Black Country Walk Through Time

The Snake Pit

Walk up the bank at back of car park. Go past the Wardens' Office (on your left) and up to Wren's Hill Road.

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Wren's Hill Road

At the top of the road, look for the large 'Dudley Bug' carving on the right. This is a sculpture of a trilobite - Dudley's most famous fossil. (There's more about fossils on page 4 and 5.)

Under this area are the foundations for the house where Abraham Darby was born. He was instrumental in the Industrial Revolution - more about that later.

Turn into the reserve on the right, just past the Dudley Bug.

The Snake Pit

The area just past the entrance is part of a disused limestone quarry. Limestone is the one of the oldest rock types in the Midlands. It was laid down here 443 - 417 million years ago in the Silurian Period. At that time, Dudley was at the bottom of a warm shallow sea.

Imagine what it must have been like where you're standing - you'd be underwater with soft sand between your toes, the seabed covered with different types of coral and burrowing creatures. The water around you is crystal clear as sunlight twinkles down from the surface, picking out the bright colours of the many strange creatures swimming past.

When the creatures which lived here died, they settled on the sea bed, leaving layer after layer of dead bodies in the mud. Over millions of years, under heat and pressure, the mud became limestone with the dead creatures preserved inside it as fossils.

What did Dudley look like in the Silurian period? Listen to Graham Worton »
How does a creature turn into a fossil? Listen to Graham Worton »

Layers of rock in the Snake Pit

If the Earth's crust didn't move, this limestone would be buried hundreds of metres underground. So why is it sticking up here on the surface? Over the millions of years since the limestone was created, the plates of the Earth's crust have been moving about, folding and tilting the rock as easily as if it were fabric.

If people hadn't quarried the limestone here, they would never have found fossils and found out about Dudley's incredible past. Dudley limestone was first used as a building material - Dudley Castle is made from the local rock (and its walls are full of fossils!). Then, in the 1600s and 1700s, limestone was burned and sold as quicklime all over the UK, when it was used as a fertilizer on farms.

After that, the major use of Dudley limestone has been in the iron industry. All the elements needed for ironworks are available in the Black Country. Quicklime takes impurities out of coal - this means the reaction for making iron needs less coal, so it's cheaper.

Why is the limestone at the surface? Listen to Graham Worton »
Why was limestone mined? Listen to Graham Worton »

Go back onto Wren's Hill Road, cross over and go into the nature reserve. You'll see there is a pathway cut into the hill on the right...

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