Hi,
Back in the early seventies, there were a lot of people looking for the County adit. The 'entrance' turned out to be the adit of Mount wellington mine, and another possible one had also dried up due to pumping in the adjacent Wheal Jane.
After consulting the source documents referring to the adit, it would appear that the county 'adit' was possibly just a vast system of drainage leats on the surface, connecting adits.
So it is possible that the 'Great County Adit' is not the 30 mile underground trek many believe it to be. Certainly, those adits I visited were all dead ends, even after a mile or more of wading !
This would be backed up by the flash-flooding observations.
But exploring mines then became a problem due to various security questions, after the reopening of the working trials. A great pity though for the sport... as we did not encounter any 'dodgy' sections anywhere. And, we met no ochre dams...
It is also surprising that for such an important underground venture, no survey or legal deeds have been found, as it would have involved considerable common investments and wrangling.
D.Send.
This could be a long post so bear with me.
It’s a fact that mining research, like other subjects, cannot solely be undertaken with the aid of the internet.
Much of the printed information which was once commonly available, is long since out of print and only accessible in the reference sections of public libraries or record offices.
Personal field research is still a tool well worth considering, and much useful and original information can be gleaned from ‘poking around’ with a sensible head on.
Aside from the above, there is also the ‘local knowledge’ archive from folk living in the area of interest. This can be a valuable resource if you can sort the ‘wheat from the chaff’. A great deal of info can be pure rubbish, in that stories can become embellished / corrupted as they have been passed down through families. At times like these, such stories need to be balanced with some book or archive research.
On to the County Adit.
As stated before, Alan Buckley’s book is now the go-to volume for anyone interested in this massive subterranean undertaking, and a huge amount of time was spent by AB, sorting out old documents and cost books from the adit committee, that had been held in private hands for over 200 years.
Many of those documents had not seen the light of day since they were set to rest back in the day.
So a huge amount of historic and archive material on the adit does exist and I believe, has been catalogued and now resides in the county archive Kresen Kernow in Redruth.
The supposition that it was a series of surface leats and not underground tunnels is complete rubbish, and detailed plans of the adit system do exist.
The adit does indeed cover the 30 odd miles stated by many, and drains a massive area; this is no rumour, it’s a proven fact.
Consolidated Goldfields, once the owners of Wheal Jane Mine, undertook a survey of the adit within their mining bounds, when water from the adit found its way into the workings below the Carnon Valley forcing an emergency abandonment and flooding some of the lower levels of Wheal Jane.
The company had to construct a large concrete flume to take both the adit water, and the Carnon River which they had to divert, effectively re routing the water away from an old open gunnis and also from a very porous section of kaolinised killas, which leaked water like a seive.
Later on, Mount Wellington / Carnon Consolidated Tin Mine Ltd,
cleared and surveyed a large section of the CA whilst investigating possible future mineral resources in the United Downs and Consolidated Mines area.
This also formed part of the groundwork for the Wheal Maid decline project.
The original portal for the County Adit has been variously described as being ‘a little below Nangiles’ or ‘ a little above Bissoe Bridge’
The latter being a prime example of corruption of a location. The bridge that many call Bissoe Bridge, near L J Richards Garage, is not Bissoe Bridge. That is situated at least a half mile downstream from there.
It seems that many of these facts have been, to use a modern idiom ‘copied and pasted’ from other authors without ever having checked the facts themselves, blindly accepting that their source was correct.
The real portal location has been shown to me by 2 people, One was the owner of the land on which it sits, and the other was the celebrated mining historian A K Hamilton Jenkin. This was further corroborated a few years later when I was in conversation with J H {Jack} Trounson.
I last saw it about 20 years ago and it was almost entirely obscured by bracken and brambles, the mouth dangerously deep with ochreous marsh.
Mount Wellington’s adit is not the CA.
Wellington’s adit did discharge into the CA in 3 different places, at different times in its history. Firstly the old Wheal Friendship (later to become Mt Wellington) adit discharged approximately 30 metres west of the present portal. This is now buried under the banks of the concrete flume previously mentioned. This was used until abandonment in the 1930’s (ish)
The next discharge into the adit came in the early 1970’s when the Canadians opened the mine and pumped water to surface, and from there let it flow down the hillside, under the Twelveheads to Bissoe road and into a shaft on the CA located a few yards east of the present gated CA portal, which by the way, is a bypass excavated after the CA collapsed under the old Chasewater Redruth Railway embankment, a few yards west of the bypass portal.
Concrete gulleys can still be seen either side of the road which channelled the water beneath the road, one is down the bank next to the small car park opposite Wheal Andrew, the other is on the other side of the road; they are easy to find.
The volume of water was creating erosion problems and frequent collapses, and so the adit roof was removed from this discharge shaft to a point opposite Frogmore cottage.
Later they pressed the old adit into service again for a short while, but once again the old narrow adit could not cope with the amount of water being pumped out, and it collapsed under the road above it’s present discharge point.
The mine management quickly closed the road and took the top off the adit, where they laid 1200mm concrete sewage pipe sections into the mine, and backfilled to get the road open again.
This is the present Wellington adit.
I’ve heard all sorts of tales about the CA over the years, one frequently bandied about is that “you can walk from St Austell to Penzance through it” and another was that local mineral lord and land owner, John Williams of Scorrier, “used to ride his horse along the levels”.
When faced with someone who truly believes that this is the case, especially when the story teller has more years under their belt than yourself, it’s best to nod politely and agree.
I think that’s all………...
"You Chinese think of everything!"
"But I''m not Chinese!"
"Then you must have forgotten something!"