Butsfield Quarry

Overview

A small ganister quarry on the moor edge west of Consett, worked by the Consett Iron Company in the 1920s with fourteen men. Its stone was not sold: it went into the company's own furnaces and brickworks, crushed and mixed with clay for the semi-silica bricks that lined the ironworks a few miles away.

History

Butsfield appears in the 1922 List of Quarries under the Consett Iron Company Ltd., returning ganister and employing fourteen, ten of them below ground and four at the surface — a working small enough to be a single face and a handful of men, but tied to one of the largest ironworks in the north of England. The Consett Iron Company was registered in 1864, successor to the Derwent and Consett Iron Company, and by that date already held collieries across north-west Durham; it passed to the National Coal Board at nationalisation. Ganister was worth quarrying because of what it could be turned into. The Consett works' own brickworks began on fireclay and seggar clay won with coal from the company's collieries, and in later years crushed ganister was mixed into the clay to make semi-silica bricks; a new brickworks at Templetown, opened in 1924 on the site of the old beehive coke ovens, made silica bricks and shapes. Elsewhere in the district the same logic put brickworks where the ganister was, served by narrow-gauge railways to bring the stone in. No account of Butsfield's own working life, its opening or its closure, has been found beyond the single 1922 return.

Geology

Ganister is a hard, fine-grained quartzitic sandstone, better than ninety per cent silica, which occurs in the Coal Measures typically as the seatearth immediately beneath a coal seam. The quarries around Rowlands Gill, Satley and Salters Gate worked stone of this kind, some of it hard and quartzitic enough to be called ganister and some of it taken for building and dimension stone.

Geological setting: Sedimentary Beds and Seams (well documented example)

Workings

The 1922 return puts ten of the fourteen employed below ground and four at the surface, so the working was at least partly underground rather than an open face alone — usual where ganister is followed as a bed under a coal seam.

Closure

No closure date has been located. The quarry appears in the 1922 List of Quarries and in no later list read for this pass.

What remains

Nothing of the quarry's present state was established from the sources read for this pass.

Nearby mines

• Viewly Hill Ganister Quarry — 4.7 km S
• Healeyfield Mine — 5.0 km NW
• Cornsay Colliery — 7.3 km E
• Roddymoor Colliery — 9.9 km SE
• Frosterley Marble Quarries — 10.2 km SW

Straight-line distance, within 15 km. Show on the map.

Recorded claims

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

• The 1922 List of Quarries records Butsfield Quarry under the Consett Iron Co. Ltd., returning ganister and employing fourteen, ten below ground and four at the surface. ¹
• Crushed ganister from the company's quarrying was mixed with clay at the Consett brickworks to make semi-silica bricks, and a new brickworks at Templetown opened in 1924 to make silica bricks and shapes. ²

Photographs & further reading

Sources

1. (secondary) Butsfield Quarry (Ganister) — Durham Mining Museum
2. (secondary) Old Bricks: England 6-2 — Old Bricks (brocross.com)

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