Big Abandoned Mine

 

On my last blog, I mentioned that after checking out a mountain of cars that had been dropped down a mine shaft, we bumped into some proper mine explorers, in helmets, boots, and with expensive ropes and everything. They told us about another mine that was supposedly really damn good, and recommended that we check it out.

We headed there but we didn't know what to expect. I've heard it said that mine explorers dislike urbexers, and it's fairly understandable. Mine explorers take their hobby seriously. They buy the correct gear, they put safety over being cocky, and most of all they respect the places that they go to. An abandoned mine will be enjoyed by mine explorers for decades until nature brings it down. In the urbex world, people just hand everything out to anyone, and in six months the building goes up in flames, and half of its former contents end up on ebay while the people who shared the location type online "such a shame it got trashed."

 

So Niall and I did question why some serious mine explorers would even give us the time of day,  nevermind a location of a damn good mine. Were we going somewhere really terrible? Were we going to die? Were we going to get ambushed and sold on the dark web?

Well we got lucky. It turns out they were actually just nice people, and they'd just shared with us one of the best damn mines I've ever been in.

 

The mine entrance was gloriously subtle. Here next to a ruined building we located the entrance, with a pile of slate hiding it from the casual observer, but leaving an opening just small enough to slide through.

 

 

Scrawled on the wall of the entrance is "Cadwch Allan," which is Welsh for "Keep Out." So just for the sake of adventure today I'm going to forget everything I know about the Welsh language. It'll be more fun this way. Who is Alan?

 

The mine tunnel stretched out ahead of us, into the darkness. I was excited straight away. It still has tracks and everything! This does look promising!

A quick google would later give me the basic history of this mine. It actually has the distinction of being the longest continuously operated slate mine in the world, closing in 2003, but dating back as far as 1500, when slate from the area was used to make the roof of a local house. Many theorise it probably dates back even further. The entire area sits on two parallel veins of slate under this region of Wales. One was broad but with poor quality slate but this mine took advantage of the better quality slate in the slimmer vein.

Over the centuries the mine passed from owner to owner, all of which had generic names with almost no researchability. The Lloyds had it in the 1600s, and then the Campbell family owned it from 1725 until 1805 when it fell into the hands of John Davies. You wanna try to research a specific centuries-dead John Davies of Wales? He's more elusive than a nun wearing a strap-on.

 

Still, what we do know is that it was John Davies who organised commerical quarrying of the mine in 1810, before dying in1824, passing it all on to the executor of his estate, a chap called Pryce Jones. Curiously in 1825 Pryce was recorded as only having a measely three employees at the mine, so he was off to a slow start.

At first we thought the mine was a small one when the tunnel led us to fresh air fairly swiftly. But we soon realised that we were actually in a massive internal chamber and that this was just the beginning. My shots don't do the scale any justice, so I had Niall stand in shot for this one. The mine tracks run along this ledge, and it's a long way down, and a longer way up.

 

This chamber was nicknamed the Alma by the former employees here, named after the Battle of the Alma of 1854, often said to be the first conflict of the Crimean War. The British and French forces landed in Sevastopol in Crimea and chased off the Russian troops to the Alma Heights. The British and French pursued and lost about 3,600 men between them. The Russians lost about 5000 and were forced to retreat. It must have been a pretty widely celebrated victory for the miners to name an entire chamber after it.

 

The mine consisted of eight tunnels in total, each sixty feet apart vertically, connected to large chambers where the slate was extracted. These chambers would have about 30 feet of rock between the bottom of one chamber and the top of the one beneath it. Some of these individual chambers still exist in the mine, but in the case of the Alma, the chambers were connected vertically after 1854, and opened at the top, letting sunlight shine in and allowing nature to bloom, creating some sort of Lost World vibe. Apparently it's about 800 feet deep, and while my images don't do it justice, I can assure you it was an incredible sight to behold, standing inside a mountain and looking straight up to the top of it.

 

 

A dodgy looking ladder leads down to the bottom of the Alma, but the mine tracks actually vanish back into the mountain on the ledge that we're currently on. It's one big loop though, so it didn't really matter which way we went. We took the tunnel. 

 

 

 

The first part of the tunnel was a bit dodgy, with a few chunks of the ceiling littering the floor, looking fairly fresh. We both kinda thought that perhaps this wasn't the best idea, and we were probably both persuadable to turn back, should one of us want to back out. But we're both too addicted to the game. Neither of us wanted to be the one to say "Maybe we should head out."

