bunn | Entries tagged with mines

Was it really 2015 when I began taking snaps of Random Mines of the Day/Week? Apparently it was. I came across a random mine I'm sure I've never seen before today though, and it was a really good one, with two chimneys and a spoil heap and a view down the valley with atmospherically cawing rooks. There are apparently two shafts, as well as the chimneys, though I couldn't see those from the road.

Despite all the chimneys, shafts etc, this seems to have been a remarkably shortlived copper mine. Heritage Gateway says that it was in operation from 1849 to 1858 and idle in 1865.Remarkable to build two great chimneys like that and for them to be still standing so long after, yet the mine itself was only running for nine years.

It looks good in Google Street View too, since the Street View camera has caught it at the height of bluebell season.

The last few weeks as summer faded into definite autumn, almost felt normal. We went to Calstock, had icecream. These are all phone-photos. I could have taken my camera... but I did not.

admired this bold cat, hanging out with the giant menacing ducks.
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Over the festive period I felt that I hadn't done much arting for a little while, so I put some effort into it. Now my brain seems to have entirely tuned itself in to visual stuff and I don't seem to be able to concentrate on writing! I am actually doing fairly well on concentrating on work for a change, though, so not all bad...

But it would be so nice to feel in charge of what my brain does instead of it just behaving like Rosie and randomly moving off in its own direction, towing me behind it without any real indication of why...

Also, I am getting to the end of my fully written, edited and beta-read chapters of Rexque Futurus, having just published Chapter 9 (and introduced Jormundgandr to begin the downfall of London). I have made some progress on the unfinished chapters 12-15, but I could really do with getting going on those now, otherwise I shall have to break my chapter-a-week streak, which would be sad.

Anyway, here's a fairly quick watercolour Celegorm & Huan in Valinor.

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Pp and I just put up a floating shelf. It was hard. The prong things fitted perfectly until they were screwed to the wall, then, mysteriously, they would not engage with the holes in the shelf. I hit them with a rubber mallet in the end to make them fit.

Now my arms feel like two bendy straws. Floating shelves : not worth the hassle. Stick to brackets.

The painting below was for an exercise where we had to paint something for the words 'zeitgeist', 'ephemeral' or 'subliminal'. I thought of approximately 999 very depressing things I could paint for those words, but I wanted to paint something more cheering, so in the end I went for 'Ephemeral' and painted one of our old copper & arsenic mines which were once both deadly and blighting, but now are overrun with plants and beautiful in their own way.

Then I decided to push my luck and added a pair of balmaidens for 'zeitgeist' - either literally as time-ghosts, or in the sense of 'well, things may not be perfect now, but at least girls are not routinely expected to take jobs working in arsenic mines at the age of 7 or 8 years old'. I used some of the photos on http://balmaiden.co.uk/ for clothing/ tools reference.

I'm quite pleased with how this came out, and may paint some more mine-ghost pictures. The girl is holding her bonnet in her hand, i'm not sure if that's clear.

We found this adit in the riverbank opposite Calstock village last week, at high tide. Alas, my phone ended up taking a rather blurry pic, for it was evening and the shadows were long. The passage looked like it went a good way in, and rose a little above the high tide mark.

According to the Heritage Gateway, the mine in the hillside above is the magnificently named Buttspill Mine, (also rather more boringly called Green Valley, or Tamar Valley mine) which still has surviving shafts and chimneys, and is part of the Bere Peninsula silver mines, which were in use at least from the medieval period, and possibly earlier: there's a Roman camp on the hillside opposite the mine on the other side of the river, and if the Romans knew the silver were there, they would certainly have been interested, but I don't think anyone knows for sure if they did.

Buttspill mine was opened in late 17th century and worked until late 19th century.

