The Box is a major cultural and heritage attraction and archive, which opened in Plymouth’s city centre in September 2020. Its collection, formally the South West Film and Television Archive (SWFTA), is the regional film archive for the South West of England, comprising the combined programme libraries of Westward Television and Television South West (TSW). It also includes a significant number of donated film collections dating back to the early 1890s.
This film is part of Free
The Deepest Delabole Hole
Delabole cuts the deepest.
In partnership with:
Overview
TV reporter Clive Gunnell visits Delabole Slate Quarry, the deepest hole in Britain at five hundred feet and in operation since the fifteenth century making it the oldest working slate quarry in England. There is a new Museum of Slate where four retired slate miners have been taken on as guides and they reminisce about life in the quarry. The exhibition is full of photographs of quarry life including a visit by the Prince of Wales in the 1920s.
Slate from the quarry has been used in construction throughout Europe for centuries, in 1841 five quarries formed into a single controlled unit known as the Old Delabole Slate Company but the company was liquidated in 1977. Delabole village only became a village after the railway arrived in 1893 before this three hamlets of Rockhead, Medrose and Pengelly were home to the quarrymen. Rumour has it that slate has been quarried here since the reign of King Stephen. The quarry was once the deepest man-made pit in the world, but has long been overshadowed by huge open-cast mines and quarries in America and Australia.
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