This excellent article first appeared on the Facebook page of Callander Heritage Society. Our thanks to them for permission to reproduce it here.

At the entrance to the slate quarries on the Duke’s Pass, the Quarry Master’s House is now a private residence.
Owned by the Aberfoyle Slate Quarry Co. Ltd., these slate quarries date from the eighteenth century and by Victorian times were the third largest in Scotland. There were several in the Aberfoyle area, all producing high quality slates. This quarry is at the side of the Trossachs Road, at the approach to the Duke’s Pass travelling north from Aberfoyle. The sturdily built workmen’s cottages are all roofed with slate, as is the Quarry Manager’s house on the right. A narrow gauge tramway used to connect this quarry with the railway at Aberfoyle. The tramway was closed in 1947 and the quarries themselves closed in 1958. The workmen’s cottages have long since been demolished but the Quarry Manager’s house still stands at the roadside and is now a private residence.
When the quarries were at their busiest in the middle of the nineteenth century, many of the workers lived on the site and there was a school for their children. they were being worked by Duncan Macfarlane and in 1847 the tenant was Peter McKeich. In the 1850s there was a huge increase in demand for slates, because of the house-building boom in Glasgow and the lease of the quarries was taken over by a company. It was able to invest more capital in the development of the quarries and greatly increased the workforce. As a result of the remoteness of the site of the quarries from the village of Aberfoyle, many of the quarrymen brought their whole families to live up there in the hills and the new owners encouraged this by establishing a school and paying the salary of a schoolmaster. He must have been kept busy, because at one time the number of children on the roll of the school at the quarry was greater than the total of boys and girls attending the school in Aberfoyle, whose Victorian grey whinstone buildings can still be seen on the road leading out to Loch Ard. Certainly the school at the quarry must have been the best supplied in the whole of Scotland with the slates on which nineteenth-century pupils did their writing and practised their sums.
At the quarry the only remaining building stands at the entrance just off the main road. This small whitewashed house was the home of the quarry manager.
At one time the quarry company also owned the block of red sandstone buildings on the corner of Main Street and the foot of the Duke’s Pass, and what is now the office of the local branch of the Bank of Scotland was at one time the home of one of the quarry officials.
In addition to the slate quarries there also used to be a whin quarry, which was developed by the then local government body, Perthshire County Council, when it took over responsibility from the former Road Commissioners for the development and repair of highways in the area and required material for road metal. Until this time, material for road repairs had simply been acquired by picking up stones from the roadside and transporting them by horse-drawn cart to the place where they were required. Once at the site, labourers had the hard job of smashing them up with picks and hammers to form the required road metal.