The works

Fourteen weeks from the face to the tube, and most of it is waiting.

Nothing here is quick. Ochre comes out of the ground wet, full of clay and quartz and the odd root, and every stage after that is a way of taking something out of it. What is left is a colour that behaves. This page is the whole of it, in order, with the bits nobody photographs.

In order

Five stages, one ticket each

Stage 01 · two days Digging Hand tools only inside the licence. About 400kg of wet spoil gives us 60kg of dry pigment, if the face is behaving.
Stage 02 · six weeks Washing Three settling tanks in the yard. The sand drops in the first, the clay in the second, the colour in the third. Patience is the whole technique.
Stage 03 · one day Roasting Only for the reds. Yellow ochre goes into the kiln at 480°C and comes out somewhere between rust and liver, depending on the hour.
Stage 04 · three days Grinding Jaw crusher, then the edge runner, then sieved to grade. Anything above its mesh goes back round.
Stage 05 · a morning Mulling Glass muller on porphyry, two passes, by hand, sixty tubes at a time. This is the stage a machine would do worse.
A section through the Wigpool seam with the core sample lifted out.

The face

Wigpool, east side, four to nine metres

The iron mines above Ruardean have been worked since the Romans, mostly for ore and once, briefly and disastrously, for cement. The ochre sits in a soft band near the top of the workings — no use to anyone smelting, which is why it is still there.

We take about nine tonnes a year under a licence that runs to 2034 and caps us at twelve. Two of those nine end up as colour. The rest goes back in as fill, because a hole you have finished with is still your hole.

Photographs

Ground of this kind, and hands of this kind

A red iron-oxide escarpment: the kind of ground the colour comes out of.
A maker's hands measuring turned work with callipers at the bench.
Measuring, at the bench. James Frid, CC0, via StockSnap.
Weathered iron oxide over blue-grey paint on a metal sheet.
Iron oxide, weathering. Burnt Pineapple Productions, CC0, via Flickr.

Escarpment photograph: Bernard Spragg, CC0, via Flickr. All three are public domain, stored in photos/ and served from this folder — the page fetches nothing.

Five of us, three worth naming here

Who does what

Each plate is that person's own earth with the person cut out of it, which was Nell's idea and has been quietly resented by the other two ever since.

Team plate for Ada Pell: a silhouette banded in Wigpool red.

Ada Pell

Does
The face, the licence
Was
Field geologist, BGS
Since
2011, from the start
Team plate for Rhodri Bevan: a silhouette filled with sieved grain.

Rhodri Bevan

Does
The mill, the kiln
Was
Feed miller, Monmouth
Since
2012
Team plate for Nell Fewings: a graded drawdown with the knife line across it.

Nell Fewings

Does
Matching, records
Was
Paper conservator
Since
2016

What we will not do

No lakes, no fugitive reds, nothing bulked with chalk to make the price look kind.

If a colour cannot last two hundred years on a wall we would rather you bought it from somebody else. There is a list of the pigments we have refused to make, and we will send it to you, at length, if you ask.

I ordered a kilo of the yellow expecting the usual dull mustard and got something with actual light in it. Then Rhodri rang to warn me the next batch would be greener, because the face had turned. Who does that?
Peter Halsey · decorative plasterer, Bristol

Come and see it being done.

The mill is open to callers on Thursdays, 10 till 4. No booking, no tour, no gift shop — but somebody will stop what they are doing and show you the slab.

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