The quarry worked a portion of the formation that occurs at the surface as an inlier, surrounded by the younger rocks of the Mercia Mudstone Group.
The two brooks combine downstream to form the Cadoxton River, which discharges to the Bristol Channel at The Bendricks near Barry.
Stone was conveyed down an inclined tramway to be loaded onto wagons on the Barry Railway close to the southern entrance of the Wenvoe Tunnel.
At around midday on 15 August 1889 three men, Charles Harding, George Richards and James Wills, were killed while boring a hole for blasting purposes, about 10 feet (3 m) from the face of the quarry.
Harding was rescued alive, but died about an hour later from a fractured skull and complications shortly before arriving in hospital.
It was an earthwork hill-slope enclosure dating from the late Bronze Age, located on the southwest-facing flank of the ridge that now hosts the Wenvoe Quarry.
[6] A pair of lime kilns, presumably those recorded in the Ordnance Survey map of 1885, are located adjacent to the quarry entrance.
The operation mined haematite intermittently in the mid to late 1800s, by both surface (opencast) and underground workings, the latter accessed by several levels.
The main line ran for part of its length through the Wenvoe Tunnel, which had its southern portal approximately 250 m southwest of the present quarry entrance.