I had come up this Saturday morning with Sal from Manchester so it
was going to be a later start, with this in mind Karli suggested that we should
go to the Middlecleugh Second Sun Vein stopes above the incline as Sal had
never been there. Good idea as it has been some time since all of us did our
exploration there - our last visit was in March 2007.
Making the
standard way in, we finally reached the laddered rise into the stopes above,
which itself is just above Pickering's Rise from Caplecleugh, near the bottom
of the incline. You have to climb up onto a little platform above the horse
level and then get on the ladder into the stope. When all of us were up, we had
a look at the east end of the stope for as far as we could go. Now this
actually filled in a few blanks because when we were here last we had come
across a large pillar that we had climbed up onto, and going to the end of this
stope brought us to the area below the north side of the pillar that we could
not get to last time - lack of thorough exploration
Returning to the top
of the ladder we then made our way along a short level and climbed up a hopper
and shallow chute. This gave us entry into the short series on levels in the
stopes. Following the various branches we showed Sal the area coupled with
having a few more blanks filled in.
This whole area is split into three
parallel stope workings that are all interconnected with crosscuts. You have
the two main stopes on Middlecleugh Second Sun Vein and Longcleugh Vein and
then a third one in between them. Once we had looked at the middle one we took
a crosscut to the Longcleugh Vein and showed that to Sal. Around the sump that
connects with the sublevel at Baron's Sump we noticed that the air was very
fresh here - possibly coming up from that sump, but then someone stuck their
head into a hopper on the horse level and it was coming from that. At this
point the only thing above is the Middlecleugh Level, could the air be making
it way via that?
We decided to do a round trip and headed out via Luke
Hall's Crosscut, entering the rather shattered stopes on the Middlecleugh
Second Sun Vein. Here a short climb down brought us back into the horse level
about half way along the incline. We spent about 5 hours underground, a nice
pottering type trip and the best bit was
we had loads of time to get
washed up and then get over to the George and Dragon in Garrigill for our
belated MES Christmas Dinner. Good food, good beer and warm roaring
fires. |