Freesteel Blog » Welsh weekend mines

Welsh weekend mines

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 11:03 pm Written by:

Last weekend involved two visits to famous North Wales Mines with my old caving club from Cambridge. The first was Parys Mountain copper Mine on Anglesey. Large sections of this had been recently drained and the hanging concretions of snotite formations in hanging bollock passage were unique.

Unfortunately the club had been recommended to stay at the most inconvenient campsite in the whole of Anglesey. It was nowhere near the sea, nowhere near a town, any pub, a main road or anything that could qualify as a view. We were trapped. It required 20 minutes of driving down single track roads to get anywhere. Anyone who examined a map of the island with the mission of pinpointing the most inconvenient campsite in the whole of Anglesey would choose roughly this place. It is in the largest region of single track roads between the network of main roads. It is slightly off-centre in this region, but there is a lake between it and the closest main road, which means it takes just as long to reach it from any direction. Staying at the most inconvenient campsite in the whole of Anglesey means you don’t get to see a beautiful sunset in the evening, nor do you get to swim in the sea in the morning. It means you might as well have camped in a field just outside of Cambridge.

Shut up about how crap this campsite is, Julian.

On Sunday, after hours of faffing followed by a tedious drive from the most inconvenient campsite in the whole of Anglesey, a small team reached Croseor Quarry and had a nice dangerous afternoon doing the famous through trip between two enormous and collapsing slate quarries. Some engineers have spent a lot of time and money installing suspension bridges and zip wires to deeply score those squeaky too-small pulleys that you’ve brought along for the ride. It saved swimming across the lakes.

The people who installed all this infrastructure and fixed ropes don’t leave their names anywhere on the equivalent of “donated by” plaques, so you can’t say thank you to them. This is a shame. On second thoughts, maybe they prefer you don’t know who they are in case their ropes break. They are left secretly in the night so you take them like gifts of nature.

Leave a comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <strong>