The In-filled Quarry at Berwick Hill

For much of its history, there was a quarry in the centre of Berwick Hill between West End Farm and East Farm, opposite South East Farm.

In this part of Northumberland we are blessed with good, attractive, easily worked sandstone which often outcropped or lay just below the surface. For centuries until it was replaced by mass produced red bricks, this was the default building material. This resulted in almost every village, and even hamlets, having their own quarry, almost none of which survive.

When the quarries were no longer worked, they tended to flood, forming ponds which were very attractive to young children. In the days before organised rubbish tips, they also became a convenient dumping ground. A former resident remembered the pond at this quarry being full of all sorts of household rubbish and even old cars. This combination made them dangerous with local newspapers regularly carrying reports on children drowning in old quarries. By the 1960’s far fewer children were dying from infectious diseases and parents were less tolerant of their children dying from “accidental causes”.

The boom of building work which was taking place at this time presented a solution. The building debris from cleared sites was a convenient resource for infilling many of these quarries, levelling them out and making them disappear from the landscape.

Today the site is indistinguishable from the ground, but from the air you can still make out a straggly hedge which used to delineate the edge of the quarry and an uneven surface with none of the plough lines of the adjacent field.