Speleology

During my time working for the Marconi Co. at Chelmsford I got involved with a group of cavers and was invited to join them in N. Wales on several occasions. It was during one of these that I spent my first, and so far only, night in a police cell. We were camping for the weekend and on a particularly cold and frosty night Wrexham police, who had no other 'guests' that night, kindly allowed us the use of their cells.

Descending into the mineshaft

One of the group about to descend the rope ladder into an old mineshaft. The area around Minera, Coedpoeth, was rich in old lead workings. One of the dangers was from the past use of wood, much of which was rotting by then. Tall mineral seams were worked starting at the bottom and putting in wood floors, for convenience, on the way up, so when we went down it was often difficult to tell whether you were standing on solid rock or on a rotten wooden floor covered by rock debris. At the surface it was advisable to view any slight depression in the ground level, especially accompanied by a slight change in vegetation, with suspicion. Many of the older mineshafts, which were simply holes in the ground with no surrounding wall, had been boarded over many years ago and were by that time potentially unsafe to walk over.