Bowers Quarries

Go to Home Page Go to Navigation  Page

Bowers Quarry has gradually extended south towards the sprawling Weston Estate. There are many old tramway remains between the quarry and the cliff edge.

Bowers Quarry is one of the few working quarries on Portland and has been used to pioneer the use of horizontal mineshafts to extract Portland Stone.

A comprehensive history of this quarry written by Ashley Smith can be read here.

Please click here for a detailed map of this area. Click the BACK button on your browser to return to this page.

Please click here to visit the satellite image of this area on Google Maps. Click the BACK button on your browser to return to this page.

Please use this table to navigate around this page BOWERS QUARRY THE ‘MEMO’ PROJECT ANOTHER OF MY HOBBIES

BOWERS QUARRY

These pictures show the experimental mine being created. These pictures were taken during a visit to the mine on an Open Day in 2005.

Checking the roof for movement.

Above small cubic crystallised entities are embedded in the stone.

The Portland and Purbeck beds which make up the overwhelming mass of the Isle of Portland were formed about 130 - 140 million years ago in shallow tropical lagoons when the land was at about 38 degrees north of the equator. For a brief time during the laying down of the Purbeck bed the sea level fell and the seabed dried out. This allowed a thin layer of soil to form, as seen above, and plants and trees grew.

Please click here for more information.

A wonderful mass of fossils displayed at Bowers Quarry. These were variously known as 'Osses 'Eads (because the bivalve Myophorella looked a little like a horse's head to quarrymen) and Portland Screws - a conical gastropod.

The working quarry.

An abandoned explosives magazine on the edge of Bowers Quarry.

 Return To Top Of Page

THE MASS EXTINCTION MEMORIAL OBSERVATORY (MEMO)

A site near the western boundary of Bowers Quarry, shown approximately on the above map, had been allocated to build the Mass Extinction Memorial Observatory (MEMO). This construction costing �30 million was intended to be in the shape of a conical tower inside which visitors could walk on a spiral exhibition illustrating representations of some of the species that have gone extinct on Earth since the Dodo was driven to extinction about 350 years ago. Some 860 species would have been represented in the visitor attraction.

However, since the collapse in 2017 of the proposed �80 million Jurassica Project on the East of Portland, it has now been decided to combine MEMO with elements that would have been in the Jurassica theme park and call the downscaled scheme “The Journey” - please click here for more details.

Instead of a huge conical building on the western cliffs of Portland, “The Journey” will be 40 metres underground inside an abandoned mine. Visitors will walk through a Jurassic “Rain Forest”.

 Return To Top Of Page

ANOTHER OF MY HOBBIES

Age of 75 I started a new hobby - writing and publishing books. These are available as paperbacks from Amazon - please click here for details. Their overall star rating from readers is

Keywords Bowers Quarry Portland Dorset