Tonka trucks

You may recall me mentioning earlier this year that I was planning a camera club outing to The Coldstones Cut artwork and the adjacent Toft Gate lime kiln remains. Well, it happened... but sadly for some reason the old lime kiln was securely padlocked and the area inaccessible. I had taken photos there before (see HERE) but it was disappointing that my fellow photographers couldn't access it, as it is interesting. 

The artwork at the brow of the hill was open to explore though (see tomorrow). It overlooks the Coldstones Quarry, owned by Hanson, part of the Heidelburg Cement Group. Here they produce 600,000 tonnes of aggregate a year, for major construction projects in the UK. It is one of the highest quarries in England and its workings are almost completely hidden from view from the surrounding area, as they are burrowing down deep inside a hill. From the viewing platform at the artwork, there was a good view of the big machines and the crushing facilities. Those big yellow trucks look like Tonka Toys from this height. You can see the levels where they are working to blast and extract the rock, which then gets trucked up to the top to be crushed into aggregate in the sheds. 

Toft Gate Lime Kiln

Planning for our camera club's summer outings programme, my recent visit to The Coldstones Cut (HERE) sparked ideas, so I went back to properly research the area. Adjacent to the artwork and the modern quarry is a small limestone quarry and kiln, Toft Gate, that was operative in the late 19th century. It is now ruined but you can still see broadly what it would have been like and there's an informative display board.  

Large blocks of limestone would have been cut from the quarry by the hewers. The stone-breakers, often children, would have broken these up into smaller pieces to be fed into the top of the furnace. Around the base, skilled lime burners would have packed coal into the eight fireboxes. The furnace was capped and the fire was lit. It heated the stone to above 800°C, driving out carbon dioxide, ventilated through a long flue, to produce quicklime, which collected within the vaulted chamber under the furnace. This was then raked out into a pit and mixed with water to make 'slaked lime' ready to be transported by cart to the cities. It was used in mortar and limewash for building, and for agricultural purposes too.  

The above photo is looking from one of the fire pit cavities into the furnace and down to where the quicklime settled. The photo below shows the inside of the flue that travels uphill to a squat chimney (see final photo) that would have released the gases from the furnace. 

It must have been a hard life working in these places but similar kilns existed all over the limestone area of Yorkshire. Demand for lime products was huge, as the Industrial Revolution sparked the building of mills, factories and housing for the workers. My own house was built in 1901 with lime mortar. Over the years it basically hardens back into limestone and, if you ever need to drill into the walls, it's a grey, gritty, crumbly substance.  

The Coldstones Cut

On the way back from How Stean Gorge, I passed The Coldstones Cut, which I heard about and was keen to explore. The wind up there on the hill was strong and bitingly cold, so it wasn't altogether a pleasant experience but it is a fascinating structure. Built alongside a working limestone quarry on Greenhow Hill, it is a piece of public art on a monumental scale, which also provides a viewing platform for the quarry and surrounding scenery. It was built in 2010, designed by the artist Andrew Sabin, who took inspiration from the massive quarry itself and from the surrounding area and its industrial heritage of mining. It has echoes of ancient structures like Stonehenge, Neolithic longbarrows or some of our medieval castles. Made of huge blocks of rough stone, it consists of a long 'street' up to a terrace overlooking the quarry, with two steeply curving paths that spiral round ending in matching 'towers', almost like the drum towers of Skipton Castle. 

The views across Nidderdale are splendid:

as is the vista down into the quarry, which is cleverly hidden from view from the outside, burrowing down into the hill like a volcanic crater. 

The large 'bicycle' at the entrance is, I guess, a throwback to the time when the Grand Départ of the Tour de France rode up and down the steep local hills back in 2014. From this viewpoint you can see the large 'golf ball' radomes of Menwith Hill satellite listening station, managed by the RAF and the US National Security Agency. 

The twin towers have displays showing local wildlife and also the main points of interest in the surrounding landscape, though It was getting a bit dark to read them and I was more interested in the rather lovely sunset unfolding on the western horizon.