You may remember that it was hereabouts you crossed the vale of Tilberthwaite,
“Paled in with many a mountain high,”
on a former ramble. On the present occasion, you hold the road to your right, and a precious steep, rugged sample of a road it is; but as you gradually surmount the ascent, you may take a retrospective glance, now and then, at the beautiful vale, or rather dell, of Tilberthwaite, and the mountains with which it is “paled in,” all of these being surmounted by the massive Weatherlam, which is seen to much advantage, and shews itself to be a magnificent hill from this road.
Travel onwards, with belts of plantations occupying all conceivable, and some inconceivable inequalities of ground on your left, and “mountains and moorlands, bleak, barren, and bare,” on your right, till, as you approach Hodgeclose, you pass one or two very awful-looking chasms, yawning in close proximity to the road. These are slate-quarries, which have, for many years, been placed upon the superannuated list. At Hodgeclose, you must turn from the road, pass through the farm-yard and a wood-girdled field or two, to inspect an adjacent slate-quarry, in which inspection you will find the proprietor an intelligent and obliging cicerone. He will first conduct you by a subterranean passage two hundred yards long, to the principal quarry, where the men are busy boring and blasting, and loading the carts with masses of slate metal, technically called clogs. It is in truth a strange looking spot this same quarry, being about eighty yards long and twenty wide, with perpendicular walls of living rock rising to a height of, at least, fifty yards, fringed at the top by low trees and bushes, the circumscribed portion of white clouds and blue sky appearing, from below, to rest upon the tree tops. The only exit is by the level through which you entered, though there is another level branching off to the right, and leading to an enormous dark cavern,
“Where, far within the darksome rift,
The wedge and lever ply their thrift.”
MOUNTAIN HANDICRAFT.
Its great extent is shewn by the candles of the workmen at its farther extremity—its height, by a chink in the roof, where a few stray rays of daylight faintly and feebly struggle through.
Having explored the slate beds, you may proceed to the slate sheds, where the men are engaged in riving and dressing the slate, and, from the expertness of the workmen, a very interesting process it is. The clogs, you perceive, are thrown down in heaps at the open side of the shed, and are of various shapes and sizes, the average size being that of a well-grown folio volume. One of these the splitter seizes, and holding it adroitly on edge with his left hand, taps one side of it with a hammer like a small pickaxe, with its points flattened and sharpened, until he establishes a decided crack, which he follows up, and repeating this process, divides the clog into smooth slates, quite as rapidly as you could divide the leaves of any gigantic folio. When riven to a proper degree of thinness, the slates are laid alongside of a man who sits very commodiously upon a prostrate beam of wood, into the upper side of which a long flat-topped staple is fastened. On this staple he holds the undressed slates, and chips them into shape as quickly as any young lady of your acquaintance could clip muslin with her best scissors. They are then laid aside, and classified according to their fineness, the finest being called London—the second Country—the coarsest Tom—and a very small quality for slating the walls of houses is called Peg.
A NOBLE EXCAVATION.