"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone"

I have lived in Pembrokeshire for over 15 years now and still it yields new treasures, hidden wonders concealed from all but the most unrelentingly curious.

On a day of unbroken sunshine I had the opportunity of sharing a friend's car and enthusiasm to explore a little further beyond my usual territory. Pooling our historical and geographical knowledge of the area, we visited a village church, a chapel and an ancient burial chamber, then set off to walk up to a prehistoric hill fort that was not known to either of us. We were amazed to find an isolated double-ditched camp commanding a hazy panorama of farmland and distant hills. The earth banks were riddled with the burrows of its now sole denizens - rabbits and badgers. As we marvelled at the view, I spotted, a little way below, the contours of an old quarry, ran down to the edge and was astonished by what I found: a vast cavity in the hillside with, perched above, these giant stone structures that would once have held winding and lifting gear to supply water and to bring out the slate. Within the quarry itself, grassy now beneath the rock faces, there was a hidden world to explore: stone orifices leading to passages where the light faded into dark dripping caverns, piles of scree scattered with the bleached bones of fallen cows, a clear pool of cold water emerald with algae and alive with newts, a solitary tree bearing aloft a single raven's nest in its forked branches (the disgruntled bird croaked at us as it flapped overhead) and all manner of intriguing plants, mosses and lichens flourishing in the undisturbed solitude of a sheltered microcosm.

Shelley's lines of Ozymandias came to my mind on seeing this abandoned stonework, standing like massive fortifications guarding an industrial enterprise that petered to a halt over a hundred years ago when the demand for slate and stone was superceded by the easy availability of bricks. The quarry workers packed up and departed, the machinery was sold and the place was left to nature, and the stone legs.