The stone railing, which imitates wooden post-and-rail construction, is decorated with medallions and lunates, most of them filled with the lotus ornament and some of them centred by the head of a man or woman.
The mansion, which later became a school, was recently moved half the length of a football field by synchronized jacks moving on rails, leaving its arched colonnades, stain glass and stone railings intact.
In 1854, a coal mining firm managed by civil engineers Hugh Baird and Robert Stevenson took over the running of the quarries and by 1866 the Busby Railway was built, allowing them to transport the stone by rail.
The terrain provided excellent cover for infantrymen, with rail and stone fences, outcroppings of limestone, and little hollows and swales.
These "coal railways" used horse traction (mostly) and short cast iron rails on stone block sleepers.
From the heights we gazed at rafters and kayakers paddling past a line of stubby stone piers, the remains of rail and wagon bridges destroyed in the war.
It was constructed with fish-belly rail set into stone chairs, some of which, and some wagons, still exist in the castle cellars.
"There is a little bit of shared guilt, because I knew better," Thomson said on an August afternoon at his home, just a stone's throw from the rail yard.
Advertisements in the Bolton Chronicle appealed to Quarrymen for quantities of stone blocks to support the rails, and for excavators to construct parts of a proposed addition to the embankment from Agecroft towards Clifton Hall.
They resolved this by mounting the sleepers on supports made of sand and cement grout, with the sleeper ends resting on comparatively soft broken stone ballast underneath the running rails.
