A dreich morning. Rain, wind and low cloud forced me to keep low, sticking to the woods where I could at least avoid the worst of the weather. This meant I had little choice but to focus on the minutiae. Hence this stream. It cannot even decide on a single name. Near its source on Great Ayton Moor, it is called Howden Gill. Here, in Slacks Wood, it borrows the wood’s name and becomes Slacks Beck. By the time it reaches Dikes Lane, someone has unimaginatively dubbed it Dikes Beck. Eventually, it will flow into the River Leven at Great Ayton via a culvert beneath Station Road.
Here though, the beck is full of sediment, its murky flow obvious as it snakes through the still waters of a flooded quarry. Suddenly, as if tiring of visibility, it vanishes, continuing its journey underground through the workings.
Slacks Wood quarry is an old whinstone quarry. It predates the more familiar, larger quarry on Cliff Ridge and the nearby Gribdale Terrace cottages, which housed whinstone miners. Later, the quarrying grew ambitious and extended below the stream’s water level, necessitating a wooden aqueduct to divert the flow. This has long since rotted, resulting in the charming flooded crater we see today.
Whinstone is a basalt, an igneous rock which intruded into the Jurassic sedimentary layers 58 million years ago as a dyke, a vertical slab here about 25 metres wide. This hard rock was extensively quarried and mined from the 18th to the mid-20th century. Shaped into setts or cobbles, it was taken away to serve as road surfacing. Some of these blue-grey setts can still be spotted locally or as far afield as Leeds. Once the railway arrived in Great Ayton, Slacks Wood quarry connected to the main line sidings near the Guisborough road via a narrow gauge railway, which passed through a tunnel under Aireyholme Lane and along Cliff Rigg’s side. A few years ago, I recall part of this tunnel collapsing , forcing the footpath above it to be rerouted. A minor inconvenience to mark centuries of disruption.
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