Parc Mine - Sump on Reservoir Lode

ChrisJC

Well-known member
All,
Tom and I were in Parc on Saturday, and visited a location that I had last visited probably 25 years ago. Amazingly given my memory it was how I remembered it.
Basically, the drive on Parc level 3 along the Reservoir lode ends at a sump.
According to Mines of the Gwydyr Forest book 3, page 91, the drive ceased at the end of 1957 'At the very end of the year the men broke into old workings on the Reservoir Lode'
Now it's a sump, but when Tom lowered the water by a couple of inches, it started glugging.
There is some barbed wire and an old tyre there, which must have washed through from the other side. The white vein material is discoloured. This could be from dirty water rising in flood conditions, or dirty caving suits being forced down there...

We wondered if anybody had forced their way through it?, or had located the other side?

Chris.
 

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tomferry

Well-known member
All,
Tom and I were in Parc on Saturday, and visited a location that I had last visited probably 25 years ago. Amazingly given my memory it was how I remembered it.
Basically, the drive on Parc level 3 along the Reservoir lode ends at a sump.
According to Mines of the Gwydyr Forest book 3, page 91, the drive ceased at the end of 1957 'At the very end of the year the men broke into old workings on the Reservoir Lode'
Now it's a sump, but when Tom lowered the water by a couple of inches, it started glugging.
There is some barbed wire and an old tyre there, which must have washed through from the other side. The white vein material is discoloured. This could be from dirty water rising in flood conditions, or dirty caving suits being forced down there...

We wondered if anybody had forced their way through it?, or had located the other side?

Chris.
Is looking more and more like that, if it is successful i hope we agree on the name parc pot for the survey, in honour of are temporary forum “host “ uk caving :ROFLMAO:
 
All,
Tom and I were in Parc on Saturday, and visited a location that I had last visited probably 25 years ago. Amazingly given my memory it was how I remembered it.
Basically, the drive on Parc level 3 along the Reservoir lode ends at a sump.
According to Mines of the Gwydyr Forest book 3, page 91, the drive ceased at the end of 1957 'At the very end of the year the men broke into old workings on the Reservoir Lode'
Now it's a sump, but when Tom lowered the water by a couple of inches, it started glugging.
There is some barbed wire and an old tyre there, which must have washed through from the other side. The white vein material is discoloured. This could be from dirty water rising in flood conditions, or dirty caving suits being forced down there...

We wondered if anybody had forced their way through it?, or had located the other side?

Chris.

Speaking as someone who nearly came a cropper after lowering a sump in an adit in Cwmystwyth, be very careful about air quality beyond the newly lowered sump. We'd dug through a collapse / dam, letting the water down, with satisfying glugging noises as you describe. Returning the next day when the water had lowered we came to a choke / narrow bit and one of our party was squeezing through then went quiet. I though he was checking carefully but in fact he was semi-concious, which luckily was spotted by Rob Prothero-Jones who also posts here on occasion. We sent the rest of the team out and me and Rob assisted the by now rather dozy guy out. I suspect if he'd gone through he would have been overcome and not made it back. The rest of us weren't particularly affected but I wonder if there hadn't been the constriction reducing mixing the bad air might have caught us all out. No bad smell (neither methane or sulphur), and none of us were panting (so not CO2) so I suspect it was simply low oxygen. This was a lead mine.
 

royfellows

Well-known member
I heard about that incident and frankly I have never been through there. I am not afraid of ordinary bad air as I easily recognise the signs, but as I understand it, it was low on CO2 as well as oxygen, so basically, more or less just nitrogen. Assuming that is, we are talking about Taylors.
 
I heard about that incident and frankly I have never been through there. I am not afraid of ordinary bad air as I easily recognise the signs, but as I understand it, it was low on CO2 as well as oxygen, so basically, more or less just nitrogen. Assuming that is, we are talking about Taylors.

My memory on the name of the adit is now a bit hazy, though I remember it was near the house a little eastwards of the main mine site. The name "Taylor's" does ring a bell though. RPJ and his crew had dug into it from the surface and I was involved in a later trip when the underground incident happened. If Rob sees the thread he'd no doubt confirm. Not particularly scary in the moment as it was a more a logical deduction that something wasn't quite right, but without the fear you'd get from less insidious risk, but very scary in retrospect when we realised six of us could easily have copped it
 

ChrisJC

Well-known member
To be fair, Tom and I did scarper pretty quickly when it started glugging, and it was certainly going through my mind that if there was a column of bad air behind the sump, it might be coming through...

Chris.
 

Willy Eckerslyke

New member
We wondered if anybody had forced their way through it?, or had located the other side?

(I should check the forum more often.)
It's my theory that this would have joined up with one of the bat castles - the one between the forestry track and nearby house, beside the remains of a large settling pool. I believe that the flood that resulted in the building of the surge dam came from that pool, sending huge quantities of silt through Reservoir Lode and out through Parc 3. That's why the Reservoir spur has so much silt still visible. If you were to get into that bat castle, you'd probably ab down 10m or so into a stope/cutting that had once been open to daylight and see water disappearing through a plug hole or building into a flood depending on recent rainfall.
 
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