Do you ever find treasure underground?

PeteHall

PeteHall

Moderator
How often are you asked that stupid question when people find out that you are a caver?

Anyway, found this nice little rock nodule digging at Rickford today. My son was especially pleased as it was the first time he's joined a digging trip and he even pressed the button that set it free.

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We're digging in conglomerate and there are a lot of little rock nodules, but this is the first one I've seen at the site, that's come off intact, with a crystallised cavity.
 
cap n chris

cap n chris

Well-known member
PeteHall said:
How often are you asked that stupid question when people find out that you are a caver?

Anyway, found this nice little rock nodule digging at Rickford today. My son was especially pleased as it was the first time he's joined a digging trip and he even pressed the button that set it free.

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View attachment 15577


We're digging in conglomerate and there are a lot of little rock nodules, but this is the first one I've seen at the site, that's come off intact, with a crystallised cavity.
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Impressive, beautiful and I hope he has a life-long motivation to continue! :) Good stuff.
 
Badlad

Badlad

Administrator
Staff member
There is a gold mining area in the Papua New Guinea Highlands at about 2500m altitude. By all accounts it is/was a bit of a wild west, lawless klondike region. The late Ken Kelly tried to visit in the eighties. He was a hard man and even he found it threatening as visitors were not made welcome. Helicopters could be paid for with match boxes full of gold nuggets he said and it was difficult to compete with that.

Kelly went at our bequest on a recce as there was an unexplored caving area to the south. At about 1500m altitude there was a limestone plateau where water from the klondike area sank. This reappeared below an escarpment, 1000m lower. I have always imagined that if the caves here could be entered then in the plunge pools at the bases of pitches and cascades there would be gold washed in from higher up and ripe for panning. Maybe an expedition could become rich. That'd be a first.
 
mrodoc

mrodoc

Well-known member
Some years ago I was taking pictures in Swildons just up from Trat's Temple. My mate Pete threw the Magicube firer he was holding back me (remember those) and I reached down into the stream to pick it up. What I grasped was a functioning Citizen watch that had clearly been there for a few months as it was an hour out! I did put it in a lost advert in Descent but nobody claimed it. I thought Citizen might have been interested in the story for promo purposes but they just changed the battery and sent it back. I still have it although the battery is flat again!
 
pwhole

pwhole

Well-known member
I find stuff all the time, underground and outdoors, but I spend half my life looking at the floor, so it's not surprising. One the best was finding the remains of an 18th century waistcoat in Speedwell Cavern - or at least the buttons, as there wasn't much else left. This was in Pit Top Passage, high above the Bottomless Pit. Their layout showed that the waistcoat had been taken off and laid on a low wall of deads, and the owner clearly forgot about it - though why he never went back to fetch it remains a mystery, and most of the fabric had since rotted away. Initially I thought it could have been left behind by James Puttrell and friends, who visited the passage in 1921, but we had the fabric tested and it was maroon-dyed wool, and at least 200 years old. AR cleaned up one of the buttons back to its original shiny silvery (tinned) surface, and they are now in the artefacts cabinet in the showcave shop, along with a pick-head I found in the Pit Props Series. There's an article in 'Observations and Discoveries' in the PDMHS Newsletter 151 with more detail.

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ILoveCaves

ILoveCaves

Member
Mark Wright said:
We found 2500 year old human bones in Eldon Hole and then made the big mistake of reporting it to the authorities.
We certainly won’t ever be doing that again
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Nice... so we should just be destroying more of our archaeological heritage to create more sport caving spots? UK caves have seen some of the worst ecological and archaeological destruction happen to them in the name of 'sport caving and exploration'. As an archaeologist, opinions like this are seriously dumbfounding and incredibly problematic from both a collective knowledge point of view and a legal one...
 
M

mikem

Well-known member
Badlad said:
I have always imagined that if the caves here could be entered then in the plunge pools at the bases of pitches and cascades there would be gold washed in from higher up and ripe for panning. Maybe an expedition could become rich. That'd be a first.
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Kayaking on a river in Ecuador, small specks of gold were constantly washing on and off the decks of our boats - I only managed to catch one of them, but the locals had massive vacuum pumps mounted on rafts!
 
CatM

CatM

Moderator
Long Drop said:
Mods... Is it worth taking ILoveCaves's rant out to a new separate thread, as it does raise some interesting points, before Pete's fun and enjoyable treasure finding thread gets locked?
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Rest assured that mods will be keeping a close eye on the thread - we may split later if it seems necessary (y)
 
pwhole

pwhole

Well-known member
Galena pebbles, also from Speedwell - largest is about 40mm across. The miners were probably just picking these up in the stream, as I did. Found quite a few buried within intact, layered sediment in a dry section of the Pit Props Series too, and it was clear the miners were just digging or sifting them out - must have been very easy work.

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