Bank Wood Quarry

Overview

A very small slate working at Rosthwaite in Borrowdale, opened by W. J. Barrow and worked for three years by three men. It produced 16 tons of slate in 1902, 80 in 1903 and 57 in 1904, and the 1905 List of Mines records it abandoned.

History

Bank Wood appears in the 1902 List of Mines under W. J. Barrow, employing three people, two below ground and one at the surface, and in 1903 under Barrow & May. The separate Mineral Statistics record what it actually produced: 16 tons of slate in 1902, 80 tons in 1903 and 57 tons in 1904, with no value given at the mine for any of the three years. The 1905 list returns it with nobody employed and the single word abandoned. Three years and 153 tons is the whole of its recorded life. It sat in the middle of a much older industry. Borrowdale had been worked for slate since at least the 1600s, and the Borrowdale Volcanic Group tuffs of the district give the silver-grey slates of Coniston Old Man, the green slates of Broughton Moor, Hodge Close and Kirkstone and the blue-black slates of Brathay and Longsleddale. Honister, the great working of the valley, was reached by a graded packhorse route over the high fells called Moses' Trod after a quarryman, running fourteen miles to the coast at Ravenglass or Drigg. Against that, a three-man quarry returning eighty tons in its best year is the scale most slate working actually happened at.

Geology

The quarry worked slate of the Borrowdale Volcanic Group, the Ordovician cleaved volcanic tuffs that give the Lake District its slate — the same sequence that yields the silver-grey of Coniston, the greens of Broughton Moor and Kirkstone and the blue-blacks of Brathay.

Geological setting: Slate and Regional Metamorphism (well documented example)

Workings

Two of the three people employed in 1902 were underground and one at the surface, so the working was at least partly a mine rather than an open face. Nothing else about how it was worked is recorded, and the Durham Mining Museum holds no grid reference for it.

Closure

The 1905 List of Mines returns the quarry with nobody employed and records it as abandoned. Its last recorded output is 57 tons in 1904.

What remains

Nothing of the quarry's present state was established from the sources read for this pass, and no grid reference for it has been found in any of them.

Recorded claims

Individual factual claims, each attached to the source(s) that support it below. Where sources disagree, both are kept.

• The 1902 List of Mines gives W. J. Barrow with three employed, two below ground and one at the surface, and the 1903 list gives Barrow & May; the 1905 list returns the quarry with nobody employed and abandoned. ¹
• The Mineral Statistics record 16 tons of slate in 1902, 80 tons in 1903 and 57 tons in 1904, with no value given at the mine. ²

Photographs & further reading

Sources

1. (secondary) Bank Wood Quarry (Slate) — Durham Mining Museum
2. (primary) Bank Wood Quarry (Slate) Mineral Statistics — Durham Mining Museum

Record created: 11 September 2026 · Last researched: 12 September 2026