Where Once Dynamite Was Set

While at first sight the hills look like an untouched natural haven, below a thin layer of green is an industrial history just waiting to be found. Across the length of the hills more than a dozen quarries existed to allow stone to be extracted.

At the turn of the 20th century Malvern stone was much sought after for house and road building and to keep up with demand a number of quarries were started. To extract all this stone dynamite was set into the rock to break it into manageable pieces. This continued until the mid 1970’s when the final quarry closed.

Of course all this work left the hills littered with scars, but it wasn’t long before the hills took them back. What you see here is a flooded Earnslaw quarry, home to a whole host of wildlife. Not every quarry was flooded, some are completely overgrown while others are used as car parks. What started off as blots on the landscape have now become a new chapter in the history of the hills themselves.

Europe / UK-England

Lat: 52° 5' 54.961" N
Long: 3° 21' 9.775" W

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Taken with a Nikon D300 and a Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8G fisheye lens. Mounted on a Nodal Ninja 5 panoramic head and R-D16 rotator atop a Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod. 3 bracketed shots (-1 0 +1) taken at 6 positions 60° apart, tilted 15° down, another set of shots taken looking straight up. Raw files then processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5.7 before being blended into single views and stitched together using PTGui Pro 10.0.19 and converted using Pano2VR Pro 6.1.10.