Cwmorthin
The car park beneath the track to Cwmorthin was full and the rain lashing down, hardly the day for exploring mountains, but I pressed on with my hood blown like cling-film round the back of my head and waterproofs billowing in front. The water tipping over the edge of the cwm was whipped into a plume of spray. Not a bird in sight, no farmers, just soggy sheep sheltering against rocks and streams racing to join the river. Clouds of smoke from damp logs were rising from one of the old mine buildings as I splashed through deep puddles to meet the Friends of Cwmorthin.
The Friends are a group of volunteers from across Britain sharing a passion for mines, exploring, restoring and preserving their infrastructure making them relatively safe places to visit. Safety is an odd word for a mine whose nickname is ‘Slaughterhouse’. Many miners died here in the late 1800s due to bad management and in particular ‘pillar robbing’ – cutting into the pillars of rock that take the weight of the mountain above. Ultimately this caused the great fall of 1882 when six million tonnes of rock collapsed into the chambers of this and neighbouring mines on the edge of Blaenau Ffestiniog.
I hung up my waterproofs to dry and donned a caving helmet with a head torch powered by a chunky battery belted round my waist. Looking the part I followed the ‘Friends’ to the main entrance, the ‘lake level adit’, an ‘adit’ being a horizontal entrance to a mine, with pit props and steel girders holding back the avalanche of slate above. The collapse of this entrance a few years ago had been the catalyst for the formation of the group and this had been their first project – clearing debris and installing strong supports. My guides wanted to chat at the entrance but I had the urge to step gingerly into the bedrock of the mountain, in part to escape the howling wind.
At 5’ 8” it’s a rare occasion for me to bang my head on the ceiling but it happened here and I was grateful for the helmet. Inside the mine the normal peace and tranquillity was broken by a generator throbbing away but the compensation was to be able to see the wonders inside – sights the miners of Victorian times could only imagine with their limited candlepower.