To try and keep things in one thread, the story so far:
As a result of the trip in, after a fair amount of standing around, often in the least HSE approved place possible, and saying things like that looks well dodgy we decided to clear the fall, separating the walling stone from the rubbish.
In the process of clearing the pile we found some timber with an iron lift ring on it and a hole below, this had the harbingers of doom suggesting we were standing on top of another shaft. Undeterred by this we cleared the hole and discovered it was a concrete lined cistern and the sludge that was cleared out had a strong smell of fuel oil which had us speculating that it was some kind of oil trap and that maybe there had been an engine refuelling station in this location. This will need to be named in keeping with current North Pennine naming conventions this will need a suitable name - The Trap of Fear perhaps.
Having stacked up all the walling stone it was then decided to build a plinth (The Plinth of Doom) in the middle of the junction, to provide a base from which props for the remaining arching can be located. This should help to prevent further arch collapse and prevent any further debris from blocking access to both the horse level inbye and the shaft.
We intend to use lengths of the compressed air pipe for the supports, as this will ensure that the job has a better chance of being finished. The location will require significant haulage to get any appreciable quantity of gear in, which in turn will require a large amount of manpower and the NORPEX doors are not exactly conducive to easy transport.
On the NORPEX front, there is some spare framing but it is a long way outbye and would require a lot of work to move it to the fall site.
At the moment, there is a pretty good supply of building stone so we will carry on with that.
If you fancy a trip in please let me know, this job will take quite a few trips and the more helpers the better. :)
Don't look so embarrassed, it's a family trait...