bwizz
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10 years ago
Just got our village "Carharrack" summer magazine , an interesting article reffers to a tunnel connecting the castle "restauraunt" with St Uny church "blocked in 1970 by current owner"
Anyone know anything about this.
Morlock
10 years ago
Stolen from Wiki.

"Smugglers' Cave

Smugglers' Cave
In a depression between the Monument and the Castle are the remains of the "Smugglers' Cave", blocked by the Council in the 1980s with rocks to stop children entering. This tunnel is rumoured to extend from the top of the Carn down into Redruth town, but it is probably an abandoned mine working. It may have been confused with another tunnel from the castle down to St Uny's church which was blocked off for safety reasons around 1970 by the castle owners.[19][20] 50°13'19?N 5°14'50?W"
Tony Blair
10 years ago
Here's how to do some of your research without moving anything.

1. Log onto this:-

http://map.cornwall.gov.uk/website/ccmap/?zoomlevel=1&xcoord=187430&ycoord=64380&maptype=basemap&wsName=ccmap&layerName= 

2. Click "Layers" on the top left. A menu appears.

3. Click "Historical Events" another menu appears.

4. Go down that menu and click event record.

5. Zoom into the map to the area you are interested in.

6. A little box appears when you click it talking about some report or other. Up in the top right of a box is a "Play" triangle (like an old tape recorder). Clicking this will scroll through the other documents.

7. Click "link to the report" where there is one and something like this will come up. Many by the CAU. There are MANY interesting documents in there. Enough for the lazy person like yourself to find the answers to everything without having to go to the studies library or record office ;)

http://map.cornwall.gov.uk/reports_event_record/2004/2004R066.pdf 
bwizz
  • bwizz
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10 years ago
Whats with the lazy person, and moving anything ?
somersetminer
10 years ago
"bwizz" wrote:

Whats with the lazy person, and moving anything ?



suspect its a typo, 'lay person' most likely what was meant
Cat_Bones
10 years ago
"bwizz" wrote:

Whats with the lazy person, and moving anything ?



Or "thank you for taking the time to write down some interesting and useful information for my benefit"???
Tony Blair
10 years ago
No it was a half sarcastic comment regarding shortcutting the huge amount of work involved.

The Cornwall Archaeological Unit were behind many of the reports, which are now accessible from your armchair. People doing research have never had it so easy with the internet.

If you were to take a mine like Wheal Basset and then look at one of the CAU reports available on the shaft capping, or history of the engine houses and layout of the site, you've got among many suites of documents, hundreds of sheets of mine plans. When you go in the record office, you can order 3 every half hour, if you've got a big report like that to do, it can take days of collating records, if you don't have copies of them. Then you've got the old maps, the various ground investigations and archaeological watching briefs and analysis of what was found....

One just logs on and it's all there. All those hundreds of hours of work in something you can download in a second, skim over and delete in 2 mins.




Tamarmole
10 years ago
"Tony Blair" wrote:

No it was a half sarcastic comment regarding shortcutting the huge amount of work involved.

The Cornwall Archaeological Unit were behind many of the reports, which are now accessible from your armchair. People doing research have never had it so easy with the internet.

If you were to take a mine like Wheal Basset and then look at one of the CAU reports available on the shaft capping, or history of the engine houses and layout of the site, you've got among many suites of documents, hundreds of sheets of mine plans. When you go in the record office, you can order 3 every half hour, if you've got a big report like that to do, it can take days of collating records, if you don't have copies of them. Then you've got the old maps, the various ground investigations and archaeological watching briefs and analysis of what was found....

One just logs on and it's all there. All those hundreds of hours of work in something you can download in a second, skim over and delete in 2 mins.



I must admit I do find working in the CRO frustrating - particularly when you are not to sure what documents contain and need to skim through a large amount separating the wheat from the chaff.
Tony Blair
10 years ago
Or you have the pleasure of ordering 3 documents and get 3 pieces of A6 tracing paper with a line on and then it's lunchtime. DRO are better in this respect.

Then there is the other. "This is the second bundle of nnnn and there are 5 more to come"

I enjoy it. I find the record office hugely pleasurable. CSL is good as well.

I would also like to participate in the continued digitisation of the mining journal, albeit with a crew....then start on the mining magazine.
royfellows
10 years ago
"Tony Blair" wrote:



I would also like to participate in the continued digitisation of the mining journal, albeit with a crew....



If a dedicated team were to take on the digitalisation of the late George Halls index into a relational database, I project which i started a few years ago, then I would happily turn over all my VBA source code.
My avatar is a poor likeness.
Tamarmole
10 years ago
"royfellows" wrote:

"Tony Blair" wrote:



I would also like to participate in the continued digitisation of the mining journal, albeit with a crew....



