Go to the Main Mendip Cave Registry Search Page

Union Quarry

Odd Down, bath.

This quarry was located to the north of Midford Road opposite St Martin's Hospital. It is shown as a 0.9 hectare (2.3 acres) quarry on large scale OS maps of 1873-88. The large scale maps of 1892-1914 show two cranes in the quarry.

It is understood the west face of the quarry was still being worked in 1958. The quarry was built over and lost prior to 1999. It is not thought that there were any underground workings.

Alternate Names: None recorded.

Notes: An entry in Kelly's Directory of Somersetshire for 1889 gives the quarry master as Henry Shellard at Union Quarry. The 1911 census records Henry, then aged 65, as a stone quarry owner living at Rock View, Bloomfield Road in Bath with his wife and nine children. One of their some followed him into the business as the quarry was then worked by Shellard and Son together with Beehive Quarry.

Shellard and Son were quarry owners and stone merchants in 1919 but the Hill brothers extracted stone from Union Quarry at a later date between the two world wars and then Bill Reed was the final quarry owner until the mid-1960s. New workshops for the high tech. engineering company, Cross Manufacturing were built in the former quarry in the mid-1970s. The area is now residential housing. However, one crane has been preserved albeit with a slightly shortened mast.

The British Geological Survey has one sample collected from the quarry. It is recorded as a shelly oolitic limestone from the Great Oolite of the Middle Jurassic. The location is recorded as Union Quarry, Odd Down, Bath, Somerset with an NGR of ST 744 622.