The BBC forecast for
today said no rain at all and it was certainly dry and much warmer
when we woke. So, it was back to yesterday's plan – Great Orme and
the copper mine.
We took the van and
found lots of on-street parking on wide roads on the western side of
Llandudno close to the western promenade. We walked along the
promenade and joined a footpath beside the castellated Victorian
toll house, now converted to a private house and for sale, if you are
interested. This footpath rises quickly up the side of Great Orme
providing lovely views over the bay to mountains of Snowdonia. The
view was hazy and we could only just make out the shoreline of
Anglesey to the west, however not only wasn't it raining but there
was virtually no breeze and the sun was shining making it quite warm.
What a contrast to yesterday!
We joined the road
above Gogarth, a village of large, individually designed and, no
doubt, very expensive houses. Just outside Gogarth we looked down on
the Coast Artillery School used in World War II to train soldiers in
the use of searchlights, artillery and radar. Then up again until we
reached the 'Rest and be Thankful' café
and, tucked into the cliff below it, the Victorian lighthouse now
converted to a B&B.
A road leading to the
car park took us up to the moorland on the top of Great Orme. We
followed the northern boundary wall of the farm past the Roman well
spotting many interesting birds on the way, especially wheatears. We
reached the summit next to the cable car station and were suddenly
surrounded by other tourists who had taken one of the easier options
to reach the viewpoint. We had a snack in the café
before descending to the Great Orme Copper Mine via the Visitors
Centre and tramway station.
It was known that
copper had been mined at Great Orme since Roman times but a chance
discovery established that copper was very important long before the
Romans. In 1987 landscaping work was being done on Great Orme when
they came across evidence of surface copper mining. Below this they
found shafts filled with mining waste that were heading into the
hill. Clearing thousands of tonnes of waste they cleared the area and
started to clear the tunnels. In the tunnels they found bone tools
used to excavate the green malachite copper ore in the Bronze Age,
4,000 years ago! The archaeologists have already excavated 8
kilometres (5 miles) of Bronze Age tunnels and believe that this is
only half of the mine. They estimate that the Bronze Age workings
would have produced at least 1,700 tonnes of pure copper – enough
to make 10 million axes. The softer veins of malachite ran through
the hard limestone enabling it to be won with the crude tools
available in the Bronze Age. Surface mining would have been
relatively easy but tunnelling would have been very difficult –
cramped, dark, dirty, lacking in oxygen and decidedly dangerous. The
veins varied hugely in size from the truly massive to those so small
that they could only have been worked by very young children. The
copper is thought to have been traded all over Europe and probably
combined with Cornish tin to produce bronze. It is certainly the
largest known Bronze Age copper mine in Europe and probably in the
world. This must have been a 'must have' on the Roman's shopping list
when they invaded Britain!
The walk down into
Llandudno took us past a cromlech (prehistoric burial chamber) and to
the Llandudno Town Museum where we learnt more about the history of
Great Orme, its copper mines (old and ancient) and Victorian
Llandudno. There was an interesting section about GOES
(www.goes.org.uk),
an organisation of volunteers who explore the copper mines. I must
check them out on the web when we next have Internet access.
The route back took us
up a 1 in 4 hill on a narrow road – this was a mistake. We were
unlucky to meet two vehicles on this normally very quiet road. The
first was a Range Rover and we managed to get past it but we met a
white van on a corner at the steepest part of the hill. Henrietta has
only got a 2 litre engine and a small clutch and we had to stop on
the hill. Getting started on the hill and negotiating past the van
were both very difficult but we managed to do it safely although we
did have a rather overheated clutch and must have lost a few
millimetres of tread of the front tyres!
Photos: The Great Orme
Tour Coach – we weren't sure which was older, the coach or the
passengers; The Great Orme Tram approaches the top station; An
overview of the copper mine showing the surface excavations and the
entrances to the mine at the bottom of the steps; A huge cavern
within the mine, which is thought to be the largest man-made
prehistoric excavation in the world and was once completely filled
with malachite.
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