So this morning began with a bit of a struggle. I had called some taxi services yesterday to get estimates of how much it would cost me to go to the Dolaucothi Mines from Llandovery and had settled on a company. When I called them this morning to get a lift, thinking who would be using a cab on Wednesday morning, I found that they had no cars available. I scrambled and called a few other companies and eventually found one that could send a car over. The trip had already gotten more expensive.
While I was making these calls and waiting for my taxi, there was a constant barrage of weird sounds coming from outside. The noise was coming from an even odder collection of cars. The Garbage Run, a car rally starting from the Netherlands, was rolling through tiny, old Llandovery. The Garbage Run is a rally to show that even old, beaten-up cars can do rallies that are thousands of miles long. The cars are generally all older model cars that have been seriously personalized. I saw everything from a car with a tent on top of it to a car shaped like Olaf from Frozen. I watched a car with a paddleboat glued to it's roof try to fit into a parking spot for about ten minutes. In all this chaos, my taxi arrived.
My taxi driver was a very sweet man and we had a lovely chat about local culture and Welsh accents as we drove the twenty-five minutes to the mines. As he dropped me off, he warned me that there would not be taxis until the late afternoon, as they worked school runs. I'm assuming this meant that schools had hired the taxis to act as buses to bring the students back home to the towns and villages that were farther away from the school.
I arrived at the mines and found out that there would be a Roman tour of the mines about an hour and forty-five minutes after I arrived or a Victorian era tour about an hour earlier. Clearly, I decided to wait around for the Roman tour. In the meantime, I wandered around the mining buildings and machines. The contraption below is called a headframe and was used to lower and raise an elevator into a shaft below. The shaft below this headframe was 500' deep. This was not the deepest shaft dug in these mines; I noticed one marked on the map as being 1000' deep. Now most of the shafts are covered and sealed.
Most of the machinery around the site is from the 1930s era. There were three (possibly four) main periods of activity at this mine. The first was the Romans who began working here in the 1st century CE. It is possible that the mines had been worked by the natives as early as the Bronze Age, but there is no physical evidence for this. After the Romans, the mines weren't worked again until the Victorian period. The were finally worked again between 1933 and 1938 for the final time.
The buildings around the site contain the machinery and tools needed to operate a mine in the 1930s. These included things like giant winches to operate elevators in shafts, generators to create compressed air to power the tools underground, and ventilation controls. This machine above controlled the flow of compressed air from the generators to three chambers underground. It was fascinating to look at all the levers and dials on these machines. It made me realize just how little I know about anything having to do with mining, which ended up being the theme of the day.
They also had a few troughs set up to allow you to try to pan for gold. When I purchased my ticket, I was given a small plastic bag for any gold I might find while panning. Gold mining in Wales is not at all like the gold mining in the western United States. The gold here is not in nugget form, but rather dust. The dust is trapped in other stones, mainly quartz. Therefore, the panning process would have been extremely tedious, working to reach the very finest particles. I gave up rather quickly, perfectly happy to leave without any specks of gold.
Finally it was time for my tour and a group of eight followed our guide, Emyr, around the site. One of the first things he showed us was a model of a very clever Roman device. In the 1930s, when working on a shaft 160' below ground, a miner accidentally discovered a massive mining gallery. It was from the Roman period. Not only were they shocked to find a Roman mine so deep underground, they were also shocked by it's size (it was nicked named the "Cathedral" because it was so large). In this gallery, they found evidence of Roman scaffolding and tools, including a curved piece of wood. Eventually, using examples from other Roman mines in the Mediterranean, they discovered that it was part of the Romans' system of keeping water out of the work site. They used a series of water wheels that were able to collect water and then poor it into a higher trough, which would then lead to another wheel. Through a long series of these wheels, the Romans were able to bring water up to the surface level by level. Emyr demonstrated how this worked with the model they have which is only built to about half scale; the actual water wheels would have been around 12' in diameter.
From the demonstration we walked up the from the bottom of the valley we had been in. I should say former valley. The site of the 1930s mining buildings is actually the bottom of the Romans' largest open cast mine. The bottom is much higher than it would have been in Roman times as it has been partially filled in by natural causes and was used as the waste dump from the Victorian era mines. The size and scale of this open cast mine is pretty hard to describe and capture with a camera. It would have been massive.
