Have you enquired at the Museum?
Given the apparent lintel restoration they might well know something.

No, they had already shut when I came down. I was planning to speak to someone because the degree of rot/woodworm in the roof suggests that the roof could fail in the near future. Also the back wall is vulnerable to frost damage, and only a little of that could trigger a collapse. Too many of the structures have been needlessly lost already.

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This building appeared in "Hidden Histories" on BBC2 Wales this evening. Dafydd Roberts, curator of the Welsh Slate Museum explained it was a blast shelter where the men sheltered for 5 or 10 minutes, having a smoke, whilst blasting occurred.

Thanks very much for that info. In theory my PVR should have recorded the program, but due to problems caused by DSO it failed. I'll check with friends to see if anyone recorded it, failing that I'll wait in hope for the repeat.

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Iplayer
http://bbc.co.uk/i/nyx2z/ 
Not that any one would use something like the iplayerdownloader to get an offline unexpiring version ...

Iplayer
http://bbc.co.uk/i/nyx2z/ 
Not that any one would use something like the iplayerdownloader to get an offline unexpiring version ...

On a 160Kbaud line. Be quicker to get the BBC to send it frame by frame on postcards, scan them, re-assemble them and then watch it. Sorry about the sarcasm but downloaded video is a none-starter for my line speed. However some of my friends do have reasonable line speeds, so thanks I'll check who's got some coffee going spare.

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:offtopic: but
160k thats fine just use one of the offline viewers. as long as it grabs the iphone stream it comes in at 108M it will also never expire.
http://linuxcentre.net/getiplayer 

This building appeared in "Hidden Histories" on BBC2 Wales this evening. Dafydd Roberts, curator of the Welsh Slate Museum explained it was a blast shelter where the men sheltered for 5 or 10 minutes, having a smoke, whilst blasting occurred.

To be Devil's advocate, he did qualify what he said with (from memory) something like "This looks like a blast centre".

Great snippet though. A few weeks ago I stumbled across on of the animated 3D images of a drumhouse on Youtube. Wondered what it was all about at the time, now I know.

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Well its taken a few days but I have now seen "Hidden Histories".

To be Devil's advocate, he did qualify what he said with (from memory) something like "This looks like a blast centre".

The exact wording was "This looks rather like a blast shelter" which does sound more like an opinion than a definite fact. Also he was speaking of the larger building which is on the same level as the V3 drumhouse and not the smaller one on the same level as the V4 drumhouse that I originally queried.

The consensus seems to be that these buildings are blast shelters so I guess the smaller one must come from the same school of architecture as the loos at some Victorian factories which were carefully designed to minimise any loitering.

Its a shame that the underwater sequences did not give a better view of the sign that appeared to be attached to the "possible shelter". The centre was clearly a stenciled capital "S" but it was not possible to read the wording around the periphery. Made me wonder if it was a WWII shelter sign.

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Ah, I thought he was talking about the one in your photo, certainly that was shown in the same sequence, I recognised the "3-stage" roof.

Ah, I thought he was talking about the one in your photo, certainly that was shown in the same sequence, I recognised the "3-stage" roof.

The structure in the original query has a square sawn lintel. The larger structure one level down has a unsawn tree branch lintel with two knots visible. The roofs are similar in both.

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