Quarry

On Sunday I was allowed into the quarry on my own for the first time. It was a gloriously sunny day with crisp white snow underfoot. Magical. I got to wander around and just look and think for an hour and a half.

The stillness was only broken by stones running off and bird calls. I found tracks of animals scaling quite high mounds of stones. The landscape had a sense of otherness. A world apart.

I got to do want I’d wanted to do from the beginning. I walked into and stood in the heart of the hill. Figures appeared out of the rocks like carvings on Chartres Cathedral; opened up by quarrying, stone was seeing light for the first time.

Nobody told me they were blasting yesterday, they forgot. To see a blast firing in the snow…

So today I climbed up the hill and over the security fence to photograph the quarry in the snow. A landscape devoid of scale, hills looking like mountains. The only colour was the yellow of the diggers and the blast shelter.

The character of the quarry has changed since they started on the new phase. Before we had shelves mimicking an amphitheatre, now it’s a mountain range of promontories and landslides, all very ordered but primitive, earthy.