Quarry Moor  Quarry Moor is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, or SSSI, at the south edge of Ripon, North Yorkshire, England, and adjacent to the A61 road. It contains an outcrop of Magnesian Limestone, exposed by former quarrying. 255 million years ago this limestone was the peripheral sediment of a tropical sea. The land was donated in 1945 to the people of Ripon by the town's mayor, Alderman Thomas Fowler Spence, a varnish manufacturer. The land was notified as an SSSI in 1986 because its calcareous grassland supported a large diversity of plant species. The site features a Schedule 8 protected plant, thistle broomrape. The land is protected as a nature reserve, and it is also managed as a recreational area. Therefore, its calcareous grass area is fenced off for protection and study, but it also contains a car park, information signs, a children's play area, accessible paths, benches, and dog waste bins. The strata of the quarry face at the western side of the Quarry Moor site are the remains of a Permian shoreline of 255 million years past. Sediments from the tropical Zechstein Sea ultimately became the Magnesian Limestone outcrop of north-east England, part of which is exposed here. Limestone has been quarried here for at least six centuries, and used for construction. For example, in the 15th century the walls of the 12th century Chapel of St Mary Magdalene, Ripon, were refaced with blocks of limestone from Quarry Moor. By the 1870s there were lime kilns on the site, making quicklime for mortar. In September 1943, following the "use of land for army training," botanist George Taylor reported: "Serious disturbance has been observed on Quarry Moor ... where last year "Spiranthes spiralis" Koch [or lady's tresses orchid] occurred in some quantity and the reappearance of this very local species on this site is problematical." He checked the site again in 1944, and said, "The work of destruction has proceeded apace during the intervening months. The common is now almost completely excavated, and all vestige of plant life - except at the narrow margins - has disappeared." As of 2020, the lady's tresses orchid is "becoming increasingly rare in the north of the UK." The quarry was closed in the 1950s, and the pits were infilled in the 1970s.