Heritage Gateway also says:

At the northern end of the eastern silver lode lies Buttspill Mine. Said to have been worked in Elizabethan times and operated intermittently throughout the 19th century under a variety of names. At the turn of that century it formed part of the Old Bere mines. In 1843 it was re-worked as the Green Valley Mine but changed hands shortly after and was re-named Wheal Fancy. In 1855 it was re-opened as Bere Alston United and a smelting furnace erected. At this time, attention was turned to the mine's reserves of fluorspar. Output records for both silver and fluorspar exist for the 1870's and, under the name of Tamar Valley, fluorspar was again produced during the mid 1880's.

Now, I thought this was just another mine when I came across it the other day near West Down on the river Tavy. It looks like an adit to me, though it seemed a bit odd that there was no fencing and no grill to stop unwary tourists wandering into it. (It's quite big enough to get inside, Pp almost did, as he was wearing wellies & it was a wet day he ventured in to take the photos.)

But I just looked it up on the Heritage Gateway*, and there's no mine or adit marked there.

There are a few mines a short distance away: Wheal Bedford, a nineteenth-century coppermine, Tavy Consols, across the river, the Lady Bertha Mine, Walkham United mine, and the closest, the excellently named 'Virtuous Lady Mine' apparently named in honour of Elizabeth I, which was worked from 1588 to 1807. It reopened in the 1830s before finally closing in the 1870s, and was apparently 'once famed for the siderite crystals with curved faces.' I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds brilliant.

So, possibly this is one of the undocumented adits, or possibly it's not an adit at all but some other... thing.

*I'm a bit worried about Heritage Gateway. They have so much brilliant data in there, and it must have been a huge faff to assemble, but the interface is looking very aged now, the maps are still in beta and don't work with https... I do hope it won't just fall off the web one day, that would be a great waste of so much carefully-compiled information.

I thought I'd run out of the most conveniently located Random Mines of the Day near my house, but I'd managed to completely miss Wheal Sheba, near Luckett.

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This mine is a Devon one rather than a Cornish one, just for a change. I stumbled on it this evening, walking along the banks of the River Walkham.

I don't have much historical detail on this mine, although I know that it may be known as Walkham Consols, or Walkham and Poldice Mine, or Poldice Mine, or maybe Wheal Walkham (I'm not sure where the divisions lie, or if these are all names for the same mine). The main adit is supposed to be blocked up, but I didn't venture into the mouth of this one sufficiently to find out if this IS the main adit, or one of the side ones that the intrepid mine exploring types use. You can read one of their hair-raising writeups and see photos of the inside here.

What it looks like is a terrifying hole into the depths of the earth, from which eldrich Things might at any moment issue, very little obstructed by the two strands of barbed wire bravely standing between the daylight world and the Hellmouth.

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As an antidote, here is a photo of sunshine on the River Walkham, taken just a little way down the river.

Actually, this isn't an entirely random mine because I actually went looking for this one. I had hoped that I might find some bluebells in the woods too, but it turned out that something rather terrible had happened to quite a bit of the wood...

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This Random Mine is another fairly small one, and there seems to be some confusion about it.( Read more... )

Sitting here waiting for a near-endless upload to finish uploading, so let us have a Random Mine.

I went past this mine this morning. You may have to click to embiggen to see that there are actually two chimneys there - the naked one on the right is clear, but I am fairly sure that the thing on the left that looks like a tall dark tree is also in fact a chimney, thoroughly shrouded in ivy. There's an engine house in there somewhere among the trees as well, although I couldn't see it so it may well be impersonating an ivy-covered bush.
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Old Gunnislake is an unusually elderly mine, being already busily producing copper at the end of the eighteenth century. The Heritage Gateway declines to guess when it was first worked, but Aditnow boldly guesses at the sixteenth century. That means, it's from before the days when someone thought 'Hey, we should make some sort of record of where all these tunnels go'. Which is why buying a house in Gunnislake is just a little like russian roulette, because Old Gunnislake mine is now underneath a bunch of houses. In 1992, they lost a couple of electricity poles down a hole that opened in someone's back garden. At least it *was* in the garden. It turned out that that shaft had supposedly been capped with concrete, but 'no details remained' of exactly *how* it was capped.

