- The folks at this quarry in Claughton near Lancaster
dig up about 60,000 tonnes of shale rock from the ground every year.
That shale needs to get to the brickworks,
about a mile and a half that way.
Nowadays, you'd have some fancy underground conveyor belt
or you'd just have trucks loading up and driving back and forth.
But this quarry opened in the 1920s.
So the solution was a bit different: an aerial ropeway.
This is the last aerial ropeway in Britain.
It's nearly a hundred years old.
It needs no fuel and no electricity to run.
And in 15 years time, it'll be gone.
- This ropeway was commissioned in the 1920s
but we've been quarrying from this valley now
for well over 150 years.
An empty bucket arrives, it goes onto what we call the bull rail,
so that automatically comes off the rope
and it allows the rope to go around a wheel.
The bucket then is dusted. If the weather is bad,
the rain adheres to the bucket and the muck sticks to it.
So that would reduce what is taken down to the factory
and also would affect the balance of the rope.
And then it's put under a feeder
where a given amount of material is put into that bucket,
about a quarter of a tonne.
At that point, another operative takes the full bucket
from under the feeder and waits until the correct positioning
of the incoming bucket is in place,
which allows him then to feed it onto the rope.
That spacing is critical because of the way the rope works.
It's gravity fed.
- The brickworks is downhill from here
so all the power for this ropeway comes from gravity.
Put the full buckets of shale on one side, going down the hill
and the empty buckets on the other side going up
and you don't need an engine house or a motor.
You just need brakes to regulate the speed.
It takes about half an hour for a round trip. There are about 40 buckets.
This ropeway will move about 300 tonnes of shale every day
with no need for petrol or electricity.
So let's go to the brickworks at the other end
and see how it works down there.
- As a bucket comes in the other end, an operator is stood waiting for it.
It comes off the rope at a given speed onto a bull rail,
from that bull rail, the operator walks round.
There's a pivot system on the bucket that tips into a hopper.
At that point, it then feeds into a dump truck.
The operator then puts the bucket back.
When the correct space is positioned, he pushes the bucket onto the rope.
It's an art to swing that bucket and tip it at the right time.
They do walk quite a few miles in a day.
This factory was designed to produce round-about 42 million bricks annually.
And there was a £4.4 million investment four years ago
that increased the productivity up to 50 million.
Claughton produces frost-resistant product.
It's down to the shale from the quarry, that's a vital key to it.
The temperature we fire at
and also the durability of the ceramic bond.
That means we can sell this product into all extreme weathers.
There's nowhere in the UK we can't sell to
with our durability of the product at Claughton.
Unfortunately, it has to cross the road.
It's never been known, certainly in the last 50, 60 years,
to come off at that point, but it is a possibility.
So we have a steel bridge with big bucket-catchers on the side
that would prevent that happening.
The rope construction is a 25mm steel rope.
Very difficult to get contractors these days
who are skilled in splicing ropes of that size.
We replace the rope every six years.
It's a very, very difficult process, very old,
the technology's the 1920s, of course.
We did a computer design of a new ropeway many years ago,
and unbelievably, the computer matched this design
in terms of trestle heights and weights
to somebody with a slide rule and a pencil.
- There used to be hundreds of these ropeways around Britain,
in industrial sites, mines and quarries.
This is the last one still operating anywhere in the country.
It nearly wasn't, the financial crisis in the late 2000s
meant the quarry and brickworks shut down for a few years.
But it was kept in working order and as of right now,
it's still transporting rock.
But it has an expiry date. 31st December, 2036.
Permission for quarrying was going to end in 2018
but the local council planning department granted an extension
because the quarry and brickworks are still operating.
There's a lot of shale still in the hill up there
and literally no one objected.
I checked the planning report.
Environmental agencies, local residents, everyone was, like,
"Yeah fine, keep it running, that works."
Now in theory, that deadline could be extended again
but the reason they picked 2036
is that by then, the company will more or less have quarried
everything they can out of that hill.
And one of the conditions of that time extension
is that once quarrying is finished, the ropeway has to come down.
The planning report does acknowledge that it's unique in the country,
it's the only one left in Britain.
There is some heritage value in it,
but, they say, not enough to justify saving it for posterity.
This isn't like an old railway line where,
if it's left unmaintained, it'll just slowly, steadily decay.
It could be actively dangerous if the ropes and towers start to fall apart,
particularly when they run over a road, just there.
Unless money is constantly spent to keep it in working order,
it'll decay into an unsafe blot on the landscape.
Which is fair, but I suspect when that final day comes
in about 15 years time, when the last bucket
goes down the ropeway, there'll be a few people here
to say goodbye to it.
And until then it'll keep moving shale without needing any fuel at all.
Thank you so much to all the team at Forterra
for showing me around.
They did ask me to make clear that the ropeway
is not a tourist attraction.
So if you're in the area and you want to take
a couple of pictures from the road, sure!
But then, for their sake, please keep driving.