Welcome to the Rudloe and environs website.
Here you will find news, articles and photos of an area that straddles the Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in north-west Wiltshire.
Contributions in the form of articles or photos are welcome. Even those with completely contrary views to mine!
Thanks to the website builder 1&1 and Rob Brown for the original idea.
Rudloescene now, in January 2014, has a sister, academic rather than anarchic, website about Box history here: http://www.boxpeopleandplaces.co.uk/
It contains thoroughly professional, well-researched articles about Box and its people.
Contact rudloescene through the 'Contact' page.
Copenacre - grooves cut into the rock by ropes at the bottom of the eastern haulage shaft
Copenacre - potential loss of industrial archaeology through planning application 15/11889/REM
The Copenacre site has two former vertical haulage shafts into the quarry below, the earlier one of c1826 is almost certainly capped with a concrete slab. The other shaft
dates from the 1830s or 1840s. This shaft is magnificent, easily the best surviving shaft in the whole Bath stone district; it preserves features of its quarry use such as deep grooves
where the hoisting rope has cut into the rock. At the bottom, the shaft measures about 16 feet by 20 feet but narrows higher up. In 1942 or thereabouts an electric lift and
winch house were installed. This concrete winch house structure appears to be proposed for demolition through planning application 15/11889/REM. Such demolition would probably result in materials or
waste falling or being hurled into the shaft. Should this occur, the precipitate occlusion would bring about a significant loss to Wiltshire's industrial archeology.
The photographs below show:
(1) a view up the shaft
(2) haulage rope grooves on the corner of a pillar by the shaft bottom
(3) the grooves cut by the haulage rope into the rock at the shaft bottom
(text and photographs courtesy of David Pollard)
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