I recently visited with the aim of beating the scrapman to No2 Headgear which was strongly rumoured as under threat...

I met one of the site people there who confirmed that BOTH headgears are to be saved and all remaining buildings on site to be restored even the modern roadside buildings (now listed).

The standard of restoration of the long former workshops is stunning and if the same standard is applied this will be another fabulous Welsh Coal Mining relic.

🔗Penallta-Coal-Mine-User-Album-Image-34969[linkphoto]Penallta-Coal-Mine-User-Album-Image-34969[/linkphoto][/link]

A restored building, stonework perfectly conserved and pointed
🔗Penallta-Coal-Mine-User-Album-Image-34964[linkphoto]Penallta-Coal-Mine-User-Album-Image-34964[/linkphoto][/link]

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ICLOk

I've always considered the destruction of headgears on Welsh Coal Mines a bit of a lost opportunity.

Much like the engine houses in Cornwall, I feel the headgears could have played a similar role in the valleys. Iconic of the history of the area and a definite draw to tourists.

Great news on these 2 though

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with the crucial difference, that a Cornish engine house needs no maintenance over periods of 100 years or more; a part-ruined engine house half-covered in undergrowth is actually quite scenic, but an unpainted headframe is a lump of rusty steel.

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and there's not enough people desperate for work and ridiculous sized grants available in the valleys to do that kind of work?

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with the crucial difference, that a Cornish engine house needs no maintenance over periods of 100 years or more; a part-ruined engine house half-covered in undergrowth is actually quite scenic, but an unpainted headframe is a lump of rusty steel.

I disagree with you on that. I believe that a headframe is every bit as scenic as an engine house. Just look at Cook's headframe at Crofty or Victory shaft at Geevor... both striking landmarks that can be seen for miles.

With the right care and attention the headframe on Mount Wellington would have been one of the finest iconic headframes in Cornwall, sadly due to the attitude of 'lump of rusty steel' it was ripped down and younger generations will never see it's majesty again.

I see headframes as a gateway to another world, they are that link between two ways of life. When the headframe is gone the mine's surface never feels the same.

Sad as there is some truth in Derrickmans statement. The Astley Green headgear isgoing to cost £1,000,000 quid to repain properly to keep it standing.... 😮

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How on earth did they come up with that cost? I just cannot think how it would cost a million to do up an old headframe!

consultsants, advisers, assessments, feasibility studies, H&S experts......

will be up to a million pretty quick.

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consultsants, advisers, assessments, feasibility studies, H&S experts......

will be up to a million pretty quick.

I think this is a summary of what all those people are...

it's amazing, the amount of money it is possible to spend without actually achieving anything.

MetroNet, the consortium set up to administer London Underground capital projects, was a classic example of this; LUL is a sprawling, ancient network with commercial goals and stautory obligations which are often incompatible or unrelated, are often contentious in themselves, and which bear little relation to the funds actually available.

LUL's decision-making process was sometimes arbitrary, because they had decided long ago that at times it is necessary to simply take a decision and stick to it. It may not be the best decision, it may not be the only decision, but it is the one you have taken and represents a valid use of limited resources.

of course, this is very difficult to justify in the current culture of risk avoidance, box ticking and blame deflection. It's much better to support a huge staff producing unlimited reviews of possible options; and best of all, this is at no risk to the consultant, which is important to them if not to anyone else. LUL of course had the ongoing limitation of being unable to sue themselves, and didn't need to allow for this contingency




it's important to remember that headframes are a capital investment, which represent income to the administrators of a failed or closed mine. They also represent an ongoing cost.

I would agree that Victory and Cooks Kitchen headframes are icons of the last days of Cornish mining, but the important thing is that there are only two of them.

much as people may be attached to, say, Pwllgyrngogerygogogogogogoch No 2 Shaft, the point is that for most tourists' point of view, they only go to Big Pit once. There is a finite demand for such items, and a finite revenue to be extracted from them, and once a representative sample is preserved I would seriously question the desirability of preserving and indefinite number at public expense, because that's what it means.


of course, I stand to be corrected, or better still proved wrong, over 'the last days of Cornish mining'...

