LeatherDome
Member
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Shall we get this rather lame title joke out of the way first? Well then, there we go:
And the next thing is to pay proper respect to the raisers of flags. There it is, flying true in all its majesty. It was a fine sight all morning long.
I only wandered around the part of the site away from the closed Heritage Centre as all of that looked properly squared away. But the true remnants of the commercial mining areas looked like they were abandoned yesterday. The pallet truck there looked in perfectly good order as if someone had left it there last night.
I suspect they used to take visitors down the drift when they had them. It’s locked up and seeing as I had no notion of going down flooded mines on my own it was of no consequence. There was a definite dripping sound coming out of it but this is Northern England in May. I can hear dripping sounds all day long.
Facing back the other way, looking up to the drift winch.
Clearly, some of this winch isn’t that old so it was probably operating in pretty much this condition. It strikes me how dangerous looking heavy industry stuff is sometimes. The broken or missing guards are bad enough but the operator had to stand behind this thing to work it; just where a parted cable would hit him in the face. Well, it wouldn’t hit him really, I suppose. Just collect bits of him on its way going out through the back of the shed.
By now, you’re probably getting to see that a lot of this stuff is kind of rust coloured.
Ah, the first mystery! Barrels and barrels of giant iron Maltesers and it looked like they were kept in barrels to be re-used rather than sold or shipped out. Some barrels had a bar through the top half for lifting and tipping. The forward one here didn’t want any of it though and has just ripped out.
Now then, here’s a clue. Maybe this tombola has something to do with the Maltesers? Something that turns and turns like that would probably produces various sizes of almost round iron pellets.
See inside (apologises for the dirty lens flare, rum form of the first order I know) there’re all these rumble plates. I know! Processing iron ore must be a bit like making yoghurt. You have to start off with a little quantity of iron Maltesers inside this thing and they make more of them as they pound the ore to dust and more Maltesers are born. Please qualify this theory with the knowledge that I do not know what I’m talking about.
Part of the tombola turning apparatus. A gearbox and a pinion shaft that looked like they could have turned the thing forever and ever. But of course, they didn’t.
Now that we’ve seen heavy industry at something like the indestructible we find the sorry affairs that are the loading shovels. The far one is actually a proper JCB shovel of some vintage but the near article is only an old Ford tractor with bucket on the front. Not so much of vintage as of antiquity.
Here we go. Misapplied equipment if ever I’ve seen it. And the state of the thing, although it’s actually better that the JCB, simply defies belief that anybody could actually drive this around for a job every day. It’s meant to be moving hay and ‘fertilizer’ now and again, not Iron ore all day long. It was now that I started to realise what a dire place this must have been to work in its dying days. Maybe they had some better equipment that has left the site but all this stuff is just rubbish waiting to break down.
A word about this ore and the dust it produces. It looks brown or red, usually, and then sometimes its blue or violet. It’s thoroughly horrid stuff and they had even gone to the lengths of putting flexible trunking through the window at the back to suck out the worst of it. That limp ducting leads to the front face of the main air compressor radiator in the building next door, so you should see the state of that, and it smacks of desperation rather then ingenuity.
Oh, I don’t know. It’s some kind of electric/hydraulic hopper of sorts. Maybe I’m wrong but while we always see 19th century stuff restored a preserved. I doubt that anyone will be preserving or restoring 20th century equipment like this. Just as the Victorians would have scrapped stuff off, so will we.
Random hoppery crushery.
It had a sort of workshop.
These had the look of horseshoe shod wooden clogs. Because this is exactly what they are. Can you imagine watching two drunken miners, each wearing a pair of these, having a fight on a cobbled street? It must have happened. It must have been one of the funniest things on Earth never to be seen again.
And then there is nothing as awesomely wondrous as a store room of an industry that you know virtually nothing about. The function of almost every item in here has to be guessed at and pondered.
Air powered rock drills I take it? Power indeed, but they’re sadly deficient on handles, grips and shoulder pads. They really are the most ungainly power tools in existence.
A ‘safety block’. When one finds oneself standing in a high place with a desperate need to be standing in a low place, for instance because you are on fire or the high place is collapsing beneath you, hook one end onto the high place and the other to your trouser belt (all miner’s leather belts are at least four inches wide, look at any picture of one). Now jump, and it will deliver you to the low place with a sedate zipping and whining sound.
This is gasket paper. About a hundred weight of it. I guess that the Beldham Asbestos Company has gone the same way as Hitler Knee Balm. The names are just not as popular as they used to be.
Breathing paraphernalia. I’ve seen WWII movies where this stuff is regarded as obsolete, never mind how it’s all covered in ore dust. It might keep you alive, just, but you’ll definitely contract a severe case of Rusty Gum with this lot mackled to the front of yer face. Bite down, now.
And this is the site air compressor. This is the room that sucks all the dust from the ore loading bay where the shovels are. There’re oil and grease leaks everywhere and with the ore mixed in with all that, just think of a room that’s been sprayed with warm copper slip and you’re somewhere near it.
I’m guessing that these are lamp batteries charging ports. Maybe radios, I really don’t know. A pity they’ve been left outside though. There’s a chance they might go a bit rusty and let the whole site down.
And just three of these ports had men’s names on them. Maybe it was that Watson, Blane and Kerr were not numbers, they were free men? Everybody else that worked there seemed to have been just numbers. But not even that anymore.
Cheers...LD.
