Quarry book turns back the clock
Last updated 10:41, Friday, 15 August 2008
CAWFIELDS pool is probably second only to Crag Lough as the most picturesque stretch of water on the Roman Wall.
Its serene peaty depths, still plumbed by Hexham Sub-Aqua Club on regular excursions, reflect the trudging walkers, or the families sharing their sandwiches with the chaffinches that flutter around the thoughtfully provided picnic tables.
Turn the clock back a century ago, and the scene would have considerably less tranquil.
For Cawfields then was a busy working quarry, producing stone which was conveyed to Haltwhistle by a little railway chugging alongside the Haltwhistle Burn.
The life of the quarry is examined in detail in a newly published book Cawfields Quarry and Railway.
Its author John Parker wrote the book in 1996, but then put it to one side to concentrate on his successful first book Haltwhistle and Beyond.
Sadly, John died before either book was published, but they provide a fitting epitaph to a well loved local personality.
Lovers of local history will be delighted by the sheer volume of material and pictures amassed by John over the years, and embellished and presented in a very readable form by his daughter Cathy Smith.
Some of the early text is a little dry and technical, but the pictures of ancient locomotives, belching chimneys, toppled steam rollers and local ancients are a sheer delight.
Whinstone quarrying started at Cawfields in the mid-1800s, but it was in 1905 that a narrow gauge railway was constructed to carry stone two miles from the quarry down to the Newcastle-Carlisle railway line, at a cost of £3,000.
The locomotives on the line would do five or six laborious journeys per day from the quarry to the railhead, each round trip lasting for around 90 minutes.
There were two steam locos at Cawfields, the Vrynwy and the Mountaineer, later supplemented by a pair of petrol engines.
The gradients on the line were such that heavily laden trucks had to be skidded along the 2ft gauge railway by skilled brakesmen.
One solemnly told the author: “Oh aye, trucks often went away with square wheels ...”
It was the demand for the upgrading of rude tracks into proper roads that created a demand for whinstone, which was much more hard wearing than the traditional sandstone and limestone.
The book is brought to life by John’s personal recollections of the line when he was a youngster in the 1930s, pushing empty coal tubs up the line, and then jumping in as they careered back down again.
He wrote: “When we came speeding back down the line, the slope acted as a very effective brake.
“We had a few derailments, but usually on the wood side, not the burn side.
“It would have been an aerial flight if the tubs had gone off on the burn side.”
The development of road transport eventually made the quarry railway redundant, and it ceased operating in 1938.
The track was lifted, but the railway lines were left down within the quarry itself, to enable workers to push tubs full of stone from the quarry face to the crushers.
Incidentally, the lines, which can be seen supporting bridges in the Haltwhistle Burn area, are not relics from the quarry railway; they were salvaged from Newcastle when the city did away with its corporation trams.
The quarry carried on working throughout the war years, but problems arose with rising water levels, requiring pumps to be used.
In 1936, it was employing 40 men and boys, and producing 200 tonnes of whinstone per day.
Finally, though, the waters won, and the quarry closed in October 1952.
When pumping stopped, the quarry filled with water to a depth of some 20 feet, and the people of Haltwhistle took to dumping their rubbish into its peaty depths.
The water was pumped out in the 1970s, to unveil all manner of farm machinery which had been dumped there over the year.
There were also some sizeable fish put into the lake after being caught as fingerlings in the burn.
Pumping had to be stopped temporarily, when the bomb squad was called in to deal with several rounds of 303 rifle ammunition found there.
The quarry has now been converted into a pleasant picnic area and car park for visitors to the Roman Wall.
The scope of John’s book goes well beyond Cawfields, including clearly happy days spent scrambling through the waterways of Townfoot armed with turnip lanterns, playing “Jack shine the louw.”
He also recalls the steamroller running away down Castle Bank, and finishing up on its side after crashing through a wall.
Then there was the time he and his mates managed to get aboard an old tank engine, filling it so full of coal that it ran out of the fire box!
There also a look at the impressively mustachioed Kit Carrick and his frankly scary wife Annie, who lived at Spittal Crossing, and were married for 70 years.
Kit started work at the age of four; he had to stand on a chair to sort rags at Haltwhistle Woollen Mill.
He never went to school, but taught himself to read and write.
There’s also a look at the workings of the South Tyne Colliery, which at one time employed 684 people, 550 of them underground.
It officially closed in 1928, and left behind a grim butcher’s bill of employees killed in the line of duty.
It seemed to produce almost as many bodies as tonnes of coal, with miners dying in rock falls, banging their heads on the roof, falling into machinery and being splattered by runaway coal tubs.
This is an excellent read and you don’t have to be from Haltwhistle to enjoy it.
It is available from Haltwhistle book shop, or printers Tups Books, 33 Hutton Close, Crowther Industrial Estate, Washington, Tyne and Wear NE38 0AH, or tel (0191) 548 7283.
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