This photograph was made at Brathay, in the Lake District.
I had set up my 10×8 camera, an American folding model by K.B. Canham, itself a thing of beauty. Solid enough for fieldwork, steady enough to carry the vast 480mm Schneider lens I favour for this kind of work. An instrument slow enough to demand patience, large enough to command respect.
The light was flat, the pit of the quarry dark and unpromising. Overnight rain had pooled, just a couple of inches, no more, yet enough to transform scarred ground into a mirror.
In that fleeting moment, the quarry became both itself and its reflection: stone cut and stone remembered.
Once seen, I couldn’t walk away. The excitement of pre-visualisation remains vivid even now, twenty years later. My technique allowed no more exposures than the two sides of a dark slide. Vanity? Hubris? Perhaps. But the limitation sharpens the mind: the spot meter, the zone calculations, all made more exquisite under pressure. It was just me, the kit, and the quarry.
I think of Nick Fecitt, Managing Director at Kirkstone Quarries, who granted me access, who embodied the grit and perseverance needed to keep such a place alive. He knew stone was never just a commodity. It is time, compressed. Geology made tangible, wrestled into use by generations of quarrymen, sawyers, rockhands, polishers, masons, craftspeople who read the fault lines and teased beauty from brute weight.
The quarry at Brathay, like Kirkstone’s main site high on the Pass, was not only an industrial workplace but a cultural landscape, a ledger of human skill inscribed onto the body of the earth. To photograph it was to frame a dialogue between force and finesse: the immensity of rock, the dust and sweat and precision required to convert boulders into counters, flooring, memorial stones.
Yet no photograph, however large the negative, can contain the slow unravelling of an industry. Kirkstone, established in 1949, is now silent. Ceased trading. Market forces proved indifferent to provenance or environmental cost. Imported stone undercut what was quarried and worked here with pride.
In that shallow floodwater, on a single sheet of film, I caught something of the paradox: permanence and fragility bound together. Stone is the hardest of materials, yet the industries that sustained it in Britain have proven brittle, vulnerable to global trade and indifferent policy. The reflection in the quarry water was also a warning, an image of a legacy under threat.
The photograph is not only of a quarry. It is a portrait of an ending, and of the people whose labour turned geology into architecture.
The negative sits in my archive, fragile in its own way, yet holding in silver grains the memory of stone, water, industry, and loss.
September 2007.
Exposed with green filter
8×10″ Berger BPF,
Normal development Ilford ID-11, deep tanks, normal agitation
Film scanned on Epson V850. No photoshop
