Opposite Prior Park, home of philanthropist Ralph Allen, who transformed Bath’s small scale stone mining industry into a major commercial venture. In the foreground can be seen the wooden railway Allen built to transport the stone. above An artist’s impression of working in the part of the quarry known as the ‘Grand Canyon’.

Hollowed Ground: the archaeology of Bath’s stone mines

The hills around Bath look solid enough but below the surface they are riddled with tunnels and stone quarries. When some of these began to collapse, putting the village of Combe Down at risk, Oxford Archaeology was called in to record this vast labyrinth before it was filled with concrete. Chris Catling reports on the record they made of an industry that helped create the beautiful buildings of Georgian Bath’s ‘Golden Age’.

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Period: Post-Medieval & Industrial
Location: Europe › United Kingdom › South West

Nestling in the steep-sided valley of the Avon, Bath Spa has a remarkable degree of homogeneity. This comes in part from having been planned and built over a short period by just two architects, John Wood the Elder and John Wood, his son. But viewed from the Bath Skyline Walk that encircles the city for some six miles, offering the perfect vantage point, it is something else that you notice about the spiky church steeples and long rows of houses that climb up the terraced hillsides from the river. Bath has that quality that William Morris so admired in his own home of Kelmscott Manor or such Cotswold villages and towns as Bibury and Burford: it is built of materials that complement their setting so well that they look as if they are rooted in the soil and have grown like something organic rather than man-made.

Opposite Prior Park, home of philanthropist Ralph Allen, who transformed Bath’s small-scale stone mining industry into a major commercial venture. In the foreground can be seen the wooden railway Allen built to transport the stone. above An artist’s impression of working in the part of the quarry known as the ‘Grand Canyon’.
Prior Park, home of philanthropist Ralph Allen, who transformed Bath’s small-scale stone mining industry into a major commercial venture. In the foreground can be seen the wooden railway Allen built to transport the stone. Image: Building of Bath Collection, www.bath-preservation-trust.org.uk.

Bath is, of course, a bit of both: a human artefact, but made from stone so local that the buildings of Bath form a geological continuity with the limestone bedrock on which they sit. And whereas the architects of such fine stone buildings as St Paul’s Cathedral, in the City of London, or King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, had to ship their stone from distant quarries at vast expense, John Wood, creator of Bath, had an abundance of England’s finest stone on his doorstep.

Precious stone

Bath stone is the queen of building materials, surpassed only by Portland stone, with which it has many similarities. Comprised of myriad rounded granules of calcium carbonate, the remains of broken and eroded marine shell laid down millions of years ago under warm tropical sea, it is called oolitic – egg-like – because of its resemblance to fish roe. When freshly quarried, it is soft enough to be sawn and carved into the crisp acanthus leaves and scrolls that the classical orders demand. It becomes hard as it dries to a creamy yellow colour with hints of warm pink. And it is what quarrymen call a ‘freestone’, meaning that it can be cut and carved in any direction – unlike limestone from higher up in the Great Oolite sequence, which forms distinct layers, into which it can be split by a skilled mason to form rubble stone or to create the roofing tiles that are so characteristic of Bath and the limestone belt that runs north-eastwards from Bath to Stamford and on to Lincoln.

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