Shipton-on-Cherwell cement works and quarry, May 2008

[batroy]

This is a report from a huge derelict cement works and quarry in the countryside a few miles north of Oxford. Visited in the company of BadgerLad and KingRat.

It's been the subject of quite a few reports in the past so my apologies if there's anything here you've seen before. I hadn't been there since a wander round with a mate in the late '90s so it was effectively a new explore for me because there have been quite a few changes in the intervening years.

Because I knew next-to-nothing about cement I had a quick read of the Wikipedia page about the cement manufacturing process. Crushed limestone is mixed with small amounts of other minerals to form a raw mix which is fed into a long horizontal rotating kiln with crushed coal as a fuel. The resulting pieces of clinker are then crushed to form the cement powder that you can buy at your local builders merchant. The process is conveniently linear allowing the explorer to identify structures in a cement works by where they sit in the line.

There will be more photos on my www site when I get a full report up, meanwhile here are a selection.

First up, the conveyor house that brought the stone up from the quarry floor.

Moving swiftly on, the raw mix processing plant. A load of big hoppers for the mineral additives with a big space where all the mixing machinery once sat underneath them. Somewhere here, probably to the left of this pictures, was the rock crushing plant. The upper floors are sadly inaccessible.

The rawmix plant basement is uncannily like a Quake level.

This flooded pit probably marks the site of the rock crushing plant.

Further down the site are a set of monster silos that once stored the raw mix. Holding the camera at arms length through a small opening, here's an inside view.

And yet further, the chimney, visible for miles around.

There will be more from the kiln house and clinker silos when I put up a full report on my www site. Now to the office block.

This is just a taster of what's on this site. It's so big it could furnish several reports in one. I took hundreds of photographs with not the ideal camera for the job so it's definitely somewhere I'll be returning to.

 

[cardiffrail]

Nice pics. Thanks for the infor on what the various buildings did.

 

[batroy]

Thank you, it was your report that reminded me to get my butt into gear and do this site.

(edit: I should point out that my interpretation of the buildings original purposes is based only on guesswork. It fits with how a cement plant works, however there's no guarantee it's right. )

More pics:
Machinery under the clinker silos

Swans on the crystal clear water in the quarry

Looking up the side of the water tower

 

[Foxylady]

Excellent site and photos, batroy. Interesting info about the process too.
I absolutely love quarries. Doing some google earth research recently I've found loads of them local to myself, including what looks like some gravel pits. It's amazing how many of them there are!

 

[batroy]

The trouble with gravel pits in my part of the world is they end up full of water. I hope Devon's ones are drier

The Cotswolds, which I guess you could say this site is on the edge of, are full of quarries too. Most of them are long-abandoned though and have few surviving buildings like these. Still worth a wander though, I've screeched to a halt driving along more than one Cotswold road to dive through a hole in the hedge and investigate a wooded hole in the ground.

Another picture, this time a site overview showing the raw mix silos, kiln house with chimney and the clinker silo in the foreground.