I am not sure why I have a fascination with mining. Perhaps it is borne of reading too many Poldark novels combined with many a Cornish cliff-top walk, punctuated by roofless engine houses, clinging to the cliffs in impossible locations, adding a certain beauty and character to the landscape. Heroism too. As one contemplates the lives of the men who lived and worked in these parts it is hard to imagine what sort of lives they eked out. Some of these mines descended thousands of feet and for miles under the ocean bed. Just getting to work for the day, armed with little more than a candle and a pasty, would finish most of us off. Perhaps it was not heroism; just a desperate need to feed and clothe the family.
I think too of the coal pits of South Wales. Ugly black blots on the landscape; but with the lazily turning wheels of the head-gear high above a hive of activity, little industrial steam locos busily shepherding their wagons around heaps of black stuff, they were darkly impressive. Most impressive of all was the coking plant at Abercwmboi. Huge and black with fire spouting from every orifice it was a terrible site, poisoning the land and its inhabitants for miles around. Ironically its purpose was to produce smokeless briquettes to assist city-dwellers be less effective in their smog-making capabilities.
Tragically, hand-in-hand with mining, comes disaster. Countless thousands of men have died in their endeavours to enrich either themselves or their pay-masters. Although safety standards have improved, death and disaster is never far away. The world was enthralled by the rescue of 33 men over 69 days at the Copiapo Mine in Bolivia in 2010. In the same year came the death of 29 men at the Pike River Mine in New Zealand. They are still inside. The callous disregard for life is so appalling. At the Blackvein mine in Risca in 1860, a mining tragedy claimed the lives of 146 men. What did the newspapers report? That the accident killed 28 pit ponies with an estimated value of £1,000. Replacing these was going to cost the owners dear. Men? Well, there are always plenty more men and they come without capital outlay! Never far from the national consciousness whenever mining is mentioned is Aberfan – the enormous tip that slid and buried a school and all within. That was not an accident. That was the highly avoidable result of incompetence and corporate irresponsibility. Yet, as awful as it all seems, the minerals wrested from beneath our feet range from the purely functional to the sublimely beautiful. Coal and oil may not be great lookers but where would this world be without them? A much better and cleaner place, I hear you cry. And you may well be right. There would have been no industrial revolution for a start. Burning coal produced heat. Heat, steam. Steam, power. Power, industry. Oil has taken over where coal left off. Think too of the beauty down there. Gold, silver, diamonds and a myriad of other gemstones and crystals in every sparkling and delightful colour. Surely Jehovah wanted us to discover these beauties of creation. Indeed it didn't take long for humans to do just that. Eighth generation Tubal-cain forged every sort of tool from copper and iron. Think of the gold that adorned the Tabernacle and later, the temple in Jerusalem. Quite a lot! It all had to be discovered, smelted and refined.
Some 40 or so miles west of Aberfeldy is a gold mine – Cononish on the slopes of Ben Lui – which, after decades of on-off development, finally went into commercial production this week. Nevertheless, it's the Barhaul lorry that most Aberfeldians are familiar with as it hauls barite or baryte from the Foss Mine, north of the Faragon ridge, to the crushing yard in town. It wends its way up and down the B846 tirelessly, yet its days are numbered. The Foss Mine is almost spent and a new mine is being prepared. Those who have recently used the A827 at Logierait will have noticed much activity. A new road, shiny and smooth, and 14km long, has been built. It goes up through the trees and can be seen for miles around. This is for the Duntanlich Mine, where another deposit of barite has been located and is ripe for extraction: about 120,000 tonnes per year, for the next fifty years. Compare the 42,000 tonnes from Foss. Now here's the tragedy, in my view. The Foss Mine is well-hidden and it's only people like me who go wandering in the hills for no apparently good reason who get to see it. Much work has been done to ensure that the new mine is equally concealed, especially from the revered Queen's View of Loch Tummel. Above Logierait, hidden in the woods, is to be a transfer facility, where the material is transferred from the site trucks to road-going lorries. Said lorries will pop out onto the A827, turn left, cross the river and railway line, join the A9 and head off to Aberdeen, where this stuff is used in the oil industry. I don't really know what 120,000 tonnes looks like but if we break it down we can get an idea. In other words, the mine will produce 2,300 tonnes per week or 462 tonnes per day, Monday-Friday. If an average artic can haul 25 tonnes, then that's roughly 20 lorry loads, or 40 movements per day. That's a lot. Two arrivals and two departures every hour for most of the day. And yet, the new road is built almost precisely on the track-bed of the erstwhile Aberfeldy branch line (1865 – 1965) and about 300m west of the existing highland mainline. And 2,300 tonnes can be handled in a single train with a single locomotive. That's a big train, admittedly, but even two trains a week or one a day has to be preferable to hundreds of lorry movements clogging up our already woefully inadequate road network, surely? Or is working with the dysfunctional rail system, fragmented into a thousand competing parts, too difficult and too expensive to handle? Sadly, I suspect so.
So what is this stuff? Barite is otherwise known as barium sulphate, BaSO4. Whilst barium is toxic, as a sulphate it is harmless; in the same way that the harmful sodium, when in chloride form, is delightful on our chips! Its use? It is very heavy and completely insoluble in water. 'Barite acts primarily as a weighting agent to increase the density of drilling fluids, where it functions to confine high hydrostatic pressures due to oil, gas and water released by drilling and thus prevents “blowouts”.' No! Nor do I. I can hazard a guess but that's as far as it goes. This mineral is described as critical and essential to the UK's energy needs. As much as we are being prevented from buying further dirty diesels and polluting petrol vehicles, the oil industry is going nowhere and investing for a long future. Of course, the planet won't survive much longer. We are coerced into disposing of perfectly usable vehicles in order to replace them with 'clean' alternatives. But it is consumerism that has got us where we are. Left unchecked, consumerism will destroy the planet. It is not possible to endlessly consume finite resources. Yet corporate commercialism carries on unabated, fully supported by a myopic, self-centred political elite. What's that promise in Revelation 11:18? God will 'bring to ruin those ruining the earth'. The evidence is that this will be very soon; humans are equally unwilling and unable to care for our, indeed, my home.
PS I can find no evidence of fatalities at the Foss Mine. Just for the record.
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