Historical Importance

Ralph Allen

You may be familiar with Ralph Allen's garden which is run by the National Trust.   Ralph Allen was the original quarry owner and his residence, Prior Park built in 1755, was used as a showcase for Bath Stone.

The village started as a group of miner’s houses (and a pub!) with a railway coming out of the woods and down Ralph Allen drive, past Prior Park.  The railway would transport the stone from Ralph Allen’s yard and down to the river Avon.

The Georgians originally quarried from above ground.  As the quality stone ran out they  were able to mine the stone underground ground due to the presence of a bed 1-2 m thick above the  Combe Down Oolite called the Bastard stone.   It is much harder and this effectively formed a solid roof  for the miners. Had it not been there they would not have been able to extract the stone using underground methods.

The mine was worked using a room and pillar method, leaving rooms.  Discards were stored underground in worked areas.

Long after the mines were abandoned, the pillars supporting the mine roof and structures above were robbed and timber supports failed causing fractures in the roof.  The mines were identified as unstable with over 85% of the stone mined away.

The stone mines have supplied the stone for many of the buildings and structures in Bath including the famous Royal Crescent.  They are therefore an important historic and archaeological record of the development of the world heritage site.

Buckingham Palace was also built from Bath Stone.

Archaeology

Oxford Archaeology (OA) have been engaged on the Stone Mines Stabilisation project almost since its outset, initially carrying out desk-based assessment of the history and potential of the mines and, since 2000, undertaking a detailed Watching Brief and Recording of the stabilisation works. These works mainly comprise the monitoring of the construction of the stabilisation roadways and the production of a detailed survey of the mine landscape as it is revealed.

In common with all other members of the below ground team OA are never permitted to leave the safety of the steel and wood roadways so the survey entails no standard archaeological excavation.  It instead relies upon photographic and drawn survey techniques to record archaeological features as they are encountered by the forward progress of the roadway or as they become visible to the left and right of the roadway as it snakes through the underground landscape.

In addition to these techniques, which are used on a daily basis and in all sections of the mine,  OA are also carrying out a programme of detailed recording of  particularly important, impressive or well preserved mine areas, such as the very high pillar area known as the Grand Canyon using a mixture of laser scanning, detailed photographic survey and video recording.   The mine landscape is a fascinating although challenging environment, criss-crossed by old cartways and barroways, the roof supported by thousands of stone pillars left by the miners as they extracted the stone from around them. Some sections of the mine are still open to their original height of 8 or 9m  whilst some areas are densely packed with rubble and spoil so that the modern day miners now have to hack their way through the work of their distant predecessors. Much of the waste stone has been used by the miners to create substantial mine structures including entrances to the mine, internal walls and a private staircase up to the cellar of the Hadley Arms, a local pub still open on North Road.

Finds, although somewhat rare, often provide interesting insights into the life of the 18th and 19th century miners with recent finds including clay candle holders, stone lunch-boxes (intended to keep the miners food safe from the local vermin) and the ubiquitous clay pipes. Perhaps the most common find are the remains of the tools and equipment that the miners used during the stone extraction and finds include the broken remains of saws, chips, chisels and axes and, far more rarely, the often badly decayed remains of wooden artefacts such as wheelbarrows. Accessible finds are recovered and brought to the surface where are cleaned and conserved before being stored in advance of their further analysis and display.   

One of the most impressive class of finds are a large number of pieces of graffiti scribed into the mine walls and pillars. The majority of these date from the later stages of the mines exploitation from the mid 19th to the early 20th century and provide invaluable source of dating evidence as well as providing valuable insight into the social context in which the miners worked. Particularly interesting pieces include a roughly scrawled advertisement for the quality and cheapness of the beer at the Hadley Arms, a detailed drawing of a ship and a number of vivid cartoons or caricatures including the naked figures of a top-hatted gentleman (possibly one of the mine owners) and,  much more commonly, naked female figures.  In addition to the miners graffiti there is a substantial canon of Second World War air raid shelter graffiti and also a number of pieces of more modern work including the evocative work of the Combe Down Skins from the 1970's. All Graffiti is photographed and drawn and particularly significant pieces are recovered where possible. A few pieces, where located within areas of substantial rock face, have been carefully cut away from the rock, but the more common technique is to employ a specially designed technique where the graffiti is painted with silicon rubber, `peeled' from the rock face and then transferred onto a resin background.

Analysis of the results of the survey is ongoing. The initial analysis has identified a range of different pillar forms and techniques of exploitation and it has been possible to tentatively divide the workings into six main time phases, including those carried out in the lifetime of Ralph Allen, the mid 18th century entrepreneur who was responsible for the first large scale exploitation of the Combe Down mines.