Over the next few years, Mum edited a variety of publications for the Northern Mine Research Society. As well as the monographs on lead-mining in the Yorkshire Dales that I’ve already told you about, she edited monographs on coal-mining in East Lancashire…
Accrington and Blackburn…
And Oldham…
But what she liked best were the monographs that tied in with tourist areas outside the Yorkshire Dales and sold in quite large numbers, as these gave her and her partner a good excuse to have a day out by delivering the books in person.
The most successful of these was the Great Orme Mines which was written by C.J. Williams and published in 1995.
Now because I’m only a Little Bear and don’t know everything, I’d to ask Mum where the Great Orme mines were. She told me that they were in Llandudno, on the North Wales coast.
That had me really confused, however, as I knew Llandudno was a seaside resort where Granny Betty and Grandpa Graham had had some really nice holidays over the years and they’d never mentioned any mines.
But Mum explained that, at the time Granny Betty and Grandpa Graham were visiting in the early 1980s, the mines weren’t a tourist attraction, but more like a derelict area which was in need of tidying up and landscaping.
She also told me that the Great Orme, at 679 feet/207 metres high, was the bigger of two limestone headlands which marked the two ends of the North Shore at Llandudno.
The other is the Little Orme, at 463 feet/141 metres high.
Large parts of this smaller hill are now a nature reserve, but the Great Orme has been a tourist attraction since Victorian times when Llandudno started to develop as a seaside resort and it even has a cable-hauled tram, built in 1902, to take people to within walking-distance of the summit.
Although Mum would ride up the Great Orme on the tram at a future date – and take me with her – when she and her partner were delivering books, their main interest was in the Great Orme mines site.
This had opened to the public on a small scale in 1991, after the 1987 plan to landscape the derelict area of the Victorian mines and build a car-park had been abandoned when evidence of mining on the site dating back around 4000 years was found. At that time tools made out of stone and bone were used to extract the malachite ore from which copper could be smelted.
With the addition of tin, this could be made into bronze and used for tools and weapons, which were far more effective than anything used previously.
The most productive period for the Great Orme mines started around 1700 BC and lasted until around 1400 BC – and their production was so great that by 1600 BC they were said to be the only copper mines left open in Britain as none of the others could compete with them.
As the Iron Age gradually replaced the Bronze Age in Britain, however, the copper mines closed and weren’t worked again until the late 17th century. Great advances in technology by then meant that workings could go deeper and be longer, but, although some ancient tools were found, no one realised the extent of the work done by the early miners or how important it was.
But by the middle of the 19th century the copper ore was just about worked out and in 1881 the mines were finally abandoned and allowed to fall derelict for over 100 years. Then as work started on landscaping the site in 1987, more evidence of the early workings was uncovered and the importance of the site became more obvious.
Since that date, archaeologists, cavers and mining engineers have worked carefully to reveal more tunnels and surface features of what is thought to be the biggest prehistoric mine in the world to be discovered so far.
And the tourist attraction itself has changed greatly since Mum and her partner first went there, as there is now a Mine Visitor Centre, with displays relating to life in the Bronze Age as well as to the mine itself.
There’s also a gift shop and a cafe – though Mum says she can remember the cafe from the first time she went there as she had the biggest slice of coffee-and-walnut cake she’d ever seen…
Then Mum scared me a bit, as she told me about the herd of feral Kashmiri goats who live on the Great Orme. She said there are about 200 of them and they’re descended from a pair who were given to Queen Victoria in 1837.
I didn’t mind that – or the fact that the regimental mascot for the Royal Welsh Regiment is always chosen from this herd and given the rank of Lance-Corporal…
But then she showed me some pictures of them coming down from the Great Orme and wandering around the streets of the town during the Covid restrictions when everywhere was quiet…
And that’s when I realised that they had these really big prong things on top of their heads that looked as if they could seriously damage a Little Bear if they got too close – and I didn’t like the thought of that at all!
That’s it for this week, so take care, stay safe – and look out for some more tales from me soon!
Follow my next blog:195. MY MUM THE STORY-TELLER – PART EIGHTY-THREE
07/04/2022
Wilf the bear-faced blogger 