Moss was slightly reluctant, all the more so because she was not able to be equipped with hard hat and lamp!
Our mine tour was conducted by an extremely enthusiastic member of the Shropshire Mining and Caving Club. We were escorted along the adit for a couple of hundred yards until we reached the main shaft - originally extending 552 yards below the ground, but now flooded so that only the first 112 yards is extant. All of us small boys dropped stones down the shaft - and astonishing explosive noise echoing up as the stones hit the water.
Outside, many of the pithead buildings have been restored. Here is the smithy, impressive with brand-new bellows (Rob take note!)...
...and this is a view of the Locomotive shed.
The compressor house, winding engine and pumping engine houses are also well-preserved. Elsewhere in the village there are a couple of curious survivals, despite considerable gentrification and modernisation.
Indeed the whole landscape was faintly redolent of Cornwall - not least because of the persistent drizzle, but also as a slightly scruffy unplanned landscape full of partly derelict mining remains and excessively modern pebbledashed single-storey houses. The Cornish parallels were made further apparent as we made our way home (via an excellent and much needed feast of chips and Three Tuns ale in the Stiperstones Inn). We stopped by the site of the Ladywell Mine, the engine house of which now forms the focus of a set of sheep pens.
All in all a marvellous day out - and once again I continue to be surprised by the endless variety of landscape which Shropshire has to offer!
2 comments:
Dear Paul Belford,
My name is Ana Miravalles, and I work as a researcher in Ferrowhite (Railway Workshop Museum, BahÃa Blanca, Argentina).
We are currently investigating about British rail workshops in this place, their buildings and labour organisation. In fact, the Bahia Blanca North Western Workshop was one of the biggest centres of locomotive and wagon repair in this area, British, since 1891 up to 1948; Argentine, between 1948 and 1992; and private, for only one year. Afterwards, the magnificient buldings have been destroyed and all the workers, fired.
We are trying now to "reconstruct" the workshops' history, so I would like to read your article "Monasteries of Manufacture: Questioning the Origins of English Industrial Architecture", published in a journal unavailable for me here. ¿Could you kindly send me a copy of it? I would be really grateful.
And, please, excuse me for my rudimentary English!
Kind regards
http://museotaller.blogspot.com/
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