Here are pictures of the some of the old sandstone quarries at Runcorn, as they were on 29/10/01. I took them in the late afternoon. These quarries were first opened at the beginning of the 19th. century, and the ones which appear in these photos were mostly worked out by 1860. New ones were opened up further towards the village of Weston, and these remained in use until about 1939, indeed I can just remember seeing the large blocks of stone being transported down the narrow-gauge railed "drumroad" as it was called, to the docks or the railway sidings in Weston Point ( I was about 3 at the time!). The older quarry remains survive because they were used to take the waste from the newer quarries as these were opened up, and in the 1920's they were landscaped to form a "park" area for the Runcorn public. The quarry faces remaining give no impression of how deep these quarries were. The sandstone was of very fine quality, and one quarry owner promised "a free wagon of stone if a single pebble was found in a delivery". The newer quarries towards Weston were used to dump chemical waste in from 1940 to about 1973, and also to dump household waste. These later quarries have been filled in almost completely.

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