 

Periodically the tunnel would split, with the tracks carrying on to the left, and a chamber being on the right. These are the slate extraction chambers that I mentioned. The Alma probably would have looked something like this back before the 1850s, before they connected the chambers vertically.  

The majority of the chambers seem to have been blocked off.

 

 

We were able to find a chamber that we could actually go into. 

 

 

It's basically a massive pit with a pile of slate in it, with the sunlight streaming down from above. It was here that I actually slipped, quite dramatically and suddenly. The terrain is just unstable, what with being a big pile of slate, and it just shifted under me and down I went. Gravity, my arch nemesis, we meet again!

 

I reached out to stop my fall, and my hand ended up with a nice big gash across the palm. I'm half way to completing my Jesus cosplay. 

My camera, however, hit the ground pretty hard and would no longer autofocus. The lens was damaged, and I'd need to get a new one once the adventure concluded and I stopped bleeding. 

 

So all my photos of this mine are taken on manual focus with a busted lens in the dark. It was going to be a tricky one.

But in all seriousness, this just highlights the point of why mine explorers take the hobby seriously and splash out for all the correct gear. I could have whacked my head or something. I imagine it would be pretty hard to get the emergency services here. This is also why maybe we shouldn't just hand locations out to anyone willy-nilly. Worse case scenario in an abandoned house is all the stuff ends up on ebay and the building burns down. Worse case scenario in a mine is somebody dies.

 

 

Here's Niall on the slate pile, just to give a vague understanding of how deep this is. Keep in mind, the chamber has a mountain of slate in it, so we're not on the bottom of the chamber here. The cavern is pretty damn deep.

And here's the rest of the slate chamber. The wall is in shadow but there's really not much more to see down there. Back in the day, slate would have been extracted from this chamber, and many more just like it throughout the mine, loaded up into carts, and sent out into the world. 

Taking a few moments to mop up my hand wound and check on my camera, we returned to the tunnel.

 

In 1859 the mine was sold to a guy called Col Robert Davies Jones, who was pretty big in the mine industry. He was the leading share holder in an 83-foot-long steam ship called The Quarry Maid that was launched in 1858, and designed to take goods from this mine along the coast from Aberdovey to London and Liverpool. Steam ships didn't become common until the 1860s so this vessel really was ahead of its time and something of a novelty. Robert Davies Jones himself personally rode on the ships maiden voyage, which was at a whopping speed of 10mph.

 

In 1860 it's crew consisted of seven people, with the captain being 24-year-old David Lloyd, and the ships cook being his thirteen-year-old brother Evan. They ended up in the papers that December for a legal pursuit of a deserter, more to make a point than to get anything from it. And then in 1861 the Quarry Maid hit another ship, and two people died. After repairing the ship, it was back to work once again making the papers that year when one of the crew stole some booze from Liverpool and ended up in jail for two months. 

The ship was sold in 1865 and renamed. Hopefully it had better luck with its new owners.

 

 

Robert Davies Jones, despite owning this mine, was seemingly bit too busy to actually do much with it himself and in 1873 he hired a guy called Robert Hughes to run it for him. Robert Hughes quickly got to work modernising the mine, and getting some new equipment. Apparently he needed some new staff too because he employed about 180 additional men.

Records of the mines success and employment numbers do exist, showing that in 1879 they produced 4,700 tons of slate with a staff body of 169 men. In 1883, they produced 4,814 tons with 177 men, and in 1893 they produced 4044 tons wth 193 men. So they were clearly going from strength to strength, with staff numbers fluctuating for whatever reason.

By 1895 their employee number had dropped to 140 but they still managed to make it their best year yet with 5185 tons of slate.

So it's fair to say that the mine was a pretty big success.

 

 

Niall did tell me that I shouldn't stop to photograph every damn fork in the road, but I just couldn't help myself. Each one was different. Some were collapsed, and others were deliberately blocked off. This one isn't blocked, and leads straight to another slate extracting chamber.

 

 

But this chamber doesn't lead upwards to the surface like the Alma, nor is there a big pile of slate to climb down and nearly die on. It's just a big dark void. If anyone fell down there, they might never be seen again. 

 

There are some wall scrawlings here from 1970, listing the initials of the men who worked here back then. Look closely and you'll see that people also etched their names into the walls back in the 1960s too.

