matlock Bath. It was also his article in the Derbyshire Times in either February or March 1952 about the Winster Earth Tremors,in which he suggested the large caverns left behind by lead miners of the 18th/19th centuries who had worked large pipe workings beneath the village were collapsing and the cause of the tremors. This sent some of the villagers into panic thinking parts of the village were going to fall into mine workings, and is the reason that my old mine exploration club "Op Mole" was called in by Winster Parish Council to explore some of the mines and disprove this theory. Exploration proved that the mines were safe and a detailed report was given to the Parish Council.

In all probability, as I previously suggested, and which is confirmed by the newspaper cuttings dates, the Taddington By-Pass was constructed in the 1930's, the dale was widened by blasting for this work to be carried and any limestone obtained from this work was probably utilised in the roadworks. During the blasting a cave was found and explored but stories of it's discovery and exploration were greatly exaggerated upon by Mr. Brindley. I would be very sceptical myself.

I've just looked at the 1898 25" and surprisingly, the Ashwood Dale lime works at the junction with Cunning Dale was there and in operation! I can only assume that the large quarry on the south side of the dale (which it seems didn't open until a few years later as it wasn't there in 1898) took over as the focus of operation and they moved back to the current working when they'd exhausted that site. It'd be worth having a look at some of the later large-scale OS maps to see if there's much expansion in the present quarry and whether it was marked as in use or not.

Another thing worth of note is that the site is described as a lime works in 1898, which means that its quarry was supplying lime kilns. That's not to say it wasn't dug for roadstone later, but I know someone who might know - I'll see what I can turn up.

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sweet we were up the other quarry the other day, big old face for the time lol

sougher

what about the womans ghost down there? :p

where did they make the valley wider exactly? the original road ran up the valley, and by the layout of the valley i see no reason to make it wider for its current width? nor and signs of widening it.

The only part of the "old" A6 that's been widened is a small bit at the top of the dale where went round a crag and it's been smoothed off a bit. There's also a bit just to the west of where the old road goes into the village that's been cut into, and behind both of these there is a vein (Swine rake). Other than that, there are head-high cuttings on the bypass course, and some embankment works above what may be the old horse mill site.

Incidentally, there's a resurgence in a bedding plane I've seen at the side of the road further down - too small to even think about crawling up but it shows there's natural holes about.

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yeah? we went in the one just up deepdale at the bottom of taddy dale a couple of weeks back, resurgence from a bedding cave, took my brave pills, de clothed and went for a bit of a swim. bloooooooooody freezing 😛

From memory wasn't there a murder a few years ago and the body hidden in a cave/rock shelter by the side of the A6 as it climbs up to Taddington?

good few years back now, shot in manchester i think + dumped in the rockshelter. last layby on left i think, going up just before duel carriageway

No, from memory he was on his way to Manchester and stopped at the layby on Taddington Hill where he was murdered. A caving friend told me police cameras were lowered down Magpie main drawing shaft in the search for the gun, and many other mining areas were searched too.

“Over the weekend of 13-14 May 1989 the Defendants armed themselves with a sawn-off .22 rifle intending to commit a “tie-up” robbery using handcuffs which were in their possession. Having been unsuccessful in their plans to rob, the Defendants in the early hours of Monday 15th May 1989 drove along the A6 Bakewell to Buxton Road. At Taddington Vale in a lay-by an entirely innocent member of the public, the deceased, a married man with two young children, (Colin John Grindley) had parked his Vauxhall Estate car probably for a rest after his long drive from Croydon. The Defendants saw his car and proceeded to waylay him. They handcuffed his hands behind his back and took him to a shallow cave near to the lay-by. There they laid him face down in the dirt and shot him twice through the back of the head at some time between 2.45 and 3.50 a.m. The killing amounted to a cold-blooded execution. The Defendants stole some money from the deceased together with his suitcase. The case against the Defendants was one of overwhelming circumstantial evidence.”

sound like a nice bunch............

Thanks for filling in the details. Goodness was it that long ago? How times flies!

No, from memory he was on his way to Manchester and stopped at the layby on Taddington Hill where he was murdered. A caving friend told me police cameras were lowered down Magpie main drawing shaft in the search for the gun, and many other mining areas were searched too.

It was (quite apart from its tragic reason) a cavers beano. It was suspected that the perpetrators had disposed of the weapon down one of the many open shafts in the peak.
We got tasked with examining the Magpie shaft via the sough, the week before the unsucessfull camera attempt - the shaft having far too much debris below water, for the camera to pass without becoming entangled.
Over several weeks many mines were entered, which under normal circumstances were strictly off limits.

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I've been in touch with one of my PDMHS colleagues (Chris Heathcote) who knows the Ashwood Dale area well. The only cave he knows of is April cave, which he described as being in the cliff face next to the access track to the old (1870s) quarry further up Cunning Dale. However, the area this is in is now being backfilled and when he last was in the dale the cave entrance had been buried. He also pointed out that Eldon didn't discover it (he played in it as a boy in the early 1960s) they just got into print first! :lol:

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A further update - I remembered there is a small quarry part way down Taddington dale,and on checking the 25" OS it wasn't there in 1898 so I nipped down for a quick look. There were a few possible entrances in the quarry face, including one quite high up but all of them closed down within a few feet. The bit at the point where the dual carriageway starts was dropping veinstuff onto the side of the road but I couldn't see any obvious hole in, either from below or above.

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