Sunday 23 May 2010
Boulby Alum Works
Tees Valley Wildlife Trust are guiding walkers around some of the many old alum works in this region, below are some of the photographs I took on three of these walks.
(The last photograph shows the fossilised vertebrae of a Jurassic sea creature)
Friday 11 September 2009
Lingberry Alum Works
The Lofthouse (Lingberry) alum works, (the part that hasn't fallen into the sea,) is much the same as it was when the works closed 150 years ago, its like the surface of the moon. Very very slowly the ling that gave the alum works its name is returning.
Sunday 19 July 2009
Horses Work
The Middlesbrough News. Friday 7th September 1866.
Boulby is a small village about ten miles further up the coast south from Redcar. Alum works have been established there this two hundred year. Persons going to inspect these works on Rawcliffe have being struck with the strange garb of the men working at the alum pits and with the dangerous nature of the avocation of the alum miners. At the end of the alum pits is a small shed and a large wheel is whizzing round at a rapid rate, and drawing water from neighbouring reservoirs to the pits. In the summer we have seen two woman turning the wheel, and dressed in a manner quite "shocking" to our modern idea of propriety. The laborious nature of their work necessitated them to work in a half-nude state, and even in that condition the sweat stood upon them in great drops like peas. Here surely was woman degraded, and doing not man's work but "horses work." Joseph Richardson
Friday 17 July 2009
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