As is common in the mining industry, production started trending downward in the 20th Century. The mines staff number fell below 100 in 1908 and had declined to just 71 men in 1910. 

The first world war saw a massive depression in the slate industry, and in 1933 the workers here were doing three day weeks. 

 

In 1935 it was leased by Sir Henry Haydn Jones, a liberal politician who was quite influentual in quarrys and railways at the time. He seems to be a nice bloke. In 1911 he purchased an entire slate quarry and the railway that served it just to prevent its closure and keep the locals in employment. What a great guy. That particular one collapsed in 1946, but he kept the railway going anyway.

Henry Haydn Jones actually knew Rev W V Awdry, the chap who created Thomas the Tank Engine, and there's actually a character based on him, Sir Handel. Although I'm not sure if this refers to the train named Sir Handel or his human counterpart whose sister married the Fat Controller. Turns out the Thomasverse actually has some pretty extensive lore. Who knew? But that's a rabbit hole for another day.

 

We  saw sunlight up ahead, and wondered if the mine was coming to an end. But no, it was just another chamber, this one collapsed and blocked off. The mine was only just beginning.

 

 

So the mine industry was never to rise again to its pre-war standards, and any resurgence in the 1930s would be halted by the second world war. In 1940 there were 140 workers, but this fell to just 40 in 1944. The war wasn't the only contributing factor to this decline, but also the workers conditions were becoming a bit of a sore point too, leading to a strike in 1947. Many of the workers found work elsewhere, recieving higher wages for less dangerous work.

 

Nevertheless the mine chugged on into the 1950s with a staff count of just forty men. The accompanying tramway was replaced by a horse in 1948, which indicates a decline in funds, given that it couldn't be maintained anymore.

But then in 1956 two brothers, Dewi and Gwilym Lloyd, took over the mine. In the 1960s they replaced the horse with tractors, so there was a bit of modernisation going on, and this succeeded in keeping the mine going right up until the 1990s. 

In 2002 it was concluded that it was no longe economical to extract slate, and the mine closed. The last three workers, Foreman Philip Evans, Glyn Davies, and Idris Lewis, hauled up the last chunk of slate, and then the mine closed for good.

 

The tunnel started to get pretty narrow. I wondered if we were approaching the end. But once again, I'd be wrong.There was something in the ground... something absolutely wonderful.

 

It's a big fucking ladder leading down into the ground! As if we were't underground enough! 

 

We were initially hessitant. Could we trust this thing, after all these years? If the ladder was in bad shape and the rungs snapped, we would be truly fucked. But neither of us wanted to turn back. Our survival instincts told us we probably should, but we knew that the good shit would be down in the lower levels. It's easy to clear a place of equipment when you can just walk it out, but nobody wants to haul a mine cart up a ladder. If there's anything left, it will be down here.

 

So we decided to make the descent. 

 

 

Keep in mind, it was pitch black! It was one of the few times I was actually getting a bit nervous. I've done some pretty daring stuff, but on this ladder I could only use a head torch. If I looked up, I saw nothing. If I looked down, I saw nothing. All I could see was the ladder in front of me. It did freak me out a little. I had an injured hand and a gammy camera, and I had no idea how deep this hole was or how sturdy the ladder was. I had no choice but to just climb until I couldn't go down any further.

But finally I made it to the bottom. Time to see where I can go now!

 

 

Fucks sake!

 

Another bloody ladder! But this one wasn't quite as monstrous. 

 

We made it to the bottom.

The mine headed back the way we had come, but it was a lot more littered down here. The tracks still remained on the bottom of the tunnel, but dotted all around were rusty bits of equipment.

 

There's a spade propped up against the wall here, no doubt left here by a former worker twenty years ago, although I imagine it was propped up by explorers for a photo opportunity.

 

Personal touches like this really drive home that this was once a busy workplace though. This isn't just a random bit of clutter, but an object used by a real living human in his place of work. One day he put it down for the last time and here it is twenty years later.

 

The tracks are sticking out of some water here, but the horizontal line on the wall indicates that it was once much deeper.

 

Here's the mines old explosive store, now empty.

 

 

Suddenly the track forks off to the left. We assumed correctly that this would be another slate chamber, but this one was different. This one was the last one to be used before the mine closed.

 

 

There's a ladder here that leads upwards, but the tracks continue right to the edge of the pit. 

