Random Mine of the Day: A shaft onto the Ould Men's Adit

[bunn]

This really is a very random mine of the day as I snapped it very quickly with my phone as I walked past this evening and I'm afraid it came out a little fuzzy.  It is kind of interesting though...

...because this shaft, which leads down to a mine known as Ould Men's Adit, also known as Great Hopewell, is an eighteenth century adit.  That means it pre-dates the time when it occurred to people that making some sort of note about where all the mines and adits were before the entire county was hollowed out and collapsing randomly, might be a good idea.

It's enclosed by a Cornish hedge: that's a stone bank mortared with earth and covered in turf, bracken and in this case, gorse and bramble, with a vague later attempt to stop people falling into it by adding a wire fence.   The Heritage Gateway says this is one of three shafts, but it is not communicative about where the other shafts might be.  There are a couple of other dips along here that might be shafts.  Or they might not.  Note to self, do not bounce up and down on them just in case.

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that there is a lot of working farmland in north-east England which includes the sites of old coal mining shafts and drift mines. Occasionally you see areas in aerial photographs which are clearly unfarmed and where shadow suggests a significant depression. In other areas it looks as if they grow crops or graze animals on these depressions and hope for the best.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I don't know much about coal mining : my knowledge of industrial history is pretty much developing as I make these posts (I know, appalling, right? Specially since I lived in South Wales)

Down here the transition from 'cheap abandoned mining area' to 'leisure/tourism resource and actually meat is now expensive enough to be bringing fields back into productive use too' seems to be *really* recent: it's happened in the 15 years we've been living here. So you get these odd tensions with things that are potentially rather dangerous but are left over rather than new, so people accept them...

I'm guessing something similar has happened in the North East. It certainly has in South Wales, it was *brilliant* to go back there a couple years ago and see how prosperous and comfortable and diverse and undesperate that area has become.