Bridge head revisited

It's been tipping it down with rain all day, and two members of staff ( out of four! ) called in sick. Luckily, one was able to manage a few hours with us, and another girl who usually works the weekends was also able to give us a hand later. Phew!

The horses weren't too keen to go out, but all queueing up to come in at 'home' time!

So, I'm going back to the bridge that I mentioned on Monday. When Sav was a lad, the now defunct bridge was still in use. He and one of his mates used to hide underneath the sleepers and pop their heads up as the train passed over. They also used to wait for the men who worked there to line up the small ( but heavy! ) trailers ready for the next day and go home. Then they would shift the trailers about, moving them over onto a different track! Security was a lot more slack in the '70's!

The trains pulled trailers of gypsum which is the predominant mineral in this area. For hundreds of years this stone has been quarried or mined for fashioning into alabaster or manufacturing gypsum plaster. Early examples of its use; the Normans used alabaster in the west doorway of Tutbury Priory Church, foundations of the castle and decorations inside. John O' Gaunt ordered blocks of gypsum from Fauld for an alabaster monument in memory of his first wife, which was placed in old St. Paul's Cathedral.

There were three mines, one a couple of miles away at Draycott-In-The-Clay, and two at Fauld, which may begin to ring a bell in older UK Blippers ... During the Second World War, adjacent to one of the Fauld mines was an R.A.F. Munitions depot.

At 11:11am on Monday, 27 November 1944 at the RAF Fauld underground munitions storage depot was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history and the largest to occur on UK soil ... but that's a story for another day.

Back to the gypsum - The rock was mined, sorted and then transported to Scropton sidings on the 3ft gauge railway using a steam locomotive. The mineral was then loaded onto main line gauge trucks and taken to their recently acquired mill ( in 1899 ) at Tutbury. This mill was closed down in 1968, but British Gypsum still mine the gypsum at the same sites today. The output of the modern factory is many times that of the old mill.

The collage shows the bridge being used by a horse drawn trailer, with the disused train track underneath as it was in 1986. On the right top is how it looks now, and beneath that is the main railway line that runs behind our house as it was in the day of steam engines.