Tintagel Slate Quarries

Rock pinnacles in West Quarry

Tintagel Slate Quarries are a series of quarries lying between Tintagel Castle and Trebarwith Strand on the north coast of Cornwall, South West England. There are around eight quarries as well as two wharfs, all of which are now disused. The first quarry to be worked appears to have been Lanterdan at some point in the fifteenth century, while Long Grass Quarry ceased operations in 1937. The remains of these quarries occupy coastal land owned by the National Trust and most are easily accessible from the South West Coast Path.

The Quarries

Gillow

Long Grass

Lambshouse and Gull Point

Dria

Bagalow

Caroline

Lanterdan

West

The Slate

The working faces of the quarries reach to the full height of the cliffs- 60m in the north and 100m in the south. The cliff top is relatively flat with no naturally occurring coves, bays or river valleys. The stone itself is Upper Devonian slate and Lower Carboniferous slate of a greyish green colour and was used predominantly for roofing. The slate closer to sea level is generally of better quality than that higher up.

Quarrying in Tintagel

Prince of Wales Quarry

There are two types of quarry along this streth of coastline. Those to the north (Gillow, Long Grass, Lambshouse, Gull Point, Dria, Bagalow and the northern part of Caroline) are sea cliffs where the slate workfaces were already exposed and which have simply been cut into. The southern end of Caroline as well as Lanterdan and West quarries are more conventional where the slate has been dug out of the cliff rather than into it.

Working the cliff face quarries will have involved clearing away any surface material such as soil, grass and loose stones and dumping them in the sea. A strong point will have been established on bedrock a short way back from the cliff edge. On the rock immediately above the cliff edge, a whim is built. This is a wooden frame with a pulley that is anchored at the strong point and operated by a donkey or horse walking in circles, often while blindfolded to avoid distractions.

Quarrying will have been a hazardous occupation with men suspended by ropes as they worked the vertical rock face. The whims were used to winch workers down and buckets of slate back up. The stone was extracted by hand using drills but also with explosives, and the value of the slate extracted clearly made this kind of hazardous and labour-intensive quarrying cost-effective.

The slate was dressed or split into thin, usable tiles in sheds at the top of the cliff, then taken by tramways to be shipped from nearby wharves or transported by rail from Camelford Station. Any waste product was simply tipped into the sea.

Industrial Remains

The remains of whims, dressing sheds and food and powder stores litter the cliffs above the quarries. Most are in a ruinous state but the offices, powerhouse and smithy belonging to Long Grass quarry now serve as Tintagel's youth hostel. Well-preserved whims can be seen at Lambshouse and Caroline quarries and the remains of a toolshed perches on the clifftop above Caroline quarry. Caroline quarry also has a large cave hacked into the cliff face by quarrymen- the cave gives its name to Hole Beach, a surfing beach below the quarry workings. In between Gull Point and Dria quarries is Penhallick Wharf, an abandoned loading dock cut into the side of the cliff, and another disused wharf can be found at Port William to the north of Trebarwith Strand.

Legacy

Despite Tintagel having a centuries-old slate quarrying history, ever since the publication of Tennyson's Idylls of the King in 1859, the focus of tourism in the village has been on King Arthur. However these quarries and are testament to an actual rather than a fictitious history. Despite occupying a spectacular coastal location, there is currently no visitor centre nor even any informational signage, and no tourists are directed here.