Qualla: Schevenhutte Quarry

Schevenhutte Quarry: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brunftschreier, CC BY-SA 4.0. The bottom of the quarry is a lake now. Groundwater fills the pit where bucket-wheel pumps used to keep it dry, and on the eastern wall, forty meters high and unsupported since 2008, the rock is tilting outward in great wedges, dropping into the water in landslides that shake the village of Schevenhutte. The stone here is the oldest in North Rhine-Westphalia - 490 million years, dated by the fossil graptolite Dictyonema flabelliforme - and it is finally being allowed to behave like rock again.

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Image: Brunftschreier | CC BY-SA 4.0

Schevenhutte Quarry: Older Than Everything

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Traveler100, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Schevenhutte quarry sits on the northern edge of the Eifel, at the southern end of the village of Schevenhutte in the borough of Stolberg, in a tight bend of the Wehebach stream. Geologically, this is the easternmost knuckle of the Ardennes - specifically the Stavelot-Venn sa...

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Image: Traveler100 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Schevenhutte Quarry: Two Colors of Stone

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tristan Lothmann, CC0. What made Schevenhutte stone commercially interesting was that two different varieties were exposed in roughly horizontal layers, easy to extract in large slabs. The greener variant is the Tonschiefer, a clay-banded siltstone that splits cleanly and was used for pavement slabs, d...

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Image: Tristan Lothmann | CC0

Schevenhutte Quarry: Two Centuries of Cutting

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brunftschreier, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Tranchot Map, drawn by the French around 1805, already shows a quarry in this spot. By the mid-nineteenth century the quarry was supplying the foundation stones for a forester's lodge built in 1852 near Helenasruh. Around 1890 so much material was extracted to build the paris...

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Image: Brunftschreier | CC BY-SA 4.0

Schevenhutte Quarry: What Happens When You Stop

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brunftschreier, CC0. Production ended in 2008, the last stocks were sold off by mid-2012, and then the site was simply abandoned. No renaturalization was carried out. No slope stabilization. The dewatering pump was switched off, and groundwater began filling the pit until a small endorheic lake threa...

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Image: Brunftschreier | CC0

Schevenhutte Quarry: Blasting the East Wall

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brunftschreier, CC BY-SA 4.0. The eastern face of the quarry, the most dramatic feature on the site, became a serious hazard within years of closure. Without supporting rock at its base, a slab forty meters tall began tilting outward; a crack five to six meters wide and sixty meters long opened along the top,...

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Image: Brunftschreier | CC BY-SA 4.0