About 400 million years ago, several huge blobs of liquid magma rose from the depths of the Earth’s crust below the land that now forms the Lake District. These blobs solidified to form granites like those seen at Skiddaw, Eskdale and Shap. Small offshoots of the magma squirted along fractures in the crust, and then solidified to form long relatively thin features that geologists call dykes. This quarry is into one of those dykes, probably formed as an offshoot from the incoming Shap granite. The dyke is about 13 m wide and most of it has been quarried away and removed, probably for road stone. However, you can still see some of it at the sides of the quarry, particularly on the right (NW side) as you go in. It is a pinkish rock with no layers visible.
The rock that the dyke was intruded is formed from silt that settled down to the bottom of a deep sea, about 450 million years ago, forming layers that you can see on the left hand (west) side of the quarry. The layers were originally flat but have now been tilted. These rocks belong to the Bannisdale Formation of the Windermere Group.
You can park on the roadside, close to the quarry, or in the pay and display Brown Howe car park on the other side of the road, slightly north of the quarry, where there are toilets and a picnic area.