Was looking at Wheal Peevor earlier today and doing my usual trick of chucking rocks down the shafts. Out of interest, how deep is it to adit from the big engine shaft? Does anyone know if it used to 'go' before the grill was placed? I noticed that the council have cleverly burred the ends of the screws to discourage exploration!

Going back about 25 years, you used to be able to get down a shaft down the valley from the engine houses. a level came off the shaft about 50 foot down, with a lot of water coming out (maybe shallow adit level ??) the shaft continued down, but it would have been like descending under a waterfall so we didnt try!, some interesting workings went off I seem to remember an old wooden hand barrow being in there, It was quite a while and a lot of mines ago!!. There was also a very deep shaft with a concrete cap on it . Sunk I seem to remember by a Canadian company in the 60s, We managed( dont ask how!!) to remove a corner of the cap. It was a concrete lined very large rectangular shaft with steel ladders and stagings . went down a couple of hundred feet. I remember 2 or 3 short levels going off near the bottom into crosscuts, all that was down there were some large diameter lengths of rubber pump pipe, shaft carried on down into water I dont know how deep.
Mike

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The way in used to be via the batcastled "adit shaft", I gather during capping operations, this was blocked.

Adit is about 40F down, so in the order of 220ft ish. The tunnels are meant to be cripplingly weeny. One of my old mates said that he would never go in there again due to his back.

Edit:- The one with the concrete lid is Mitchell's Shaft, at the bottom engine house. It is securely slabbed over (when we looked)

Sounds about right I had a good back then, Not so sure about now!!, we went down mitchells shaft 25 ish years ago so I would assume it was made very "safe" by now.

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They did a plugging programme up there, but actually did quite a good job with the amount of batcastles they put in. From what I can see, the shaft has a concrete "lid" on it, rather than being plugged.

I have a feeling that the council's attitude to plugging has changed and it's only choked shafts which get the plug.

Oddly enough, the only one which got a batcastle on Wheal Buller (of this era) went straight to water, whilst the interesting shafts got "plugged".

Mitchells Shaft had a serious concrete as you say "lid" on it back then about 2 feet thick , I assume they would not have done too much to this. The manway in the shaft was separated from the haulage way by wire mesh which had rusted away so it was quite an "interesting" climb down and up!! we estimated the depth at 2 to 3 hundred feet!! not sure if this would be right?

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Interesting stuff. I'm quite interested in the work Moorhead did in the area for the Non-Ferrous Minerals bunch. They opened up a few shafts to have a poke around. Sadly, the new A30 was driven right down the middle of several, including one which is an important reference point.

Does anyone have any links as to what they found in Peevor?

I wonder whether they were thwarted by a rather blocked county adit.

Now that you mention the Non Ferrous minerals bunch, What happened to, or where are the records of all the mines they opened up??

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There is a fair load referenced in Dines, but no documents in the CRO (according to their catalogue). There are several sites which a fair bit of work was done on. Very very interesting stuff. I had a thread going on it a while ago.

I'll dig some books out and have another peer.

Cornwall's future mines has a whole section on the Peevor effort, very much worth a read. It appears that test bores at North downs were not encouraging.

Mitchells is 12x7ft outside timbers,

Very interesting area.