Shall we get this rather lame title joke out of the way first? Well then, there we go:
And the next thing is to pay proper respect to the raisers of flags. There it is, flying true in all its majesty. It was a fine sight all morning long.
I only wandered around the part of the site away from the closed Heritage Centre as all of that looked properly squared away. But the true remnants of the commercial mining areas looked like they were abandoned yesterday. The pallet truck there looked in perfectly good order as if someone had left it there last night.
I suspect they used to take visitors down the drift when they had them. It’s locked up and seeing as I had no notion of going down flooded mines on my own it was of no consequence. There was a definite dripping sound coming out of it but this is Northern England in May. I can hear dripping sounds all day long.
Facing back the other way, looking up to the drift winch.
Clearly, some of this winch isn’t that old so it was probably operating in pretty much this condition. It strikes me how dangerous looking heavy industry stuff is sometimes. The broken or missing guards are bad enough but the operator had to stand behind this thing to work it; just where a parted cable would hit him in the face. Well, it wouldn’t hit him really, I suppose. Just collect bits of him on its way going out through the back of the shed.
By now, you’re probably getting to see that a lot of this stuff is kind of rust coloured.
Ah, the first mystery! Barrels and barrels of giant iron Maltesers and it looked like they were kept in barrels to be re-used rather than sold or shipped out. Some barrels had a bar through the top half for lifting and tipping. The forward one here didn’t want any of it though and has just ripped out.
Now then, here’s a clue. Maybe this tombola has something to do with the Maltesers? Something that turns and turns like that would probably produces various sizes of almost round iron pellets.
See inside (apologises for the dirty lens flare, rum form of the first order I know) there’re all these rumble plates. I know! Processing iron ore must be a bit like making yoghurt. You have to start off with a little quantity of iron Maltesers inside this thing and they make more of them as they pound the ore to dust and more Maltesers are born. Please qualify this theory with the knowledge that I do not know what I’m talking about.
Part of the tombola turning apparatus. A gearbox and a pinion shaft that looked like they could have turned the thing forever and ever. But of course, they didn’t.
Now that we’ve seen heavy industry at something like the indestructible we find the sorry affairs that are the loading shovels. The far one is actually a proper JCB shovel of some vintage but the near article is only an old Ford tractor with bucket on the front. Not so much of vintage as of antiquity.
Here we go. Misapplied equipment if ever I’ve seen it. And the state of the thing, although it’s actually better that the JCB, simply defies belief that anybody could actually drive this around for a job every day. It’s meant to be moving hay and ‘fertilizer’ now and again, not Iron ore all day long. It was now that I started to realise what a dire place this must have been to work in its dying days. Maybe they had some better equipment that has left the site but all this stuff is just rubbish waiting to break down.
A word about this ore and the dust it produces. It looks brown or red, usually, and then sometimes its blue or violet. It’s thoroughly horrid stuff and they had even gone to the lengths of putting flexible trunking through the window at the back to suck out the worst of it. That limp ducting leads to the front face of the main air compressor radiator in the building next door, so you should see the state of that, and it smacks of desperation rather then ingenuity.
Oh, I don’t know. It’s some kind of electric/hydraulic hopper of sorts. Maybe I’m wrong but while we always see 19th century stuff restored a preserved. I doubt that anyone will be preserving or restoring 20th century equipment like this. Just as the Victorians would have scrapped stuff off, so will we.
Random hoppery crushery.
It had a sort of workshop.
These had the look of horseshoe shod wooden clogs. Because this is exactly what they are. Can you imagine watching two drunken miners, each wearing a pair of these, having a fight on a cobbled street? It must have happened. It must have been one of the funniest things on Earth never to be seen again.
And then there is nothing as awesomely wondrous as a store room of an industry that you know virtually nothing about. The function of almost every item in here has to be guessed at and pondered.
Air powered rock drills I take it? Power indeed, but they’re sadly deficient on handles, grips and shoulder pads. They really are the most ungainly power tools in existence.
A ‘safety block’. When one finds oneself standing in a high place with a desperate need to be standing in a low place, for instance because you are on fire or the high place is collapsing beneath you, hook one end onto the high place and the other to your trouser belt (all miner’s leather belts are at least four inches wide, look at any picture of one). Now jump, and it will deliver you to the low place with a sedate zipping and whining sound.
This is gasket paper. About a hundred weight of it. I guess that the Beldham Asbestos Company has gone the same way as Hitler Knee Balm. The names are just not as popular as they used to be.
Breathing paraphernalia. I’ve seen WWII movies where this stuff is regarded as obsolete, never mind how it’s all covered in ore dust. It might keep you alive, just, but you’ll definitely contract a severe case of Rusty Gum with this lot mackled to the front of yer face. Bite down, now.
And this is the site air compressor. This is the room that sucks all the dust from the ore loading bay where the shovels are. There’re oil and grease leaks everywhere and with the ore mixed in with all that, just think of a room that’s been sprayed with warm copper slip and you’re somewhere near it.
I’m guessing that these are lamp batteries charging ports. Maybe radios, I really don’t know. A pity they’ve been left outside though. There’s a chance they might go a bit rusty and let the whole site down.
And just three of these ports had men’s names on them. Maybe it was that Watson, Blane and Kerr were not numbers, they were free men? Everybody else that worked there seemed to have been just numbers. But not even that anymore.
Cheers...LD.
fantastic place, brilliant pics and ver well put togther repoirt.
