CORNWALL’S HOLE

Greymouth Evening Star, 6 November 1931, Page 3

CORNWALL’S HOLE

AN ANCIENT QUARRY. Away down in the country of “Tre, Pol, and Pen, by which you may know the Cornishmen,” there is a mighty hole in the earth- This has been growing bigger and bigger for the last 400 years, for the Delabole slate quarry has been providing sjate for all kinds of purposes since long before the days of Queen Elizabeth, says the Christian Science Monitor.

The village of Delabole itself, one edge of which loqks as though it were precariously perched on the edge of the hole, lives prosperously on slate. The houses are built and roofed with it, in fact, for miles aropnd the front doorsteps of the cottages are slabs of slate, old barns and farms are roofed with thick plaques of it, and even the walls dividing the fields show plenty of it. This great hole in the ground is some 500 feet ip depth and covers mapy acres. Seen from above, the q-tfarrymen look like ants moving about. One can see the workers busy on different levels hewing out the blocks varying in colour from pale yellow to the well-known slate grey. In the yards around the workshops are rows upon rows of neatly piled roofing slates cut to carying sizes. Inside are men "busy fashioning the slabs, some by the aid of machinery, some still by hand as it has been done for centuries. Watch this man sitting on the- ground with a great leather gaiter against his leg and a dozen slabs of slate near him, each an inch or more in thickness. His only tools are a wooden mallet and an implement like a broaod-bladed chisel with a slightly curved edge. With a slab against his leg he taps a line by eye along the top side and one end, half a dozen heavier blows along the line and the slabs split neatly from top to bottom. The process is repeated until the pieces are too thin to handle further. It is this man who occasionally finds fossils of birds or bats which must have been embedded in the slate when it was a soft clay thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago. It is curious that through the slate slabs can be so easily split,., yet inscriptions can be cut in it so that even after the lapse of 150 years the lettering appears sharp and clean. It is not everyone who knows that “fuller’s earth,” which, not so long ago, was in common ' use for powdering babies after their baths, is nothing but slate powdered to a’ great degree of fineness. This is still used in the chemists’ trade, and a small department exists at Dfclabole for producing it. r