If you visit Uphill you’ll think what a delightful and peaceful little village ie:; oh I know I posted about the barking dogs the other day, but really what you mostly hear is birdsong, and the sea when the tide is coming in. There are a few businesses here, two pubs, a restaurant, a sign-writers shop, an osteopath, the village shop… there’s the boatyard and marina and camp-site and a little tea-room, and we have through traffic coming down to the beach… but really we are a quiet little place.
It wasn’t always so; there was a wharf in Uphill which was busy for ships arriving bringing coal for example, and ships departing taking limestone and lime. There was also a quarry. Uphill is almost the last of the Mendip Hills, a limestone range of undulating uplands, and limestone in past times was a valuable commodity.
Limestone was used extensively for building, and with the arrival of railways for ballast; it could also be turned into lime by being burned in a kiln. The lime was used to ‘sweeten’ acid arable land, it was used as a whitewash and as mortar for building. It was very much in use from the mid 1700’s and limestone was quarried here in Uphill from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Not only was the limestone quarried, but lime was made in a lime kiln. The kiln was fed with Welsh coal, brought into Uphill from across th Bristol Channel, and no doubt the same ships took the product away.
You can’t imagine that a kiln would make much more than a roaring noise, but getting the limestone to put in the kiln was very noisy… the quarrymen weren’t just there with pick axes and chisels, they had gunpowder and later dynamite. For safety reasons the explosives were kept in a special store, set into the rock face, built of limestone and with a special metal door which acted as a safety valve if there was an accident, the door would blow out, rather than the powder house itself blow up.
There is little left to see of the powder house, overgrown with ivy, brambles and nettles… and we can only imagine the noise of the industry, the explosions, the crashing rocks, the wagons rolling backwards and forwards, now all is peaceful in Uphill!
Lois Elsden 