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consultsants, advisers, assessments, feasibility studies, H&S experts......

will be up to a million pretty quick.

The proposed refurbishment of the surviving headframe at Haig (No 5) was scuppered by a bunch of these clowns some eight years ago.

Before any cash would be released by the funders they had to have reports from the likes of those mentioned above - just to make sure that everybody knew what it was, what it used to do, what cultural advantage would be gained by doing the work, etc, etc...

The consultants report was a very nicely presented book with photos of the headframes and heapsteads at various times during the pit's life. There was a detailed account of what the headframe was for and how it worked. Obviously a great deal of time had been spent on its preparation. Only trouble was the detail was 90% crap.

Historic photos were captioned some 15 years or more out of date and described pit top layouts which never existed. A "modern" photo "showed" the "airlock" around the shaft top - strange as it was one of the downcasts. :confused:

A large pulley, still remaining at ground level, was "part of the tub-handling gear" - er? No it wasn't, it was used to feed ropes down the shaft when renewing them on the cable belt system.

Another diagram showed quite clearly how "the cages were hoisted to this point (skip discharge height) and the tubs were tipped from them into rail wagons beneath" ::)

Bringing this to attention of ("the application agent" to avoid embarrassment) was met with the reponse " It doesn't really matter, nobody will pay much heed to it, it's just to support the application and show that it's been looked into properly".

On the assumption that the cost of repair and repainting, including probably enough scaffolding to allow access to the top stages by lorry to avoid excessive manual handling of paint tins, two H & S men to each worker, luxury site cabins - complete with new phone lines, water and electricity supply for 2 month job duration, consultants daily inspection fee, and so on, was also calculated by them it's easy to see why the outcome was "no funds available at this time". :curse: :curse:

Buckhill

I agree fully.

as an aside, I am a consultant by profession :ban: (although nothing linked to buildings, restoration, mining or the like) and get to see just how quiclky fees can grow

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Hi viewer

I wasn't knocking all consultants, having been involved myself 😞 and have worked with a number of decent, competent people.

Unfortunately, I have also encountered (too) many of the sort who give consultants the reputation as "people who come and ask you questions, go away and write down your answers, then charge a big fat fee to provide them to you in a glossy brochure". 😠

The Haig case was one where the correct answers were readily available in-house (two ex-Haig men employed at the museum), but the consultants didn't even bother to ask the questions, preferring to invent answers instead. Their proposed refurbishment to a condition "as in 19**" would have resulted in a work of fiction, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to any period of the pit's working life.

It appears that the funder's preferred to have their information in the correct format from "recognised experts in the field", not from a couple of raggy-a****d colliers - even though they saw the shaft working every day for decades and one had even worked for months on the change-over from tub to skip winding.

The trouble is that those who hold the purse strings will not, reasonably enough, release them before carrying out "due diligence" assessments on the application - and this needs to be shown to have been done competently.

The eventual high costs arise due to umpteen different reports, risk assesments, etc., having to be compiled, many of them simply being answers to questions asked of the job operatives (who are not supposedly capable of doing the job correctly, efficiently or safely without written reminders of their own replies :guns: :guns: ). I often wonder how the headframes were ever repainted in the past when all that was available was the pit's Mechanical Engineer - who got quotes from a few firms for the job (including scaffolding) and asked if the cash was available.

Hi Buckhill

I didn't take any personal affront to your comments. Just the opposite! And |I agree there are some good consultants.

From where I'm sat, consultancy appears to be one of two things in general.

the first regarding asking questions and presenting the answers nicely which you outlined

and the second

taking information almost invariably in the public domain, playing about with the wording, and again a nice presentation (and fee - musn't forget the fee!)

:thumbsup:

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