Trip to Minera Lead Mine -- 16th Mar 2008

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Trip to Minera Lead Mine -- 16th Mar 2008

Group: Dennis, Ian, Paul, Mary, Dave

This was the consolation prize as we planned to visit a few caves in the area, however Cefn Y Gist appeared to have a collapse and Ogof Dydd Byraf proved to be gated. Hence we headed towards Cabin shaft for a quick trip into Minera mine.

The entrance was quickly located and the new portal made up of old telegraph poles inspected. It looked a lot sturdier than the old entrance. It didn't take long to rig an SRT rope up from a couple of adjacent trees and drop it down the shaft. The new entrance even has a nice sheet of thick rubber as a rope protector.

We dropped down the rope and ditched the SRT gear and set off to explore the mine. Its quite complex with lots of interconnected twisty passages, all alike so we went off towards the northeast in a fairly big passage which passed some formations.

After a while we noticed some painted yellow arrows and since we had forgotten where we had been on the last trip we opted to follow them. It was not entirely successful as we ended up doing a loop. We did reach Cornish shaft nearby and then wandered around looking for an obvious way on.

When it did not materialise we headed back towards Cabin shaft and after finding a few more formations we wandered off in the vague direction of the large shaft seen on the surface (boundary shaft).

After a bit of messing around we found a way on and dropped down a hole onto a short ladder where a strong draught could be felt. At the bottom was a passage which ended up intersecting with the surface shaft about halfway down, still a long way from the shaft bottom.

After a bit more pottering around we got back to the entrance shaft, donned SRT gear and headed back to the daylight.

Trip time about 2 hours.