Craigfoot was one of only two active quarries in the Ochil Hills working andesite, a particularly hard and imporous volcanic rock. It originally worked a quartz-dolerite fault within the andesite, which is the coloured streak running down through the blue-black igneous rock – often referred to as “whinstone”, and long used as kerbing, hardcore and road metalling. From the Alloa side of the Ochils, it looks like a great dark bite taken out of the hillside.
Craigfoot Quarry was opened in 1930 by R.W. Menzies (although smaller scale quarrying had taken place here since 1880). Presumably the quarry had a relatively uneventful life, as a rather ordinary source of roadstone – but in January 1949 it experienced a large explosion, when a magazine containing 150 lb of high explosive detonated killing quarryman Alexander Honeyman and blowing out doors and windows in the Shillinghill area of Tillicoultry. The Menzies family still own Craigfoot's former operator, Tillicoultry Quarries Ltd, today although now they only operate hard rock quarries located at Wellwood, Dunfermline; and Northfield, Denny. Craigfoot shut around four years ago, despite having planning permission to extract more stone
Happily, there's still a lot of equipment left, including the Allis Chalmers primary crusher – there's an art to reaching it, as the steel stairs leading up to it have been removed. Inside the massive steel castings were hardened teeth that ate up the andesite, rendering it down into smaller chunks. It was powered by a big diesel engine driving a Siemens electric motor (the slip rings in the moto