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Report - - Dinas Silica Mine - Pontneddfechan - South Wales - Aug 2021 | Underground Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk

Report - Dinas Silica Mine - Pontneddfechan - South Wales - Aug 2021

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Lenston

Bajo Tierra
Regular User
In the areas for a few other bits but always nice to pop in a check on this one.

History

Silica mines at Pontneddfechan

The area around Pontneddfechan at the head of the Vale of Neath is one of very few in the world where sandstone has been extensively worked in underground mines. But then this is a very special sort of sandstone.

Silica Rock

In the steep walls of the gorges of the Nedd Fechan, the Afon Mellte and the Sychryd are exposed beds of a very hard and pure sandstone which have come to be known as ‘the Silica rock’. It is in fact the lowermost of a whole family of such beds which collectively are termed gritstone is simply a sandstone formed from coarse angular grains of quartz.

It is the purity of these rocks – almost 100% silica (SiO2) – that made them a target for miners from the 18th to the 20th century. The burgeoning industries of industrial South Wales needed large numbers of heat-resistant bricks to line the furnaces in which copper and iron-smelting took place. Only bricks made from more or less pure silica could stand the intense temperatures without shattering.

The silica rock was worked through a series of adits – horizontal mine passages driven into the side of the hill – both behind Craig-y-ddinas and on either side of the Nedd Fechan upstream of Pontneddfechan.

Dinas Rock Silica Mines

The mines behind Dinas Rock were a rather larger affair than their cousins alongside the Nedd Fechan. Several large entrances are still clearly visible from the path which drops steeply down from the top of Dinas Rock to the Sychryd.

Note that although they are situated on what is now Forestry Commission access land, none of the mine entrances should be approached due to the danger of rockfall.

The underground galleries were very extensive, extending over an area some 1000m x 500m. Parts of the mine are now flooded, others will have become unstable.

The material was transported by a series of tramways and inclines and indeed overhead cables suspended on pylons, down to the valley floor and then onward to the Pont Walby brickworks. The former tramway along the southern side of the Afon Mellte is a modern-day bridleway which allows the route to be traced on foot or pushbike.

In later days the material was taken to a brickworks at Swansea until the whole operation closed down in the 1960s.

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Cheers
 
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wormster

28DL Full Member
28DL Full Member
They were exported worldwide, even to Mother Russia, where the glorious comrades in the steelworks used them, at one point a regular term for any type of furnace brick was a "Dinas", that came about because the bricks had Dinas stamped into the frog.

When I were a lad T'owd man and I, with the help of my older brother, loaded up a van load of Dinas bricks, including some nice angled ones for making vaults, bought them home to build a gas fired ceramics kiln for a friend of ours!

Many happy hours have been spent in there, we once got a "rescue shout" in the middle of the night, somebody thought they'd seen a body by the addit, we turned up mob handed ready for a protracted recovery only to be greeted with a discarded boilersuit!!!
 
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DaddyBear92

28DL Full Member
28DL Full Member
Nice images. I always enjoy a pop in here as well as the Porth yr ogof cave at ystradfellte. Always nice when you fancy an easy one.
 

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