Here's a question then ...

How come this rickety passage is known as The Cartgate, when it obviously isn't?
Is it just Moose being sarcastic? 

I suspect that if there is a 'proper' cartgate in JH, i.e. actual railed or boarded large-scale passage, then it would either be at a lower level (as yet undiscovered), or west of the current entrance, beyond the currently sumped passage - which partly was driving my interest on that siphoning project. It may have been that there was never one needed for the higher levels, as Leviathan allowed direct lowering to the boats from there, rather than dragging back up to the surface - and presumably James Hall didn't have access to all that anyway, unless he paid Oakden and co. for the privelege, once they'd bought Eyre's Grove. But they wouldn't have had as much trouble lugging it back to the shaft in baskets, narrow though the 'cartgate' is.

I still think there's more to be found in JH west of the shaft, and there's a massive gap to be filled between the streamway and the current cartgate vertically for everywhere other than Leviathan - I just can't imagine this is all we have, as Leviathan was Eyre's Grove, and therefore not part of the James Hall title.
James Hall's mine ran for years, and shifted a lot of ore too - and given the surface disturbance between the shaft and the Rowter track, I'm sure there's much more mine (and natural cavities) to be found yet heading that way.

I think the cart gate is probably just that - however, its buried under a good few feet of deads that have come from above,  There is evidence of the odd cart - at the bottom of the main shaft of course.  So did ore dressed in the workshop go down Leviathan, or up bitch pitch and along, or is there another way west at workshop level ??

If there was a proper cartgate on the workshop horizon then they would presumably have found some benefits in bringing the rails out into the relatively open area of the workshop. As the floor hasn't been properly leveled would assume there wasn't a railed level there?

The workshop does however feel sufficiently remote from the currently accessible workings to suggest that there may be more closer to hand.

What's immediately west at the bottom of the Bitch Pitch?  Loose deads?

Blakethwaite said:

What's immediately west at the bottom of the Bitch Pitch?  Loose deads?

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This drops down into a very wet and narrow rift. I've never been straight down, as it is wet and commiting without a rope, but going straight across is not too hard. This leads to a small chamber but with no other way on. Certainly nothing like the Cartgate is.

I don't think cartgates leading to small pitches is going to be unusual, infact i can think of a few cartgates that are only quite short. Certainly many cartgates have had their rails removed, so the only signs are the imprints of the timbers and rails in the mud (obviously lost after 1000s of cavers pass by).

Blakethwaite said:

If there was a proper cartgate on the workshop horizon then they would presumably have found some benefits in bringing the rails out into the relatively open area of the workshop. As the floor hasn't been properly leveled would assume there wasn't a railed level there?

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Although a level may be referred to as a cartgate, it doesn't necessarily follow that it had rails, it could just be a level that you could get a wheeled cart or barrow along. The historical accounts of the Odin cartgates suggest that these were planked floors rather than railways, for example, so there may have been something like this at JH.

We refer to it as a cartgate as there's no doubt that the miners working that part of the mine used some form of trucks along it. If you look on the walls at low level there are several locations where there are deep grooves in the walls where a truck has been rolling backwards and forwards.
I would subscribe to the idea of wooden planks as opposed to steel rails as when we first got into it there were several locations where we though there was wooden launders which could easily have been mistaken for a track.

Also as pointed out the remnants of the truck(s) are in the workshop but I'm not sure if they came from the upper level or along the level heading west from the workshop. Incidentally this heads for a short distance beyond the base of Bitch Pitch, over a hole in the floor and terminates at a choke after perhaps 20m or so. It is quite possible that this once connected with the upper workings as well as possibly continuing at that level.

This has all been very interesting - thank you everybody.

I think it was the tighter bits towards the head of Bitch Pitch which made me wonder about the origin of the name, but, looking at the survey, this section would be higher than the original line.

Also interesting is what pwhole says about the different ownerships.

Well, I'd been under the impression (from Jim Rieuwerts' and Trevor Ford's Speedwell edition of PDMHS Bulletin 9-3, 1985) that James Hall's mine had only 1 meer east of the shaft, and eight west, meaning that much of the 'JH cartgate' was a different mine altogether - it would end around the 1st choke.

But the recent reprint of the '91 edition of Cave Science suggests that James Hall's title did indeed abut Eyre's Grove. All a bit confusing, and one would expect some sort of boundary wall or marker to divide the titles. That may have been Bitch Pitch itself. But there are no other documented mines west of James Hall on New Rake until it reaches the Linicar area, but lots of hillocks and shaft hollows...

Anyway, below is an intact planked cartgate from another local mine, which shows just how well this could be done. This section is only a few metres long, and was possibly only installed to protect some softer ground, or even a backfilled hole, as the majority of the passage floor is solid rock, and so wouldn't have required planking throughout. The amazing condition is due to a fairly dry environment and zero traffic from cavers, as it's not been explored until recently.

Lower cross-levels in strongly-hading stopes also show remnants of planking under fallen deads, suggesting in many cases that it was a lot easier when working in awkward spaces to drag the stuff behind you, rather than trying to install rails and tram it out...

One other thing that did just occur to me is that the current entrance shaft of JH may not be the 'founder shaft' - i.e. the first one sunk, and the zero point for meer measurements. The founder shaft according to the Bulletin above seems closer to the wall, and therefore much closer to Leviathan - possibly in the workings above Bitch Pitch. Never had a look up there, but Moose's survey has a lot of dotted lines in that area. Maybe the shaft currently used was an additional shaft, sunk westwards in maybe the second or third meer?