Mining areas of ancient Britain

Interested in something really different? A little foray into one or two of the mining areas of Great Britain of two millennia ago might prove engrossing to a minerals man who has seen all the usual tourist sights.

If you would like to do something unusual but are short on ideas, why not visit the site of a Roman gold mine that still produces a little gold after nearly 2,000 years?

The gold-mine areas of ancient Britain are at the Clogau St. David mine, at Bont-ddu, near Dolgellau, Merioneth, Gwynedd and, some miles south, at Dolau Cothi, near Pumsaint, Carmarthen, Dyfed (Luentinum to the Romans), on the Afon Cothi. (Afon means “the river” in Welsh, spelled “avon” in English. When we say “the Avon river,” we are saying “river-river.”) Royal wedding ring

Would you like to show your wife the origins of Lady Diana’s wedding ring and a little known 6-mile- long aqueduct, carefully engineered by the Romans to take water, some three million gallons daily, from the Afon Cothi to collecting basins or tanks on hill slopes above the Roman mine which can still be clearly traced?

The friendly and helpful Welsh people will add to the pleasure of the trip. An exhibition of the Roman gold mine at Dolau Cothi is a few miles southwest at the museum of Abergwili, near Carmarthen. One may picnic close to the mine at Pumsaint village. Waymarked trails start at Ogofau Lodge on the Cwrt y Cadno road.

For Lady Diana’s wedding ring, the miners at Bont-ddu found enough gold for its fashioning in 1981, and later on for a ring for Sarah Ferguson, now Duchess of York.

Starting in Old Sarum, Salisbury, take the road running close to the straight line of the old Roman road and head roughly west through villages with names such as Teffont Magna, Fonthill Bishop, Chicklade and Green Ore. Next village on the line of the Roman road is Charterhouse-on-Mendip, Somerset.

At Charterhouse, the 50-mile Roman road ends abruptly and does not extend to the sea, only 14 miles away. Why? Well, it is where the important silver-lead mines were, and the Roman road was built to get there, period.

Eastbound, the road carried the valuable loads of minerals to market, and westbound it delivered constant supplies of slaves, whose appalling lives were short, and equipment for the operations, not forgetting the defenders of the wealth, the auxiliaries, guards and legionaries. Most gold and silver mines in Greek and Roman days had military defenders, as in certain foreign countries today.

Although the main product-by- volume was lead, the Romans called the operations silver mines. One large 180-lb ingot is marked “British lead from the silver mines of Graius N. Ascanius.” Silver was money to the Romans and the principal object in conquering Britain was to get silver, gold, tin, copper, etc. for Rome. T. P. (Tom) Mohide, a former president of the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange, served as a director of mining resources with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources prior to his retirement in 1986. He recently returned from a trip overseas.