A Tragic Coal Mining Tale

 Editor's Note - this is a pre-Navy Beanie arrival adventure (and Cocoa was in the UK!)

Hullo!!! Today I am doing some more exploring around old coal mine workings. This particular old mine has a beary tragic story attached to it... more on that later. Let's go!

Ugh... we have to go up there????

Ooooh... see the black looking soil?

That's a tell-tale sign that we are in a former coal-mining area.

And look... fairly big chunks of coal rock too!

This looks odd... this little gully... not natural...

Ah-hah!!! do you see that straight line just to the right of the ferns?

It's concrete... they sealed, or blew up (or sometimes both) all the old mine adits and shafts back in the late 1970s

Why do you ask? Well... old coal mines are BEARY dangerous. Not just from cave-ins but from lack of oxygen. Old coal mines are full of methane and carbon-monoxide and if you're not careful, you'll asphyxiate before you know anything is wrong.

But up until 1969, nobody really did anything about the old coal mines. Most mining had stopped in the 1930s-1950s and there were a LOT of old mine adits and shafts. And a lot of teenagers would go exploring in them...

Hmmm... this looks odd too... like there might have been an entrance here, that got blowed up...

Anyhow... back in March 1969, two brothers went to an event with their father at the local rod & gun club which isn't too far from this old mine. The boys wandered off and were never seen again.

Well, this is interesting... see how fresh the rock is with no moss on it... possibly signs of an old blown up entrance...

Anyhow, they searched for the boys for a very long time (they were 16 and 19 years old) but never found them. It's like they had vanished off the face of the earth. And they had...

Nine years later, in 1978, some other teens were exploring one of the old mine adits here and... they found a couple of skeletons deep in the mine. They found their way out and the police were called. They went in and found the skeltons, which were sitting together. One of them had a student card in the tattered remnants of their clothing. It was the two boys who had vanished 9 years earlier. They had gone into the mine and probably got lost in all of the side tunnels (it's a maze down there). The police figure they died of exposure cause it's cold and wet down there.

Yes. It's a true story!!!

Seeeeee...

Ah... here we go... see this gully-ish area... that's another collapsed shaft entrance...

See... from farther away, it's easier to identify. If you know what to look for... That's likely the entrance the boys went into - the Furnace Portal. It's a sad tale...

And it was after that that they authorities went around and sealed off or blew up all of the adits and shafts of the old coal mines. Although some of them can still be squirmed into... but anyone who does that takes a CO detector with them... and it is still BEARY dangerous.

You can still find old bits and pieces of machinery here...

We took this bit home!!

Alright... that's the first part of our little tour from this old mine... part 2 is coming up!

It's kind of sad that so many men and boys died during the coal mining era. And even after it ended... people still died in old coal mines. Kind of like the bombs from WW1 and WW2 that keep killing people today.