The rock came from a desert
The red rock exposed in the quarry face is Bridgnorth Sandstone, and it formed in the Lower Permian, roughly two hundred and ninety-five million years ago. At that point the land that would become the Midlands sat deep inside the supercontinent Pangea, cut off from any moisture-bearing wind, and it was desert on the scale of the modern Sahara.
What you are looking at in the quarry wall is a fossilised sand dune. The sweeping curved layers running through the face are dune bedding, and they record the direction the wind was blowing when that sand was laid down. The colour is iron oxide, which is to say rust, coating each individual grain of quartz during a very long time in hot, dry, oxygen-rich air. This is the New Red Sandstone that gives the river cliffs and road cuttings round here their colour.
One further property of the stone matters more than any of the others for what happened next. Because the sand was dropped by wind rather than crushed under deep water, the grains are only weakly cemented to one another. That makes the rock vulnerable to weathering, and it makes it very easy to cut with hand tools. Every human use this site has ever been put to follows from that single fact.
The Victorians dug it out
The quarry exists because of the railway. When the Great Western Railway built the loop line linking Kidderminster and Bewdley in the later 1870s, the ground west of the station was too low and too awkward to carry track at street level, so the line had to be lifted onto viaducts. The Severn Valley Railway bridge that now shades the site needed a very large quantity of dressed stone.
Victorian engineering was ambitious in design and ruthlessly practical about logistics. Hauling masonry any distance by horse and cart was slow and expensive, so the stone was taken from directly underneath where it was needed. The hole is the viaduct. What was quarried out of the ground here went straight up into the arches overhead, which is why the two are made of the same rock and why they are the same colour.
Somebody lived in it
Cut into the soft rock face are man-made recesses, including one substantial excavated shelter. The site interpretation, prepared by the Earth Heritage Trust, takes these to be shelters used by the navvies who built the viaduct, and the reasoning is sound: the men needed somewhere dry and out of the wind for the several years the job took, the rock could be cut with the tools already in their hands, and they were working on the spot.
It is worth pausing on that. The navvies were itinerant labourers who moved from contract to contract building the canals and then the railways, and they built a great deal of modern Britain by hand in conditions that were frequently appalling. Here, having spent the day cutting stone out of the cliff, some of them appear to have gone back into the same cliff to sleep.
Then it held pigs
The first train ran over the loop in June 1878 and the quarry immediately became useless. The navvies moved on to the next contract, and nobody needed any more stone. In a crowded late Victorian town, however, a walled enclosure does not stay empty for long.
From the later nineteenth century into the early twentieth, the abandoned quarry was used by a butcher whose shop was on Westbourne Street to hold pigs waiting to be slaughtered. That is where the name comes from, and it is the name that has stuck.
It was an excellent solution and you can see why he took it. Before refrigeration, meat was a local business: animals were walked into town on the hoof and killed as near to the shop as possible. The quarry gave the butcher ten metres of vertical rock on three sides, which is a fence that costs nothing to build and that no pig is going to get over. The mass of the surrounding sandstone and the permanent shade of the viaduct kept the animals cool in summer and out of the wind in winter, which matters commercially, because a stressed animal loses condition. And it sat just off the junction of the Kidderminster Road and Westbourne Street, tucked out of the traffic but only yards from the shop.
He adapted it, too, and the evidence is still in the wall. A line of circular holes is bored deep into the sandstone, cut to take heavy timber beams. Those timbers almost certainly carried a lean-to roof and framed individual pens against the rock face, giving the pigs cover and something solid to be penned behind. The same weak cementation that let the navvies carve a bedroom let the butcher drill his anchor points without needing a mason.
Fifty years of nothing
Centralised abattoirs, refrigerated lorries and tighter public health rules ended the practice of holding livestock in an open quarry in the middle of a town, and the site simply stopped being useful. Nobody had a reason to maintain it, and nature is efficient. The rock face vanished behind a dense tangle of scrub and undergrowth.
Being at street level and in permanent deep shadow, it was easy to walk past and easier to ignore, and it became an informal fly-tipping spot. For decades, two hundred and ninety-five million years of geology sat behind a screen of brambles and other people’s rubbish.
One man with a strimmer
The Earth Heritage Trust ran a Community Conservation Champions project, which asked local volunteers to adopt geologically significant sites across the Abberley and Malvern Hills Geopark and take responsibility for them. Nineteen sites across Herefordshire and Worcestershire were taken on.
Given a free choice, most people would adopt something scenic and rural. A Bewdley resident named Ian Williams adopted the rubbish tip under the viaduct.
In August 2011, working with Bewdley Civic Society, he put an appeal out through the Kidderminster Shuttle asking for help clearing the old livestock pen, and a working party formed round it, including the Civic Society’s chairman at the time, Richard Perrin, along with town councillor Derek Killingworth, Steve Bent, Andy Michelman and Alan Scaplehorn. They cut back decades of woody growth and hauled out the accumulated fly-tipping, and the Permian dune bedding came back into daylight for the first time in half a century. Then they levelled the floor and laid gravel so the place could actually be walked on.
In June 2013 a wooden fence went up across the six-metre entrance, high enough to stop the dumping starting again but open enough to keep the quarry visible from the street, and an interpretation panel was installed at the gate, in a frame Williams built himself. In May 2014 the President of the Abberley and Malvern Hills Geopark came to look at it. By January 2015 the fence was painted and the site moved into what conservation people call care and maintenance, meaning somebody has to keep cutting the vegetation back, indefinitely, forever.
The gate is kept locked to keep the fly-tippers out, but this is not a site that turns people away. There is a telephone number displayed at the gate, and if you ring it you will be let in.
Why it is worth the detour
The Holding Pens is location four on the Bewdley Museum geology trail, which runs from Telford’s bridge up the Kidderminster Road and under the viaduct.
It is a ten metre by six metre gap in a wall, and it holds a Permian desert, a Victorian construction camp, an Edwardian butcher’s yard and a piece of twenty-first century volunteering, stacked on top of one another and all still visible in the same rock face. Very few places that size are carrying that much.