Slate

Quarriers and Storm

The Cataclysm as Told by Google

Tonight I'm thinking about Seil Island on the west of Scotland, and thinking about what a hundred plus years means. There's a little cafe there, the Oyster Bar and Restaurant whose (yes, I'm humanizing the caf) back door looks out into a hundred-yard bowl of exquisite water. Beyond a ring of stone fences the bowl off from the Easdale Sound. Its intense stillness is cupped under a blue-grey sky. Outside the ring of rocks, an old pier where the ships lined up for loading—a pier reduced to stubborn posts. Out there in the Sound, the waves are susurrating, hammering on the rocks, but inside we have a deep, still pool.

What we stare at is a slate quarry, twenty-four stories deep, on the edge of a bay that fronts for the entire Atlantic. The quarry, after having delivered ton upon ton of slate every week to roofs across the world, succumbed to an Atlantic storm in 1881 that crushed over its walls and swallowed the livelihoods of Scots quarriers, the works itself, the hubris of men. We stare, look into the depths of placid water, and recognize what obdurate nature requires from man. In the small rather than the global, what nature required from this perilous community, from the men, and their families. They splintered out a living on nature's terms, in a place that nature designed, in a place that nature finally devoured after years of foreshadowing storms and unfulfilled destiny.

These small communities in the Slate Islands began their mission in the 1100s, and kept houses and householders dry for centuries. They had found a way to live, through the goal of slate. Only the Sound took that away.

It’s worth your time to visit the traces of these quarriers in a place flooded irrevocably.