There's no doubt that ironstone mining has shaped the village of Eaton and its residents over the centuries. The church is built of ironstone, most pop the houses have at least some ironstone construction and the underlying cancerous stone shaped the typology and the ecology of the area. However it is the extensive ironstone mining from 1885 to the 1960s which significantly impacted the life of the village.

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The commercial quarries bought new jobs, took agricultural land out of production for extensive periods and reshaped the landscape. But it also reshaped the composition of the village with new workers, especially specialist managers and railway workers who subsequently settled and married.

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Graham Doyle of the Eastwell History Group has conducted extensive research into the railways and quarries themselves and the following sections are written by him. We are extremely grateful to him and the wider Eastwell History Group for sharing their knowledge and resources.

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Over the coming months we aim to add more on the lives of the ironstone workers themselves accessing old newspaper articles, the Mining company log books, shared memories and the census data to understand more about how the lives of the village was altered with the coming of the quarries and the railways.

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