There are a number of documented shafts and lodes plus Gribble's Shaft, which is apparently 'unlocated'. I hope it's not under this rather nice weathercock.

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I almost fell into this mine today as I went blundering past it on a little-used path, so I thought I would resurrect my Random Mine of the Day.

This is a particularly mysterious Random Mine, because I can't find it in the Cornwall and Scilly Historic Environment Record.
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I walked up through the quarry on the hill this morning. I like to go that way on Sundays, as it's quiet then with no Monster Trucks moving and no huge bangs. The huge bangs do shake the whole hillside when they happen, including our house, but I imagine they must be much scarier up close, with the warning sirens wailing.

It was a wild windy morning, the bare trees on the hill all bending with a tremendous rushing sound in the wind coming over from Dartmoor. The road runs below the hilltop, so it is sheltered, but the trees up on the top were roaring.

I went up on the road that runs through the quarry, and could hear a strange distant music. The whole place was shut up, with nobody about at all. Eventually I realised that the music must be the wind blowing through the metal steps and rails and bars that are arranged around the vast funnels and tubes and pipes that the quarry uses to process its sands and gravels.

The sound was like something between tubular bells, distant church bells on a windy day, and someone blowing a tune on a series of partially-filled bottles. It was surprisingly beautiful.

I've heard mines singing before, when the wind races across the top of a chimney on a hillside, it can have a sort of deep voice. But never a whole organs-worth of accidental instruments all singing together.

Today, I have been mostly staring blankly into space in a fog of cold-induced blurgyness. I did not go to Holmbush mine, because the tracks around there get awfully muddy when it rains this much, and also so as to walk dogs somewhere where I could basically tip them out into a fenced area in order to not have to engage brain or travel at more than half a mile an hour.

But if I'd walked a bit further around the hill, I would have seen this:

The Cornwall Heritage Environment Record doesn't have much on Holmbush mine, but fortunately because the enginehouse is a listed building since it is ' one of very few 19th century engine houses to have retained a considerable part of its original roof structure into the 21st century', Historic England has lots about it.

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I photographed Drakewalls mine before, but I'm revisiting it, because I walked past this end of it the other day, and thought I would take a photo of the place where the old reservoir was before they finish building on it, partly because I liked the Giant Twirl of Orange Pipe. I can't find any details about the reservoir apart from the name, but I do know that in 1822 when the mine was sold, it was listed as having 'two excellent water engines of 44 and 30 foot diameter'. So I'm guessing the ex-reservoir was to hold water for those.
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What, you thought I'd run out of mines? Hahaha. no.

South Bedford mine was a relatively unsuccessful coppermine on the Devon side of the River Tamar, the little sister of North Bedford Mines, aka Devon Great Consols, just up the river. The Heritage Gateway is unsure whether this chimney was for arsenic refining, or whether it was connected to a steam engine. The mine was already disused by 1884. It is located right on the river, and apparently there are signs of shutes that carried ore down to barges so it could be removed for refining, although I don't remember seeing those. There's also a note that 'during the War' test pits were dug to investigate the possibility of finding wolfram, but these were unsuccessful. The HER does not clarify which War they mean, but the source is from the 1950s, so I'm guessing WWII.

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New Great Consols mine in Luckett has come and gone, come and gone. Mineworks in this valley probably started out as surface tin panning along the stream at the bottom of the valley in the late Middle Ages, it was first recorded as Wheal Martha in 1836, and it closed for the last time in 1946. It was a mine that produced copper, silver, tin and a small amount of gold, as well as, yes, arsenic.

Here's a chimney, in the process of blending in to the background:

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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...

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This is the one mine that you can spot from miles around. Whereever you go, there's Kit Hill with its distinctive chimney right on the top.

I didn't bother photographing the chimney today, although I was up there this morning. It was a bit cloudy, and I knew I had so many photos of it.
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