Qualla: Broadcroft Quarry https://qualla.com/broadcroft-quarry en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:11 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/y/r/broadcroft-quarry-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Broadcroft Quarry https://qualla.com/broadcroft-quarry Broadcroft Quarry: Introduction https://qualla.com/broadcroft-quarry/ Photo credit Ajsmith141, CC BY-SA 3.0. The silver-studded blue is a small butterfly the color of a summer sky, and it needs bare ground to lay its eggs. Not grass. Not flowers. Bare, hot, stony earth, the kind that gets left behind when a quarry closes. Every spring, conservation volunteers come out to Broadcroft Quarry on the Isle of Portland with diggers and machetes to scrape the surface clean again, to keep the bare patches bare, because the butterflies need them and the butterflies will not come back if the brambles win. This is a working stone quarry. It still ships Portland limestone to London. It also holds, in seven hectares of its abandoned eastern edge, one of the densest silver-studded blue colonies in southern England.

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Image: Ajsmith141 | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/y/r/broadcroft-quarry-wp/gbyr-broadcroft-quarry-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Broadcroft Quarry: Stone for the Empire https://qualla.com/broadcroft-quarry/ Photo credit Ajsmith141, CC BY-SA 3.0. Broadcroft has been worked since the early twentieth century, originally as a cluster of small family-run operations that merged into a single large quarry as the market grew. The Portland limestone they take out here is the stone that built central London: St. Paul's Cathedral, ...

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Image: Ajsmith141 | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/y/r/broadcroft-quarry-wp/gbyr-broadcroft-quarry-stone-for-the-empire.mp3 0:06 2 full Broadcroft Quarry: A Whole Stratigraphic Column https://qualla.com/broadcroft-quarry/ Photo credit Ajsmith141, CC BY-SA 3.0. Geologists love Broadcroft. In the past, aggregate quarrying here cut down below the dimension stone beds all the way to the Portland clay at the bottom of the formation, which made Broadcroft the only place on the Isle of Portland where the entire stratigraphic column of the Por...

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Image: Ajsmith141 | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/y/r/broadcroft-quarry-wp/gbyr-broadcroft-quarry-a-whole-stratigraphic-column.mp3 0:06 3 full Broadcroft Quarry: Rewilding by Accident https://qualla.com/broadcroft-quarry/ Photo credit Ajsmith141, CC BY-SA 3.0. An abandoned section of Broadcroft Quarry was infilled and left in the late twentieth century, and nature came back on its own. Butterfly Conservation began leasing it from the quarry company in 1994. The 7.3-hectare reserve sits inside Portland's Site of Special Scientific Inter...

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Image: Ajsmith141 | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/y/r/broadcroft-quarry-wp/gbyr-broadcroft-quarry-rewilding-by-accident.mp3 0:06 4 full Broadcroft Quarry: Silver-Studded Blue https://qualla.com/broadcroft-quarry/ Photo credit Ajsmith141, CC BY-SA 3.0. More than twenty-four species of butterfly use the reserve, but the one Broadcroft is famous for is the silver-studded blue, Plebejus argus, a small butterfly whose males are blue and whose females are brown with orange spots. The larvae have a specific relationship with black an...

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Image: Ajsmith141 | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/y/r/broadcroft-quarry-wp/gbyr-broadcroft-quarry-silver-studded-blue.mp3 0:06 5 full Broadcroft Quarry: A Quarry That Does Both Jobs https://qualla.com/broadcroft-quarry/ Photo credit Ajsmith141, CC BY-SA 3.0. Broadcroft is unusual in that it actively does two things at once. On its working side, the trucks come and go and the cutters keep producing dimension stone for Britain's monuments and warehouses and gravestones. On its abandoned side, butterflies feed and breed in numbers that ...

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Image: Ajsmith141 | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/y/r/broadcroft-quarry-wp/gbyr-broadcroft-quarry-a-quarry-that-does-both-jobs.mp3 0:06 6 full