Tall tales and true: of Yorkshire moors and the byways of Surrey: The quarry men of Ravenscar

Today we went to Ravenscar and walked a slash of hills dropping down to the sea where dozens of fat lazy seals lay sunning themselves on warm rocks in what is turning out to be a gentle Indian summer along this coast. This is National Trust property now, and part of the Cleveland Way, so this was quite a good workout of a walk today.

When Henry VIII and the Tudors were at serious odds with the pope and not wanting to trade with him, England needed Alum which they used as a thickening agent in all sorts of things before they discovered a synthetic substitute in much later times. Alum was luckily discovered in the rocks of the Ravenscar cliffs, just south of Whitby. Enough to last a couple of hundred years of quarrying, and that solved a long term problem of where to get it.

The how, was another matter. To extract 600 tons of Alum a year from these cliffs you needed hundreds of men crawling like lemmings up and down the rutted ways. You needed pick axes, wheelbarrows, wagons, horses, carts, workhouses, workshops, a mechanical rail built up the cliff face, and storage for the 3,500 tons of coal it took to burn the rock, the 400 tons of kelp and 200 tons of human urine needed in the process, along with all the timber, lead and zinc they needed for their tools, factory fitouts and repairs.

This mess of stuff came by sailing ship into the harbour where the seals rested today. Later they blasted this harbour deeper into the land to bring the ships in closer to the Alum production. The human urine was collected in buckets from dense collection spots in sea ports along the east cost: Hull, Newcastle and London. It, too, was bought here and stored for use.

Horses and carts took all the cargo from the sailing ships and distributed it around the site, where needed. Pretty now, but desperate in those days. Wagons operated on a mechanical incline drawn on a pulley system up the vertical cliff.

Alum was a valuable commodity. Pirates, offshore, were forever trying to seize it. Here at Ravenscar they installed a canon high above the Alum works to frighten them off.

High up, pickmen removed the overburden and set to hacking away the shale from the cliff face, and sending it below for processing. 100 pickmen were needed to retrieve the 100 tons of shale rock needed to produce just 1 ton of Alum. And, at Ravenscar, they produced 600 tons of Alum every year. They were real quarry men. The work was hard, the hours were long, the conditions were appalling.

Barrowmen took loads of shale to the quarry where wood was used to ignite great ‘clamps’ of the shale rocks in piles some 100 feet high and 200 feet long. These clamps burned for almost 12 months, whereupon, when they became bright red, the rocks were dumped into shallow pits lined with stone where a new batch of men took over a liquor production regime around these pits.

They were called 'liquor men'. They would use water to wash the hot shale and out of that came a raw liquor of alum. This was drained via troughs into cisterns at the side, then funnelled into the Alum House where it was stored for processing from this liquid state into solid crystals, a process which took some three weeks. The liquor was boiled in lead pans over a coal fire for 24 hours until it turned green. It was then left in ‘settlers’ to remove any impurities.

To reduce the acidity, an alkaline was added at this stage, either potash from burnt seaweed, or the stale human urine, rich in ammonia, gathered and transported here. It took some 4 days after that for the first alum crystals to begin to appear on the surface. These were then washed to remove impurities.

The crystals were placed in ‘giant roaching pans’ like giant kegs. Heat dissolved the crystals, but after eight days the mass of crystals formed into solid blocks, each weighing more than a ton. The wooden slats from the roaching casks were then dismantled, and the blocks left to stand another eight days while any remaining liquor was drained off and reused. The great lump of alum was then ground into a type of alum flour, exported in that flour form.

To empty the steeping pits after the rocks were liquified, pitmen hauled and carted the leftover shale back to the quarry face and mounded it in a ridge of slag, about 50 feet high and a quarter of a mile long at the base of the quarries. You can still see heaps and mounds around the hillside today covered in gorse and bracken.

The equipment and tools of iron and lead fitting and the timber casks were made in workshops on-site so the noise must have been phenomenal. But the stench of the entire process must have been constantly unbearable:the smell of forges, the stored urine with its high ammonia content, the non-stop clamp fires burning for twelve months at a time, along with the acrid poisonous boiling liquor flowing into and and out of trenches and storage cisterns all over the site, all of the time.

Yet here hundreds of men lived and worked. Their lungs must never have breathed fresh air. It is hard to conceive of that on such a glorious day as today, as we slowly wind our way, first down, then up their hill, through their workplace, imagining their lives, while we huff and puff and rest at our leisure making this trek only once a day and feeling it. They would have been at it non-stop: up the incline as soon as they came down, then back again for another load. Interminable. Although, they must have been physically very fit, assuming, of course, that the poisonous vapours did not eat away at their insides.

We polished our walk off with the largest Devonshire scone we have ever seen for our afternoon tea, undoing all the good effects of our day efforts.