United Cavers Exploration Team

Browns Folly Stone Quarry.

Visited with AndyJ, Jay and Myself.

Browns folly is a substantial stone quarry located on the outskirts of Monkton Farleigh, Wiltshire. The site of the underground workings is now a nature reserve, and is looked after by the Avon wildlife trust. The whole site was also classified as a SSSI in 1974 due to the local bat population and the range of wildlife living on the site.

While the wildlife may of taken over the the outside of the quarry, if you look around you can see plenty of evidence of the areas quarrying past, such as the boiler house and other buildings which are now used for other things.

Inside the workings there are some lovely things, groves worn into the floor from the old carts, old troughs which were used for watering the horses and the remains of an old crane.

Our trip started mid morning when we entered the workings, we had a survey of the mine but we had no idea which entrance on the map we had entered through, after wondering about for a bit, we found an area which we felt we could ID on the survey, this gave us a starting point, in reality we probably spent more time with the survey than we did just looking about.

The day before this trip we had spent 9 hours in Box mine and my feet were feeling it, I was really struggling to stand up, taking every single opportunity I could to sit down, they were so bad that I just wanted to get out after about half an hour, this didn't happen and we spent about 4 hours just milling about.

Once we had got out we walked over to the folly, from here we headed to an old building which we at first believed to be the boiler house, the problem is boiler houses have chimneys and this building didn't, it did have a very substantial concrete built room with pipes running from it into the ground, another walk about did find us the boiler house, this now looks to be in use by a haulage company.

Total trip time was probably around 5 hours, it's a lovely mine and it has a different feel to it than the other stone mines we did over this weekend, feels lighter and more “Friendly”.

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