If a dedicated team were to take on the digitalisation of the late George Halls index into a relational database, I project which i started a few years ago, then I would happily turn over all my VBA source code.



What is thecurrent state of play with George Halls index? Is it still accessible?
Tony Blair
10 years ago
I'm up for this. It's a good project and CSL is up the road.
lozz
  • lozz
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10 years ago
"Tony Blair" wrote:

I'm up for this. It's a good project and CSL is up the road.



Has any of the MJ been digitized? 'scuse my ignorance.


Maybe badger the council to get some resources/Euro dosh to help?

I once researched a mine which operated over a 10 year period in the MJ 'twas hard going, a mag glass job at the old 'druth studies place (Passmore Edwards Bldg)

I suppose you could limit it to the entries for the Cornish mines for down here, If I remember correctly the location of the reports in the MJ were fairly consistent and most didn't run to more than a page or two.

Lozz.
royfellows
10 years ago
The late George Hall had the bound copies of the Mining Journal together with an index that he write in the 1970s.
Be advised that the index within the journal itself is total rubbish.
Georges index was hand written in the old school type exercise books that Woolworths used to sell with table son the back, money is £s shillings and pence.

He did Shropshire and mid and south Wales separate, possibly as an earlier project,

I started a project whereby I would photograph the volumes themselves and also the index which I would enter into an MS Access relational database.
He advised me from the start that there were volumes missing and some in very bad condition, but I had the bit between my teeth and once Birmingham Library confirmed that we could have access to their copies I started the project.
Now be aware that the MJ is available from most libraries on Microfiche, but I was keen to have my own photos and so avoid copywrite issues.
Also by using a logical filename system it was possibly to open the corresponding image from the index database by hyperlinks concatenated in Visual Basic.

The database itself was quite sophisticated, beside the above functionality it could output reports of page references by parsing through the appropriate recordsets and concatenating the page numbers together into a text string of comma separated values.

The current state of play is that 1835 to 1854 is photographed but with vols 12 and 15 missing. These were copied onto old 40gig IDE HDD drives and given to anyone who wanted one.

The index database has up to 1853 complete, except for as previously mentioned Shropshire and the mid and south Wales stuff.
The database itself is in .mdb format and has an interface whereby an index image and a population entry point form appear on the same screen. The intention was to distribute a retail packaged product as an already populated compiled .mde file together with the corresponding data file and 'fellow travellers' with a setup wizard, plus of course the image files.
Issue with running it off a web server would be size of image files and corresponding download time.

We are fortunate in that all of journals and I believe the index are in a safe place, a personal friend of mine whos name I wont put on a public forum.



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royfellows
10 years ago
CODE SAMPLE

Lines preceded by a ' are comment not executable code.

Public Function CreateFlatFile() As Boolean
'FOR USE IN HISTORIC MINING JOURNAL INDEX DATABASE
'This function creates a "flat file" recordset of mines and page numbers as row values from multiple page number records relative to each mine
'It populates a table type recordset "Journal"
'That table is then called into a query with information from the "Mines" table recordset as source data for a report or output to Word or Excel
'Returns true if successful

'OUTPUTS ALL FILTERED BY VOLUME

'Copyright© 2009 Roy Fellows, Iris Computers Ltd


'Declare all data types

Dim lngMineID As Long
Dim strPages As String
Dim strSQL As String
Dim strSQL2 As String
Dim qdf As QueryDef
Dim strDocName As String
Dim strDocName2 As String
Dim intVolume As Integer
Dim strCharacterRef As String


Dim dbs As Database
Dim rst As Recordset
Dim rst2 As Recordset
Dim rst3 As Recordset
Dim msg As String


strDocName = "MinesByVol"
strDocName2 = "PagesByVol"

'Get the volume from user dialog box
intVolume = Forms!CreateFlatFile!Volume

'Error trapping routine

Const mnErrDivByZero = 11, mnErrOverFlow = 6, mnErrBadCall = 5
On Error GoTo TrapErrors

'Create a query recordset of mines with page entries filtered to the relevant year
'Faster than using DAO with a WHERE clause

strSQL = "SELECT Pages.MineID, Pages.VolNo FROM Pages GROUP BY Pages.MineID, Pages.VolNo HAVING (((Pages.MineID) Is Not Null) And ((Pages.VolNo)=" & intVolume & "))ORDER BY Pages.MineID;"


Set dbs = CurrentDb

Set qdf = dbs.CreateQueryDef(strDocName, strSQL)

'
'Loop through each record in "MinesByVol" gathering information and incrementing the string value strPages



Set rst = dbs.OpenRecordset(strDocName)

