Video: 1770's Mining Drainage Adit
Music: 'Danger Snow' - Vidjanny Santo
Text: Excerpt from “The Cornish Miner” A.K. Hamilton Jenkin 1927:
Adits driven for considerable distances across country were sometimes the means of discovering far more valuable lodes than the ones they were originally intended to drain. The mid eighteenth century was a great period of lode discovery in Cornwall, and it is not an exaggeration to say that several mines, still operating in the 1920s owed their existence to the development of these years. The old men, in fact, had generally only worked such lodes as had “backs” plainly appearing on the surface. The driving of adits proved the country in a way that had never been done before, and great deposits of copper ore were discovered in localities which had hithero been thought outside the mineralised zone.
Encouraged by such discoveries as this, the driving of adits was often undertaken as mere seeking adventures, without being bound for any particular mine. As Pryce said, “The expense of an adit is slow and small; therefore, it is easily borne. Two or three hundred pounds a year is scarcely felt by eight or ten persons, then whom seldom fewer are concerned; and this too upon the chance of finding a vein, or veins, that may throw up an amazing profit presently after discovery.”
The average size of these adits being only six feet high and two and half over, it was hardly possible for more than one man to work in the end at a time, and many years were often occupied in such an undertaking. “Some levels,” wrote Pryce, “have taken thirty years to complete, and I have been concerned in one that took seventeen years to bring home to the mine.”
Yet even in these days it was generally considered a sound axiom amongst adventurers that, in an adit, expense was not so much to be considered as speed in driving. Frequently, therefore, the old miners availed themselves of a soft or clay-filled “cross-course” to drive up their adit to the mine and would follow its tortuous twistings for long distances rather than incur the great expense of driving direct through hard ground.
Water was frequently met with in these cross-courses and proved a serious inconvenience to the miners. In addition to such inconveniences as this, more timbering was required in soft ground, and new lodes were not so easily discovered in a cross-course as when driving through the “country” rock. All these matters were, or course, carefully weighed out by the adventurer.
The actual work of bringing home the adit to a waterlogged mine was always a dangerous task in the days before long-distance boreholes could be put out, and such hazardous undertakings were generally performed by picked miners at an advanced price. “Whenever they are apprehensive of coming towards the house of water, as the miners term it, they bore a hole with an iron rod towards the water about a fathom or two or so many feet further than they have broke with the pick-axe. As they work on, they still keep the hole with the borrier before them that they may have timely notice of the bursting forth of the water, and so give it vent or passage.
Yet notwithstanding all this care and prudence, they are often lost by the sudden eruption of the water. In some places, especially where a new adit is brought home to an old mine, they have unexpectedly holed to the house of water before they thought themselves near it and have instantly perished. Some have driven by the side of the house of water and have perished also by its unexpected eruption.
Of such kind was the disaster which occurred in one of the St. Just mines in the 1870s, which was thus described by an old miner of that parish: “I can mind the day the four men was drowned holing through into the house of water in North Levant. ‘Twas a Monday and I was working afternoon core out Spearn. They say the end they was driving had been bone-dry all day long. When the men got down that day they stopped out at the beginning of the level to touch a pipe of bacca, and told the boy to go in and clear up the end ‘gainst they started to work. Over a while the boy came out and said: ‘We ain’t far off the water now, Uncle Nick, for tes running through in the end.’ Git away,’ said that man, ‘theest took fear booy.’
What happened after that they don’t know, but ‘tis supposed the men went in to work and the first blow they struck on the drill, the water burst through upon them. One man was found afterwards with the tram thrown on top of him yards back in the level, and one they never found for a week. The two other men, as I said, I seed myself broft into the carpenters’ shop and laid out ‘pon the binch.” That was all the story, as the old miner told it, and it was all that can ever be known of that and many other drama of the underground life in Cornwall.
