Lectures - 2011/2012

BRITPITS - The BGS Mines and Quarries database.
D G Cameron, G Nixon and E Raycraft. BGS Keyworth

A national database of mine and quarry information has been part of the Geological Survey since its earliest days. In 1845 at the invitation of Sir Henry De la Beche, Director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, Robert Hunt went to London and took up the post of Keeper of the Mining Records of the Survey. When the Government School of Mines was established in 1851 he was made a Lecturer on Mechanical Science and then Lecturer on Physics. Part II of the Mineral Statistics of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for the Year 1858  ‘Hunt’s Statistics’ was produced in 1860. This attempted to be ‘Embracing Clays, Bricks &c., Building and Other Stones with Sundry Earthy Minerals’ In a Notice at the beginning, the then Director, Roderick Impey Murchison said ‘The present publication is the result of a first attempt on the part of Mr. Robert Hunt to collect returns of the produce of the Clay Works and Quarries of the United Kingdom. Though a large amount of useful information has been obtained, it must be admitted that this branch of our Mineral Statistics is, as yet, far from complete. Let us hope, however, that the work now issued may lead many persons who have withheld information, to render the next edition more worthy of public attention.’ This was based on figures gathered in 1858 for production by each commodity, and the complaint of the Director has been echoed by compilers down the years.

As was the norm in those days, the ‘database’ resided in a series of books, listing active workings, published yearly, firstly by the Geological Survey and later by the Inspectors of Mines - a List of Mines and a List of Quarries. The List of Quarries continued until 1948, although lists were produced by HSE and other bodies. The List of Mines was taken over by the Colliery Managers Journal and published as Guide to the Coalfields which lasted until the 1990s. In 1984, BGS decided to publish a Directory of Mines and Quarries (DMQ), listing some 2500 active mineral workings and their operators, together with, for the first time, the body of rock worked at the site.

The DMQ has subsequently been produced initially Bi-annually, and latterly tri-annually, up until the latest edition covering 2010. At the same time steps were taken to design a digital database (BRTIPITS) to store the data. At first this was just the active sites, however it was seen that holding records of ceased operations would assist to some degree the minerals planning process, especially when the database could be incorporated in a Geographic Information System. At the present moment, the BGS BRITPITS database holds around 152000 records covering mineral workings in the UK. The database has been used to provide baseline information for mineral resource maps for planners, and is currently used by the English Heritage Strategic Stone Study project to locate Building Stone Quarries. BGS makes some of this data available through its website, and in the future, all of these sites will be visible on the web. Data collection is still continuing, and once there is a baseline coverage of the country, it is hoped that revision of the data will allow early records to be brought up to the standard of those collected today.

The legacy of mining at Alderley Edge, Cheshire
Geoff Warrington

Alderley Edge is the main site in the Cheshire Basin where base metal mineralisation occurs in Triassic Sherwood Sandstone Group (SSG) rocks. It is a Geological SSSI where the SSG occurs in a horst that is an exhumed structural trap formerly covered by a seal of younger Triassic (Mercia Mudstone Group) deposits. The mineralisation and its host rocks may be studied in unweathered 3D situations in over 15 km. of disused mine workings. These are in three parts that, from E to W, give access to host rocks of different facies at successively higher levels in the SSG. Voids left by mining reflect the influence of both structure and facies on the nature of the ore bodies that formed from migrating fluids. By analogy, they aid visualization of the influence of these factors on other migrating fluids, such as hydrocarbons – affording the opportunity to ‘step inside a reservoir’.

The Upper Greensand of the Haldon Hills
Richard Hamblin

After graduating from Durham I worked for Exeter University for three years, on a contract from the Natural Environment Research Council to re-survey the Teignmouth 1” geological sheet for the Institute of Geological Sciences (later British Geological Survey). I mapped the Haldon Hills, formed from the Teignmouth Breccias (Permian), Upper Greensand (Cretaceous) and Haldon Gravels (Palaeocene). I did a PhD concentrating largely on the Haldon Gravels, but I also carried out a seismic survey of the Upper Greensand. This revealed quite remarkable variations of thickness of the formation, from 16m to 84m, and I explained these as the result of down-folding of the basement during deposition of the Upper Greensand. This theory was not widely believed at the time, but was confirmed later by measurement of temporary sections formed during the building of the new A38 and A380 roads. The story then moves forward 40 years and in 2010 I was asked to lead the Quaternary Research Association on a field trip to examine the Haldon Gravels. Whilst there I discovered a further interesting fact about the Upper Greensand! I have since found out why the QRA wanted to look at gravels which were formed 60 000 000 years before the start of the Quaternary, but the interesting fact about the Upper Greensand is still unexplained...