Extension
Objections to further work had been raised in Parliament and by residents of Holywell, who feared that the proposed drainage would affect their water supply, and particularly that of the famous St Winefride's Well. Supporters of the Milwr and District Mines Drainage Bill pointed out that mining had already been carried out in the area without substantial disruption to the area's water supply.
Legal changes, however, passed in 1913 allowed the HMTC to continue driving the tunnel, at rates of up to 45 feet weekly, to a point beneath Halkyn Mountain by 1919. At 6am on 5 January 1917, the tunnel broke into a "loch", or flooded cavern, at the intersection of the Pant Lode: 10,000 gallons of water a minute flowed into the tunnel, sweeping away trucks and seriously hampering work for some weeks. 11 hours later St Winefride's Well, where water from the Halkyn Mountain system had resurged several miles away, ran dry as the water table fell. Water was eventually restored to the well via the Holywell Boat Level.
Following takeover by the Halkyn District United Mines Ltd in 1928, the tunnel was progressively extended, reaching Olwyn Goch in 1931 and intersecting several valuable and productive new veins. Low lead prices in 1938 caused the majority of the workforce to be temporarily laid off, but Pilkington's Glass began using the tunnel to excavate high quality limestone from 1939; this quarrying continued until 1969, creating large artificial caverns west of Olwyn Goch.
Lead mining commenced again in earnest in 1948 after ore prices climbed, and the tunnel was driven further south through several new lodes, in 1957 reaching a point at lode 477, the Cathole Vein, at which large quantities of sand and clay were being forced into the tunnel: no further extension was made beyond this point. In 1962, the Holywell-Halkyn Mining and Tunnel Co. Ltd, together with Halkyn District United Mines Ltd, became subsidiaries of Courtaulds, which wished to maintain the tunnel to supply water to its factory at Holywell. Lead mining was still carried out sporadically from existing veins until 1977, and maintenance work continued until 1987, when the tunnel finally closed. During its period of operation the tunnel had produced around 200,000 tons of lead ore and 80,000 tons of zinc ore.
Read more about this topic: Milwr Tunnel
Famous quotes containing the word extension:
“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“We know then the existence and nature of the finite, because we also are finite and have extension. We know the existence of the infinite and are ignorant of its nature, because it has extension like us, but not limits like us. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)