Quarries are a surprising cliché in literature. If ever anything dramatic or suspicious were to happen you could expect it to happen at the old abandoned quarry on the other side of town

Quarries are a surprising cliché in literature. If ever anything dramatic or suspicious were to happen you could expect it to happen at the old abandoned quarry on the other side of town. Iain Banks’s last ever novel was entitled The Quarry and such a place was at the centre of the tragic and fascinating story. It’s a very Stephen King-esque sort of setting: remote, quiet and even a little haunted. However, if you ever intended to use a quarry in your own writing then it’s probably necessary that you know how one is made. What sort of tools would you expect to find there? What sort of dangers might you encounter? If you’ve ever been interested to know, here’s some information that you may find useful.

One of the main purposes of a quarry is to extract natural materials to be used in buildings and roads. After the land is three-dimensionally surveyed and measured, a drilling contractor will dig down into the wall of the quarry and an explosives engineer will plant explosives. A controlled blast will break away a portion of the quarry wall turn it into rubble. This is why quarries tend to be pretty loud. You’ll hear warning sirens, the explosives being detonated and a massive wall of rock crumbling to the bottom of the quarry. All these bits of rubble are then broken down to produce the desired materials.

There are lots of demolition tools and rock breakers used in quarries and most of the ones you’ll find there are put towards breaking down the rocks to make materials. On the site you might find a conveyor belt of machines that are used to break down the different sizes of rock. First you have the jaw crusher, which is used to break down the largest rocks. This machine uses two metal plates that move in circular motions to crush rocks that get fed into the machine. Next you have the cone crusher, which breaks down slight smaller rocks with a similar process of feeding them through a narrow passage and applying pressure to break them down. Finally you have the screening operation, where rocks are sorted into their different sizes. These are put onto a conveyor belt with a metal grid. The smaller rocks fall right through and the larger ones are, depending on the material they intend to make using these rocks, carried away to be fed through the machines again and crushed.

Around a quarry you’ll probably also see transport machines moving rocks and rubble around in the quarry. As the team dig further down for the resources they’ll make a path to allow the vehicles to move in and out. Otherwise machines would be trapped once they dig deep enough. So, if a piece of literature is about a quarry or you think a quarry would be an interesting setting for a piece of literature you’ll know how and why they’re made. You can expect during the day for quarries to be very, very loud and to be filled with the rumbling, churning and crushing of rocks in machines.