Cycling UK Forum

Si wrote:

Tangled Metal wrote:. We've had industry for longer than modern organised religion. Whether it's iron age or stone age or more modern times there's been "factories" producing in some cases high value / high grade items that have spread across the known world. From langdale stone axes found in Eastern Europe to slate roofing across the world in more modern times. .

<nerd hat on> the langdale 'axe factories' (and the like) are no longer thought of as such. Rather, they are believed to be sacred sites where axeheads were quarried because they had special meaning, the act of creating them being a spiritual process. They could have made just as good axes from the easy to access rock at the lower parts of the hills. Likewise, its doubted that they were traded as economic items, rather they may have been used as items of competative consumption, loyalty gifting, etc. Or tourist tat </nerd hat on>

What, like buying an audi for much more cash?

The same for Penmaenmawr?

Three years ago 531colin led a group of Wheeleasy members up Gunnerside Gill, an old lead mining area,

the size of it was very impressive,the first picture of the spoil heaps has people at the centre of the tracks

in the middle of the frame to give you an idea of the scale of things.There was an old bit of plant still stood

abandoned in the middle of the workings.Tough folks to live up there in mid winter.Amazing place.





A bit of history here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnerside_Gill

Ponsanooth Cornwall
The Gunpowder mills walk ... amazing .. and unknown to even most of the locals....

https://www.visitfalmouth.com/latest-ne ... der-works/

Being a North Londoner, the rest of the country doesn't seem to remember, or care to remember, how industrial London was. It's changed enormously in my lifetime. When I left school in 1984 in Enfield, two places I went for apprenticeships were the Royal Small Arms and Thorn EMI Ferguson where they made the TX tvs and IBM mainframe computers.

I still like cycling along the river lea past the old small arms plant and the last remenants of industry. I wish some of the shipbuilding herriatage remained on the Thames from when ships were made of wood. Turners The Fighting Temeraire heading up the Thames to someone who gave up and found another way to earn a living still seems particularly poignient. Now working in software it feels like someone else's life, with a foot in two eras.

IIRC there was a gunpowder works in the lakes too.

You're totally wrong about Lincolnshire sausages BTW. The two from what is now called Cumbria are much tastier. If you ever look at meat content too there's a much higher meat content in westmoreland and Cumberland (PGI) sausages than Lincolnshire. Makes for a better sausage. If you disagree then you've obviously only tried the fake ones that aren't made in Cumbria. Woodall's are possibly the best ones and a 175 year old company using an old family recipe from before the company started. Although it's a 500 year old origin. Traditionally uses the Cumberland pig (died out but some claim to have re-bred it but no longer recognised as such by the rare breeds association).

Just as you you can't get a good Cumberland sausage outside of Cumberland your can't get a good black pudding outside of Bury!

Thread drift alert. Again, sausages??

The cathedral at Koeln Germany took hundreds of years to build, construction was abandoned for many years for lack of money
If that is not a marvel of industrial heritage? Imagine the stonemasons on their shaky wooden scaffolds a hundred meters up
Not my sort of church mind, thousands of people worship there daily

(deleted.....a drift too far)

Caphouse Colliery near Wakefield overwise known as the National Coal Mining Museum. Underground tours are great and the guides are former coal miners.

I do like old heavy industry and like to see industrial heritage preserved. Several of the pit heads where I grew up have been kept as monuments to the past. I’m not someone who sees that period through whimsical rose tinted glasses though.

Cyril Haearn wrote:Britain has far too many steam railways thanks to Dai Woodham of Barry, Wales, +1

The Watercress Line is my favourite, one sees bizarre things there, for example two A4s going backwards pulling four coaches
Or a full-size replica of Thomas the Tank Engine

One of the most bizarre sights I have ever seen and quite frankly one of the most disturbing was at Ropley shed on said railway. It was Thomas's face lying discarded next to the approach road. Tilted over, staring at the under side of a tree canopy, covered in bird droppings and coal smuts yet still smiling, it was a vision sure to send any child under 10 screaming and gibbering all the way to retirement.

I know the Watercress line well as I live on-and-off in 4 Marks, where I hope to retire. Maybe in 20 years The UK will look different. I am an engineer, and after seeing that I would spend my life in the UK earning less than a bus driver, I pushed off abroad. Industrial heritage sites? That would be The UK, complete.

I'm a trendy consumer. Just look at my SM-G900F using hovercraft full of eels.

After the Falklands Conflict had abated, we took some Royal Marines to South Georgia to relieve the marines there after they had retaken the island from the Argentinians. HMS Ambuscade June(?) 1982.

Some of us had a trip ashore - first time ashore in months! - into Grytviken. Absolutely fascinating.
A bay, surrounded by blue ice-berg strewn sea with snow all around. The snow was maybe a foot deep in the town. Some of the lads ashore, tramped through the snow to Shackleton's grave, but it was a bit far as far as I was concerned, as I preferred to stay in the town and explore.

The whalers had left in the 1960s at the end of the whaling season and never returned. The workshops were still equipped and tools just left on the workbenches. Harpoon heads stacked up, huge corrugated buildings, chains, hawsers, cranes, bunkhouses, offices .......... all just left as they were when the men left.

One of my abiding disappointments, is that I never took my camera ashore. All I have is the memories.
https://www.google.com/search?q=grytvik ... 43&bih=641
These photos don't do it justice at all.
We were there in mid-winter and the place was eerie because of it.

We looked at the Argentinian submarine Santa Fe which had beed attacked by the RN and disabled, and was tied up at a jetty listed right over and covered in bullet holes.
This is worth reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARA_Santa_Fe_(S-21)

Better representations of Grytviken can be seen in the film Happy Feet, where the penguins are going to "the forbidden shore" to meet the "aliens". Great film, and well worth watching.

The ruined corn mill at Hawarden. It was a water mill, but there's also a chimney. No one knows why, but it is speculated that there was an attempt to convert the mill to steam power.

The site is just outside the Hawarden Castle estate (belonging to the Gladstones), so you won't be shot as a trespasser.

Here's a blogpost about it.

bovlomov wrote:The ruined corn mill at Hawarden. It was a water mill, but there's also a chimney. No one knows why, but it is speculated that there was an attempt to convert the mill to steam power.

The site is just outside the Hawarden Castle estate (belonging to the Gladstones), so you won't be shot as a trespasser.

Here's a blogpost about it.

Part of the park is open to the public, the nearby church and Gladstones library too

Near to where I grew up, Hall i' th' Wood (pronounced Ollith Wood and meaning Hall in the Wood) is one of those half timber jobs, and part of it was occupied by the cotton spinning inventor Samuel Crompton in the 1700s. Now a museum on the edge of a council estate that, amusingly, was itself constructed in mock Tudor style so as to match.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall_i%27 ... 223940.jpg

https://www.google.com/maps/@53.6002281 ... 6?hl=en-GB

Cyril Haearn wrote:

bovlomov wrote:The ruined corn mill at Hawarden. It was a water mill, but there's also a chimney. No one knows why, but it is speculated that there was an attempt to convert the mill to steam power.

The site is just outside the Hawarden Castle estate (belonging to the Gladstones), so you won't be shot as a trespasser.

Here's a blogpost about it.

Part of the park is open to the public, the nearby church and Gladstones library too

Holywell is nearby, Saint Winefrieds Well, one of the Seven Wonders of Wales
Winefrieds head was chopped off, then reattached, she lived many more years

Cymru am byth!