We continued up the side of the large open cast mine and onto the rise above it. The landscape here was greatly varied, due to many smaller open cast mines and their dump sites adding dips and hills to the land. We came across the first Roman drift mine, but could not enter due to unsafe conditions. We went to the second drift mine (a drift mine is a horizontal mine as opposed to a shaft which goes down) and entered the Roman mine. The mine was surprisingly beautiful made. The walls had been worked very precisely, creating a neat corridor with well angled corners leading to the ceiling. It had clearly been done with painstaking care (which raises many questions as to why). It was possible to still see some of the pick marks left from Roman tools.
It is estimated that the Romans moved out some half a million tons of stone and collected between three quarters to thirty-five tons tons of gold (we joked about how wide a range that is). In the mine, we were able to see some galleries in which the Romans followed veins of quartz. It is believed that the Romans used slave labor for work in these mines, and the presence of a fort nearby means that it might have also used convict labor. There is a theory that the mine was so large it would have required more than just local slaves and the mine would have drawn slaves from other parts of the Empire. We saw one drift mine and evidence of many open cast mines, just a small fraction of the site, and I can believe that they would need to bring in extra man power.
There were some interesting features in the main gallery of the mine we visited. The gallery was a large open space, but would have had many rooms spreading out from it, leading to other galleries. These have since been filled in, which leaves some aspects of the mine a mystery. Emyr also pointed out to us some markings that were very exciting...initially. Carved into the wall were an "IIX" and "IX," presumably some sort of Roman numbering system. If these were truly Roman, the mistaken IIX for eight (instead of VIII) could have been easily explained away as a mistake by a local slave or possibly even by a miner working upside down (I'm not so sure about this theory). The distance between the two markers is also roughly a cubit. However, the two numbers appear on different levels of shale, which seems odd for something being used for an exact measurement. Therefore it seems somewhat likely that these were added in the 19th or 20th century by Victorian or Cardiff University pranksters.
After leaving the drift mine, we passed by remains of more small open cast mine and evidence of a complex water system that the Romans used for ground sluicing. This technique allowed them to wash away upper layers of shale to find the quartz veins below. To do this, the Romans had to build an aqueduct six miles upstream and channel the water into holding tanks. In a single day, the sluicing system could have used two million tons of water. It is also likely that this system was adapted to be part of the processing of the quartz. After this explanation, we headed back down the hill and to the base of the Romans' large open cast mine.
Here, I ran into another problem. My tour had come to an end and there were not going to be any available taxes from almost two hours. I had also exhausted most everything I wanted to know about the site. So I put on my most innocent face and asked a woman from my tour if she happened to be heading in the area of Llandovery. After consulting a map, it happened that she was heading that way and offered me a ride. She was absolutely lovely and we swapped travel stories, mostly about getting lost in inconvenient places. By 3:30 I was already back at my hotel.
After taking a break for a snack and to listen to some podcasts, I decided I would try to go find the Roman fort site outside Llandovery after all. It was only supposed to be about a mile outside town and I didn't have much else to do. I made my way down the road, and after a few minutes of confusion, found the church that was meant to be near the site. There was nothing remotely fort-like about the setting. There was the church with a graveyard, a residential neighborhood, and a big pasture. There was a walking sign pointing to the pasture, so I thought maybe I'd find something at the bottom of it. As I was going I read a bit more about the Roman fort, called Alabum, and found out that I was standing at the site and there was really nothing left of it, just bits of evidence found by various vicars of the church. I was a bit disappointed, but easily distracted as I made more horse friends.
Fun Fact #12: I learned a great deal of facts about gold today and I think rather than doing one fun fact I will share quite a few in a list!
1. Welsh gold is the most valuable gold in the world. This has to do with both its rarity and the fact that the last gold mine in Wales shut down in 1999.
2. Gold is one of the ten rarest elements on Earth.
3. A lump of gold the size of a matchbox could be hammered out into the size of a tennis court.
5. An ounce of gold could be made into a wire fifty miles long.
6. Romans used gold in their dentistry, including making gold wires to hold teeth in places. (I'm imagining golden braces.)
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