Page 130 - Bulletin 11 2007

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The Quarries: Description, Exploitation and Uses of their Building Stone

The Jackson Quarries – Simon’s Town

The oldest building stone quarry in the South Peninsula opened around 1885, prior to

which building stone would have been worked from loose boulders of Table Mountain
Group sandstone. This quarry is the smaller eastern quarry of the Jackson Quarries,

named after Sir John Jackson (Watson, 1911) and located on the mountain slope above
Simon’s Town. (Fig. 3.4). It was excavated into interbedded beige sandstone and

reddish-coloured mudstone and siltstone of the Graafwater Formation. (Fig. 3.5). These
rocks are weaker than the three local rock-types described above and are prone to

weathering in the form of flaking and spalling. (Fig. 3.6).

It was probably opened to supply building stone for the construction of Saints Simon

and Jude Catholic Church (Fig. 3.7; Anon, 2007) and later for the walls and a few other

buildings in Simon’s Town. (Fig. 3.6). The interbedded disposition of the strata, their
near-horizontal bedding, presence of vertical joints, and thinness of the individual beds

(<1 m) allowed easy extraction of the building blocks. The closure date of the quarry is
not known.

The larger western quarry of the Jackson Quarries was in operation between 1901 and

1910 (Rice, 2006, pers. comm.) and exploited quartzitic sandstone of the Peninsula

Formation. The sandstone is beige, fine- to coarse-grained and contains isolated white
quartz pebbles, which differentiates it from the Graafwater Formation sandstone. (Fig.

3.8; Theron, 1984b). The sandstone was primarily utilised for construction of the East
Dockyard, which was completed in 1910. (Watson, 1911). A cableway with two lines

ran down the mountain slope for the transportation of the stone. (Rice, 2006, pers.
comm.).

A plaque at the corner of Runcimans Drive and Dorion Road, below the abandoned
quarry, states that Sir John Jackson had an inclined railway built in 1901 for the