'Go to first record
rst.MoveFirst

Do
'Parse each record in "MinesByVol" getting values, then add a new record to "Journal" to create the flat file database
'Set initial value of string variable strPages

strPages = ""

lngMineID = rst!MineID

'Second query is recreated with each run of the loop and is filtered by mine and year
'Year remains constant, but MineID changes on each cycle

strSQL2 = "SELECT Pages.MineID, Pages.ActualPageNo, Pages.LogicalPageNo, Pages.SeveralEntries, EntryTypes.CharacterRef FROM EntryTypes INNER JOIN Pages ON EntryTypes.TypeID = Pages.EntryTypeID WHERE (((Pages.MineID)=" & lngMineID & "AND ((Pages.VolNo)=" & intVolume & ")))ORDER BY Pages.LogicalPageNo;"

Set qdf = dbs.CreateQueryDef(strDocName2, strSQL2)

Set rst2 = dbs.OpenRecordset(strDocName2)

rst2.MoveFirst

Do
If rst2!CharacterRef = "#" Then
strCharacterRef = ""
Else
strCharacterRef = "(" & rst2!CharacterRef & ")"
End If

If rst2!SeveralEntries = True Then
strCharacterRef = strCharacterRef & "*"
End If

strPages = strPages & rst2!ActualPageNo & strCharacterRef & ", "
rst2.MoveNext
Loop Until rst2.EOF

'Delete the query ready for its re-concatenation on the next loop cycle

DoCmd.DeleteObject acQuery, strDocName2


Set rst3 = dbs.OpenRecordset("Journal")

'Open the table named "Journal", then add a new record with all the gen
'When the report that this is all about closes, it will delete all the records in "Journal" ready for the next time

With rst3

.AddNew
!MineID = lngMineID
!Pages = strPages
.Update
.Close

End With

rst.MoveNext

Loop Until rst.EOF

'Delete the first query, its usefulness has passed.

DoCmd.DeleteObject acQuery, strDocName

'Return true if successful

CreateFlatFile = True




' If there is a an error that brings everything to a halt, return false and get out of Dodge. Otherwise advise user, record details in the error log, then resume execution of the code.
'You wont get a div by zero but its still looks good!

Exit Function
TrapErrors:
If Err.Number = mnErrDivByZero Or Err.Number = mnErrOverFlow Or Err.Number = mnErrBadCall Then
CreateFlatFile = False
Else
msg = "Unanticipated error " & Err.Number
msg = msg & ": " & Err.Description
MsgBox msg, vbExclamation, , "Historic Mining Journal"
Dim errObj As Error, strP As String
strP = "CreateFlatFile"
RecordErrors Err, strP
Err.Clear

Resume Next
End If


End Function


Strictly Copywrite Roy Fellows 2015
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royfellows
10 years ago
Sample page from Georges index, part of 1860

🔗101257[linkphoto]101257[/linkphoto][/link]

EDIT
I am waiting for Simon's comments on my VBA programming skills!
:lol:

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lozz
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10 years ago
This is the kind of thing I was thinking of (open link below) Not so much an index but a searchable archive.

First off it's nowt to do with mining, I'm just showing it as an example.

It covers most issues of this publication from the early to more modern days, the search term I entered was Formo, Formo were a component manufacture in the days of yore, the results of the search show the usual OCR type stuff for each search listing and also the actual page which you can click on to enlarge which shows the real deal.

What ever system is used it needs to be quick, simple and as accurate as possible for locating the various stuff one is after.

http://www.americanradiohistory.com/hd2/Archive-Wireless-World-IDX/search.cgi?zoom_sort=0&zoom_xml=0&zoom_query=formo&zoom_cat []=-1&zoom_per_page=10

Lozz.
royfellows
10 years ago
I know where you are coming from, with the Mining Journal its impossible.
There is no way shape or form that OCR will work on the Mining Journal.
I have no intention of getting involved in arguments over this, I dont do arguments.
What I will do is upload a sample page image.

Dont take this personally
:flowers:;D
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lozz
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10 years ago
"There is no way shape or form that OCR will work on the Mining Journal"

Is that because of the small and sometimes not so clear print?

Lozz.
royfellows
10 years ago
"lozz" wrote:

"There is no way shape or form that OCR will work on the Mining Journal"

Is that because of the small and sometimes not so clear print?

Lozz.



That plus the paper quality of later (1970s) volumes which had a tendency to absorb the ink and produce a fuzziness.

This is an example of a good quality page, original file size was 2.5 mb. Try downloading it and zooming in on Windows Photo Viewer or similar.

🔗101258[linkphoto]101258[/linkphoto][/link]

Kelly's Directories are available online with an OCR search facility. Results are not too bad, the sensitivity is set quite high. You dont miss any of the wheat, but get a lot of chaff as well.
Mining Journal is a different ball game completely. Try working out the total number of pages for a start, never mind the issues described above, plus some others for good measure!

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