A house warming party ended in disaster in the middle of the Barnack Quarry one rainy November evening.
“A singular accident occurred on Saturday se’nnight at the ancient village of Barnack, near Stamford, the stone of which parish has furnished the material wherewith some of the finest religious edifices of the kingdom have been constructed, – as the abbey of Bury St. Edmund’s, and several others situated even more remotely from the quarry. – Mr. John Thompson, a mason of the village, conceived the strange notion of making the cone or mound formed by the rubbish thrown up in digging one of the pits in the now exhausted stratum of stone, serve as the centre upon which he could build a dwelling-house for himself; and he actually did in the way raise the wall of a circular tenement, having two doors, through which, when he had completed the dome of his house, he picked down and carried away the rubbish within, and thus left standing the wall of shell, of sufficient capacity to afford two good-sized apartments. Such a mode of building had a least the recommendation of novelty; and Mr. Thompson, on the afternoon of the day above-stated, had a large tea-drinking party in his new abode, as a ‘house-warming’. The weather unfortunately proved very bad; and as the materials used in the building were only rough stone and road mortar (without any timber whatever). the heavy rain penetrated through the arch in the course of the evening, and by disturbing the cement, occasioned the whole to fall in about 8 o’clock! Several of the tea-drinkers had taken alarm when the rain poured in, and opened the doors; through one of which the whole party of sixteen persons providentially escaped with their lives when the dome fell, but several of them were severely hurt, particularly the wife of a cottager named Leighton, who had her scalp so severely lacerated that it hung down over her eyes, and has since been a serious surgical case. Had it not been for the precaution of opening both doors, all the party would probably have been killed, for the immense weight of materials which fell completely blocked up on of the door-ways. – Mr. Thompson had intended within a few days to take his family into his extraordinary house; and it is perhaps a fortunate accident that had prevented their taking up their residence in it, as the downfall might have occurred at a time in the night when they would have been in bed, and away from the reach of assistance.”
The Stamford Mercury, 19th November, 1830.