Author name: Richard Clarke

The photo above, taken from the farm track on the south bank of the Humber Estuary that in centuries past was a section of Ferriby Low Road (from Barton), shows Melton chalk quarry just visible in the dip slope of the Yorkshire Wolds.The development of large-scale chalk quarries was allied to changes in the pattern […]

The above photo shows a wild strawberry plant in flower (May time), these being the ancestors of the modern cultivated strawberry and much prefering calcarious soils such as chalk soils. The photo was taken on the spoil-heap of South Ferriby’s second chalk quarry (see below). By 1826 trade directories record four ‘manufactories’ of whiting in

Disused chalk quarries that were originally excavated for commercial purposes are a significant landscape feature in the Humberside region, particularly on the south bank. With Barton on Humber evolving as an Anglo-Saxon settlement at the foot of two dry valleys and on the edge of the Estuary flood plain it follows that when leaving Barton

Field quarries is a term used to describe usually fairly shallow diggings into the surface of fields overlying chalk bedrock, this usually done by the farmer and his/her workers. As with parish quarries the chalk quarried might have been used as hard-core but it was also broken down (crushed) and spread as lime on fields,

The fact that the Humber Estuary bisected the ‘Ferriby chalk’ escarpment has meant that the side of the Humber valley immediately east of the boulder clay ‘Cliffs’ has been an ideal location for quarrying the chalk rock. By driving a level-floored cutting into the valley side an increasingly deep wall of chalk was revealed and

The photo. above shows the ‘cliff-face’, not on the coast as at Flamborough Head, but at the head of a chalk quarry on the south-Humber bank just west of the parish boundary between Barton on Humber and South Ferriby and commonly known as Leggett’s Quarry (chalk quarrying here ceased in the late 1960s so the