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TARMAC PAPERS, no.1 (1997): QUARRY PRODUCTS NUMBER. Tarmac Heavy Building Materials UK Ltd., Wolverhampton. Pp.viii, 156. No price. Among the more unlikely historical theories of recent years is the suggestion that King Arthur was buried at Cilyrychen Quarry, whose Victorian limekilns can still be seen as one journeys from Ammanford to Llandeilo. Implausible as the notion may be, a television company gave it credence a few years ago with the result that a number of academics and representatives of the quarry's new owners, Tarmac, met on site to discuss the possibility. It goes without saying that nothing came of the King Arthur theory but the day was far from wasted, for it led to the discovery of an abandoned, but almost complete, set of records relating to the quarry since the mid-nineteenth century. This led to Tarmac making the decision to set up an Archives and History Initiative and to appoint a company archivist, and this in turn resulted in Tarmac Papers, the first issue of which was published in 1997. Tarmac Papers, despite its name, is not a journal devoted to the techniques employed in preparing and applying that useful material, nor does it belong to the class of corporate vanity publications which are produced at great expense and which seem to consist largely of photographs of a beaming chairman of the board greeting visitors from various parts of the globe. It is intended to be a scholarly journal devoted to the archaeology and history of quarrying and of the construction industry in general; and this the first issue fully achieves, as one might expect, given that the editor is R. W. D. Fenn, the editor of the Transactions of the Radnorshire Society and a prolific contributor to that journal. For present readers, the articles likely to be of most interest in this volume are those by Dr Fenn himself and by I. C. Thomas on the history of Cilyrychen and its founder, the architect R. K. Penson. Fenn provides a readable and competent account of Penson who achieved a moderate level of success as an architect in Wales and the border counties before turning his attention to quarrying and lime-burning, apparently as a result of contacts established with the Dynevor estate while renovating Dynevor Castle in 1856. Thomas looks in much more detail at the first years of Cilyrychen Quarry, using as his principal source an Account Book of 1856-9. He extracts useful information regarding construction costs, production methods, wage rates and marketing. Both writers naturally draw on material in the Tarmac archives, one of the purposes of the Archives and History Initiative being to encourage the exploitation of this material, but as the notes to each article demonstrate, they have certainly not confined themselves to this source. Neither Thomas nor Fenn really explains why a