I’m down in Devon visiting my parents for half-term and we always try to fit in one of the many local tourist attractions that we never went to while I was a child growing up through the annual invasions of ‘grockles’. (I remember 70s summer Saturdays as days where you didn’t go anywhere, because the constant stream of ‘changeover day’ traffic to and from the holiday camp at the end of the road made it almost impossible to get the car out of the drive.)
Today’s attraction was Beer Quarry Caves – unusually for an underground tourist attraction, entirely man-made. Beer stone was quarried here from the arrival of the Romans up until the Victorian era when the quarrying moved to a new site. Almost 2000 years of hand excavation have left a 700 acre underground complex for our laconic guide to lead us through.
The ticket booth is little more than a garden shed and the ‘museum’ in the cave opening consists of four or five large boards covered by a few laminated pictures alongside a few rusty tools. But this inauspicious start conceals an intriguing and entertaining attraction that is well worth an hour’s damp, cool walk.
The year-round constant temperature would make the caves even more attractive on a hot summer’s day, but even on a damp October afternoon there was a noticeable drop in temperature upon entering. I imagine it wasn’t something you worried about if you were spending your working day in a team of five hewing a four-ton block of stone by candlelight using just a pick axe, iron wedges and a hammer. It really is incredible that this entire complex was excavated by hand (and horse). Even the introduction of gunpowder only made the first stage of the process easier – once a space had been blown to get at the top of the seam, the removal of the blocks still had to be done by hand to avoid damage to the stone.
One aspect that I hadn’t realised is that the stone is much softer and easier to carve while fresh out of the ground – it hardens once exposed to the air – and so much of the carving of ornate window pieces for local churches (one of which has been returned to the quarry after 400 years) was done underground by candlelight before being packed and shipped all along the south coast (and some even as far as St Louis in the US) for assembly.
I’ll definitely look differently at Exeter Cathedral next time I visit, having started to gain some understanding of the work that went into quarrying the stone, before the masons and builders could even begin their work.
And, by visiting at the end of the season, we were lucky enough to see the first of the hundreds of bats who hibernate in the caves annually.
onewordreview :: cool
