Kimmeridge Shale Workings
About
Workshops on the Dorset coast at Kimmeridge turned local black bituminous shale into armlets and small turned vessels on simple lathes, a craft carried over from the late Iron Age into Roman Britain. Roman-period bracelets cut from Kimmeridge shale have turned up as far away as Corbridge on Hadrian's Wall, more than 500 kilometers to the north. Workers left behind the waste disks from the lathe-turning process, known today as Kimmeridge coal money, scattered across the shale-working sites. The soft, oil-rich stone came straight from the Kimmeridge Clay exposed along the peninsula's cliffs.
What happened here
The rock is worked in benches from the top down, so that gravity does the moving. Channels are cut around a block with a pick, then it is split from the bed with iron wedges driven into a line of holes, sometimes with wooden wedges soaked to swell. Blocks are dressed roughly on the spot — no one hauls waste — and marked with the quarry, the gang, the date and the consular year, which is how the empire keeps track of what it owns. Sledges, rollers and ox teams take them to a river or the sea, because moving stone overland is the expensive part. Fine marbles are imperial monopolies. Abandoned faces still show the last unfinished cut, stopped mid-job and never resumed.
Sources
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