Do quarries ruin the landscape? The general public seem to think they do if they are being worked but that they are an essential part of our industrial heritage if they are old and disused and must, therefore, be retained.

To many a botanist an active, as well as a disused quarry represents an opportunity to find rare and exotic species. Quarries offer opportunities for biodiversity that are rare these days. It just depends on your perception.

Daniel Defoe saw the beauty of quarrying in 1724 on a visit to Portland. \'Tis wonderful, and well worth the observation of a traveller to see the quarries in the rocks, from whence they are cut out, what stones, and of what prodigious a size are cut out there.

Quarrying over many thousands of years has certainly helped shape our landscapes and Peter Stanier looks at some of those earlier quarries in his book, Stone Quarry Landscapes - the industrial archaeology of quarrying.

He goes into quarries, mostly in Southern England and mostly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to explore the history of quarrying and the stone industry of England.

He examines the abandoned machinery and buildings and sifts through waste dumps to uncover the details of the lives of the people who worked in the industry.

Stanier\'s interest in quarries stems from his early life in Cornwall, where he was surrounded by the granite industry. He has written a number of papers on industrial archaeology and his previous books include Quarries and Quarrying (1985), Quarries of England and Wales (1995) and South West Granite (2000).

He is editor of the quarterly Industrial Archaeology News for the Association of Industrial Archaeology and currently lives in Dorset, where he is a writer and lecturer in archaeology and industrial archaeology.

Stone Quarry Landscapes, ISBN 0 7524 1751 7, is a 160-page paperback priced at £16.99. It is published by: