The Gorge also has extensive evidence of quarrying, which took place between the 17th and 19th centuries. A guidebook of 1793 acknowledged the exciting drama of the explosions and crashing rocks associated with the quarrying, but warned that “those sublime wonders of nature, the admiration of past ages, whose fame has excited thousands of strangers to visit the Hotwell and Clifton” were being “wholly demolished”. The last active quarry on the Bristol side was Black Rocks, which closed in 1877.

We are familiar with the now disused quarries on both sides of the Avon Gorge, but many people are largely unaware of the extent of past quarrying on the down land itself. Following the Clifton and Durdham Down Act of 1861, in which the Merchant Venturers and the City Council combined to preserve the Downs in perpetuity as places of recreation, one of the priorities of the new Downs Committee was first the fencing off of deep quarries and then their filling in.

Coincidental improvements to the Floating Harbour and the demolition of Hotwell Point in the 1860s provided the huge quantities of spoil required to fill four substantial quarries and many smaller ones. A special tramway was built up the side of the Gorge in 1867 with a steam winding-engine at the top on the edge of the Downs. The outline of the large quarry near the junction of Ladies Mile and Stoke Road (shown in the painting above), can still traced today for it was to be filled with good Avon mud – rich alluvial soil that produces greener grass than the paler thinner turf that surrounds it.

It was in the Stoke Road quarry in 1842 that a cavern was discovered, perhaps once a hyenas’s den, containing the gnawed bones of ‘a bear, two rhinoceros, several hippopotami…and five or six elephants’. One vast quarry on land immediately adjoining the Downs survives. It is known as the Glen and now contains a large hospital.

The limestone quarries on the Downs and on both sides of the Avon Gorge were mostly worked in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. So extensive was the quarrying in the Gorge that Robert Southey, the Bristol-born poet laureate, wrote cynically in 1807: ‘’The people of Bristol sell everything that can be sold…and here they sell the sublime and beautiful by the boatload’’.

In 1574 the Clifton parish register records the death of two Mendip miners who had been ‘stifled with smoake’ while digging for ‘tynne and lead’. The Dumps, the surviving large trenches running parallel to Upper Belgrave Road were probably the site of this tragedy and remain as a visual reminder of this industry on the Downs, which included the mining of iron, calamine and manganese.