Tout Quarry
Naturally regenerated since quarrying ceased nearly a century ago, Tout (which means 'lookout') is the most magical and dramatic of the few hand-worked quarries that remain on Portland.
Cut into the clifftop high over Lyme Bay, with views along Chesil Beach to the Devon coast, it is now a labyrinth of overgrown gullies and pathways that twist and turn, revealing sculpture either carved into the rockface or constructed from shale within the quarry landscape itself.
Robert Harding - 'Philosophers Stone' 1983
This man-made landscape has inspired the diversity of sculptural concepts which can be found in the quarry today. The sculptures provide vantage points that allow the visitor to see where sculpture, geology and quarrying history meet.
Valentine Quinn - 'Green Man' 1985
"This wonderful site provided the inspiration for the sculpture as well as the material to make it. The site is permeated by the history of stone, fine stone won to construct
beautiful buildings; wandering around the City or through Greenwich I connect the Isle of Portland with Wren and Hawksmoor. In Portland, evidence of the formation of the stone is everywhere; giant ammonites spiral through this raised sea floor. The Portland sculpture quarry makes it possible to learn
how to make sculpture, often ambitious in scale; but Tout is supremely a stimulus for the imagination."
(Keir Smith - 'Dreaming Head with Estuary, 1983')
Ascent
"Tout was for me, and the young sculptors I took from Brighton, an inspirational experience not only in terms of first hand working with natural materials in their place of
origin, but because of its peculiar beauty. The works carved in situ have a unique dialogue with their environment, and I think that Tout, both in terms of its history as a quarry, and its recent
history as an open-air sculpture workshop, is a unique resource for both artists and the public."
(Antony Gormley - 'Still Falling', 1983)
Hamish Horsley - 'Descent' 1983
Time and Memory
If you do not already know the Isle of Portland, imagine an ancient sea bed made by layer upon layer of fragments of life, mainly marine, later terrestrial, mixed with river-born erosion and compacted to rock by the sheer weight of accumulating layers. At some later stage, one chunk of this bed was split off and uplifted, making a wedge-shaped plateau of land surrounded by cliffs dropping to the sea, and joined to the Dorset coast by a narrow pebble causeway.
The properties of the middle rock layers make it ideal for building and carving, so now, walking on the plateau, you see it pitted by quarries. Some are in commercial production. Others, disused, are a riot of nature's reclamation, and there is a striking contrast between the wholesale removal of rock today, and the meandering gorges to be savoured in a wander round the now 'officially' disused Tout Quarry. Nevertheless, Tout Quarry has been given a whole new lease of life by becoming the on-site base of the Portland Sculpture and Quarry Trust.
Christopher Wren used Portland stone for St. Paul's Cathedral, for which Grinling Gibbons carved its cherubs. Maybe some of this stone came from Tout, but records date only from 1780. Certainly the Royal Courts of Justice are built of Tout stone, and Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore are two of the many carvers and sculptors who have treasured it for its texture, colour and workability.
But Tout was not just a quarry. It was also a training school for masons, and one of the joys of a session in the PSQT workshops is the contact with tutors, many of them professional sculptors and art school tutors. But others are stone masons, some of whom started in the quarry as apprentices. From one of these I learnt how singing regulated the rhythm for hammering many wedges into the rock face -- one hit out of sync might ruin a valuable block, and the penalty to the guilty party was a forfeit of 3 pence from wages. How singing also regulated teams manhandling the hoists -- each verse break signalled a rested man to take over at one handle-end, releasing the tired one at the other end. Ironically it is only recently that quarrymen have developed RSS caused by so-called labour-saving machinery which has replaced earlier manual methods.
Time and memory: these are the words which resonate for me when I recall our Landscape & Art Network visit to Portland. Time, and changes over Time which are recorded in the rocks, decoded by humans into memory only within the last tiny fraction of geological Time to tell the story of evolution and restless forces which transform our planet's surface. And Human Time, not only how our actions have altered the planet, but how we have developed our understanding and power by manipulation and speculation.
Quarrying is an intervention bringing the dilemma of what to do with the hole after all useful material is removed. As it is now, Tout seems to be about as good an example of successful regeneration as could be hoped for. For one thing, it is not exactly a hole -- it is more like a natural gorge with many side-gorges. These are actually the result of earlier quarrying methods, but the natural appearance is a happy one, much reinforced by the living greening of Nature's own reclamation.
But Art has also had a go in that artists and masons with creative urges have left their own handiwork which the explorer comes across, often in unexpected crannies. Uniquely, because carvers have been able to pick their own sites, work by famous names rubs shoulders with the anonymous, and all the work has been carried out there where it now stands, as a spontaneous response to the spirit of the place.
Tout is indeed a different sort of sculpture park. And nestling in one of the side-gorges is the workshop of the Portland Sculpture and Quarry Trust, which provides all sorts of courses to suit different ages and experiences. There are also rock strata, fossils, and rare species of insects and plants for field studies, not forgetting paths for walking and cliffs for climbing. In other words, Tout is very much a used and therefore useful quarry.
Tam Giles: Landscape & Art Network
