Before I moved to the Island, I was already drawn to the granite quarries on Lundy.

The Eastern Edgelands of Lundy

My visits to the island often led me east, towards the cut edges of the land. There was something in the exposed granite. The scale of it grabbed my attention. I didn’t fully understand it then, but it stayed with me.

That pull found its way into my MA work at Arts University Plymouth.

I began sketching, painting, and eventually etching in response to the quarry landscape. It was etching that connected most closely. Scratching into a surface preparing it for print. This process echoed something of the quarry itself — the cutting, the marking, the removal. A slow, physical process of working into material.

The Lundy Granite company

Alongside this, I started reading about the Lundy Granite Company. The stories began to shift how I experienced the place.

In the 1860’s, several hundred men came to the island to work the quarries. This was a stark contrast to the small number of permanent residents who lived here. Life for the quarrymen was harsh, and often chaotic. As Ternstrom recounts, there were frequent disturbances, fuelled by isolation and a lack of diversion:

“…with some 200 workmen, laxly supervised, on an island with very few sources of recreation… there would have been fights, disturbances and damages…”

As I read this, I began imagining the exchanges that would have occurred here. The wind carried conversations, and the rock absorbed voices.

The Loss Adjusters in Portland

Around this time, I was introduced to the work of Katrina Palmer. Her piece The Loss Adjusters explores hidden and often unsettling histories within quarry landscapes, particularly Portland stone. It opened up a new way of considering Lundy’s quarries. They are not just sites of industry. They are places layered with narrative — fragments of lives, labour, and absence.

Walking through Middle Quarry now, that layering feels palpable. It was later renamed VC Quarry in memory of John Pennington Harman. What was once a site of intense human activity now sits quiet, open to the sky.

Over time, my way of being in the quarry has shifted.

I no longer go just to observe. I go to be within it. I want to experience it as a space shaped by both geology and human presence. This way of working resonates with the writing on Peter Lanyon, whose approach to landscape was rooted in immersion. Chris Stephens explained that Lanyon viewed the land as ‘holding the traces of past inhabitants and workers. The rock and boulders hold a human past’.

That feels true here.

The granite itself draws you in. On bright days, the island glistens — mica catching the light against feldspar and quartz. It’s a surface that holds both beauty and disruption.

Landscape that is continually re-forming

While researching geology, I came across the work of Tania Kovats. Her practice centres on understanding landscape as a process. It is something continually forming and reforming over time. That idea lingers when standing in the quarry. The sense that this place is not fixed, but part of a longer unfolding.

And yet, the quarries as we see them now are only part of what might have been.

The granite industry on Lundy was ultimately short-lived, lasting just a few years due to poor management. Walking there now, it’s difficult not to wonder. How might the island feel different if the quarrying had continued? What if more of the land had been cut away?

Instead, what remains are vast, amphitheatre-like spaces carved into the rock, opening out towards the North Devon coastline. Places that hold both presence and absence.

I find myself returning to them often.

What began as curiosity has become something more cyclical — a revisiting, a reworking. The quarries continue to shape my practice, just as they have shaped the island itself.

References

Granite – Lundy (no date). [Online]. Available at https://www.virtualmicroscope.org/content/granite-lundy. [Accessed on 22/04/2021]

Tania Kovats (no date). [Online]. Available at https://land2.leeds.ac.uk/people/kovats/. [Accessed on 22/04/2021]

Stephens, C., (2000). Peter Lanyon: At the edge of landscape. 21 Publishing London.

Ternstrom, M., (2008). The Lundy Granite Company: An Industrial Adventure. Westwell Publishing.