 

 

And here it is, allegedly 180 feet deep, but now full of water. And as it happens, there's a photo of this exact section from 2002 showing the last chunk of rock being hauled out of the ground and loaded onto a mine cart.

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

It's pretty cool. The guy in the picture is Idris Lewis, and he was 64 when the picture was taken. Did he know his workplace would be enjoyed by explorers two decades later?

 

The hook still hangs from the ceiling too. 

 

Above the flooded chamber, there's a metal walkway that the previous ladder led to. I didn't really fancy seeing if that would hold my weight. But it's the ladder leading downwards that really intrigues me. The mine continues 180 feet below my feet, and I cannot get to it. It's infuriating!

But someone did dive in there once, and the video was uploaded to the internet. It shows numerous bits of equipment down at the bottom, including an old mine locomotive and its attached carts. Allegedly the locomotive and carts fell down the pit in the 1970s and were never retrieved. It's still down there, under water.

 

But back to the main tunnel, we found this beauty!

It's the mine cart from the old picture! Or at least, one very similar. In all honesty given that the picture depicts the very last chunk of rock being extracted, this probably is the exact same cart, casually discarded on the last day.

 

A little further along is this Eimco loading shovel, which looks like something straight out of Robot Wars. This contraption would load up the rock in its shovel and then toss it all back into the carts behind it. 

 

And surprisingly, this one is still operational! Apparently some mine enthusiasts found it in a more precarious spot, repaired each of the failed components and then drove it to where it now is, to keep it safe. Presumably they are the ones who wrote "Please respect this machine" on it, too.

 

 

Of course the main attraction down here is this bloody huge crane!

 

 

A little graffiti at the side says that the crane was constructed down here in 1970 by three men. This was allegedly one of the earliest chambers, and as such was no longer being worked in by the time the mine shut. However, even though the chamber was redundant, it was considered uneconomical to retrieve the crane, and so it was left down here overlooking a pit of some 150 feet of water.

The water is a lovely colour but no doubt contaminated by rust and other minerals. I read that this chamber was actually used for dumping waste after they stopped taking slate out of it, and that with hindsight a lot of workers saw this as a bit short sighted, as advances in technology meant that they could have perhaps extracted more slate from it if it wasnt for all the waste dumped down there

 

The tracks lead us to another exposed section, where the sunlight streams down from above. I later learned that this is the bottom of the Alma, and if we'd scrambled up here we would have emerged near to where we first entered, the loop complete. But we didn't know that, and when we ran out of tracks, we went right back the way we came, up those big ladders. 

 

 

There are some wheels here, likely part of an old mine cart, but still on the tracks. Presumably the mine cart was destroyed and someone retrieved these from the wreckage and put them here.

 

 

And then the tunnel came to an end. But just look at it! You just know it once continued beyond this point. But unable to traverse through walls, it was the end of the road. We decided to turn back and call it a day. 

 

To conclude, this mine is incredible and I absolutely love it. It could be ideal for newer but ambitious explorers who have done the whole walk-in cottage thing, are bored of the low-challenge stuff and want to spread their wings a bit and try something that's next level. But it's definitely got some dangers down here, and people need to be cautious. There are places here where you could fall down and never be found.

If you're the kind of person who invites any old idiot along on adventures and hands the co-ordinates to anyone on Facebook who slithers into your inbox, then for starters you should have been aborted, and secondly this mine is not for you. You'll get someone killed.

I cannot understate how amazing this mine is though. It's definitely going down as one of my favourite locations. It's just so immense in size, and when it comes to lost equipment from the mining industry, it just keeps on giving. Ideally this should become a museum. It certainly has the potential. But it also has loose chunks of ceiling on the floor of the entrance, and holes big enough to fall into and never be seen again, so if anything bad was to happen here, it would likely be sealed up. Although the mine explorers with all their ropes would probably have fun abseiling down the Alma, so it wouldn't be the end of the world if the mine wasn't quite as accessible anymore.

That's all I've got for today. I'll be focusing on my local blog for a bit, first deviating from the norm to show a photoshoot from last summer, and then I'll be showing some tunnels underneath Shrewsbury. I'm really looking forward to that one. 

In the meantime, follow me on Instagram, follow me on Reddit, follow me on Vero, and also the lesser social media sites, the hellscapes that are Facebook and Twitter.

Laters. Amen. Etc.