Science Spin March 2010

Castlecomer coal

By Tom Kennedy

In Castlecomer, Co Kilkenny, many people can still vividly recall what it was like to toil deep underground, mining coal from what had once been a warm and humid tropical swamp. By all accounts it was a hard and dangerous existence, yet, when it all came to and end in 1969 former miners often said that they missed the life.
In the final decade before closing down, the mine still employed about 500 men, and three train loads of coal were being sent off to Kilkenny every day. However, despite the exceptional quality of Castlecomer anthracite, a 'smokeless coal', the mine became a loss making enterprise. A government study, costing £85,000, concluded that the mine had no future. The miners disagreed, and for a while a subsidy was raised to cover the £18,000 annual loss while hopes were pinned on the success of a new shaft.
However, it soon became apparent that this new shaft could never hold off an inevitable decline, and finally the pumps were turned off, and the entrances sealed. Shafts and tunnels, many miles in length and up to 700 feet below were left to fill up with water. Six miles of haulage cables, three miles of rails, coal cutters, lighting, pumps, engines, and other pieces of equipment were abandoned. The cost of keeping the mines open and dry would have been prohibitive. For every ton of coal extracted from the 500 ft deep Skehana Pit, twenty-two tons of water had to be pumped out, and the miners had to be supplied with 14,500 cubic feet of air a minute. The demand for power made the mines the biggest consumer of electricity in Ireland.

Early days
Mining around Castlecomer has a long history, but it began with iron rather than coal. In the 17th century iron ore, which occurs abundantly in the shale above the coal, was being smelted, and as some overgrown remains show, this was a substantial industry, fuelled not with coal, but with oak charcoal. The fossil stems of giant plants provided iron ore, in the form of Siderite, FeCO3. The iron ore was tipped into the top of a furnace with limestone 'flux' and charcoal produced from local oaks.
The glassy slag, skimmed off the top of molten iron can still be picked off the ground around the ruins of three-hundred and fifty year old smelters.
Many historians claim that charcoal burning caused the oaks to disappear from the surrounding landscape, but the evidence from elsewhere, such as Blackloon in Co Mayo, suggests that charcoal for iron smelting was usually produced from coppiced oak, and forests were carefully maintained.
About twenty years after the opening of an iron mine at Ballinakill, Sir Gerald Boate took note of the adjacent coal, remarking on how much heat it gave off. The iron founders were slow to change, but the popularity of coal as a general fuel rapidly began to rise. At Castlecomer, the upper seams are quite close to the surface, so gaining access to the coal was not too difficult. However, locals did not actually own the coal ten or so metres beneath their feet. On acquiring 20,000 acres from the Ormonde family in 1637, Christopher Wandesforde also took over the mineral rights. Like trees and game, his coal had to be protected from poachers. Fortified towers were constructed to store the coal, one of which gave rise to the townland name, Coolbawn.
Overseers were employed to catch coal thieves, and while some disguised pit entrances with flags, one canny individual escaped attention by digging down through the floor of his kitchen.
Techniques used by all the early miners were not much different, and until the eighteenth century, coal was dug out of pits by 'middlemen'. The middlemen worked with permission but without any real co-ordination.
On reaching the seam, the miners branched out, leaving pillars of coal to prevent the roof of shale from falling in. Where coal is close to the surface in the hills above Castlecomer the ground is still peppered with old pits.
A seam of coal, extending from Coolbawn to Crettyard, lies at a depth of 15 to 45 metres, and it became the first to be worked using what are known as 'bell pits' In these, there were two vertical shafts and a connecting tunnel from which the coal was extracted. From 1640 to 1815, when that seam was considered exhausted, is thought that fifteen million tons of coal had been extracted. The geologist, Richard Griffith, visiting the site in 1814 commented that the number of pits and holes made the place look like a rabbit warren.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the Wandesforde family began to take a closer look at their assets, and in 1740, when a geologist was called in to conduct a survey, a large horseshoe shaped deposit of coal, over three feet thick in the centre, was found lying at a depth of about 200 feet below Cloneen. Experienced miners were brought in from Durham in England to work this coal, which became known from this association as the Jarrow Seam.
Early in the 20th century a much deeper seam, three hundred feet below the Jarrow coal was found, and by this time mining at Castlecomer had become a big industry. Its expansion was primarily due to the dynamic intervention of Captain Richard Henry Wandelsforde.
In 1892, the Captain, a young man of just 22, inherited the estate, and he immediately threw himself into a number of projects in and around Castlecomer. The various land acts of the late 1800s had reduced the original estate down to 1,500 acres, but the young captain was already wealthy and the family still retained their mining rights. So, at a time when many of the big land owners were abandoning their damp old mansions and debt ridden estates, Captain Richard was investing in Irish coal. He bought out the remaining coal leases, and by selling his property in Yorkshire, raised capital to develop the mines. In 1917 Captain Henry, reminding the British War Office of their dependence on coal, persuaded the government to build a 14 mile branch line out from Kilkenny, and under him, the largest and deepest of the mines at Deerpark was opened in 1921. Overhead lines, like those on ski lifts, brought coal in from outlying pits, modern machinery was installed, and
just when nothing seemed to stand in the way of further expansion, mining became uneconomic. The scale and success of this venture at the height of production was in stark contrast to the eventual collapse in the late 1960s.

 

 

Carboniferous corpses

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astlecomer is at the centre of the Leinster Coalfield, which extends into Laois and Carlow, and while the coal is of high quality, the seams are narrow. There are three main seams, the deepest being several hundred feet below, and the uppermost close enough to the surface for opencast mining.
The coal was formed from vast tropical forests, growing for thousands of miles along the flooded edges of a supercontinent as it slowly sank into a shallow sea. Giant trees, up to 45 metres high, formed dense forests on a scale that the Earth had never had before or since. A high leafy canopy, similar in some ways to the much smaller Amazonian jungle of today, could have made the ground below dark and damp. Dragonflies, bigger than birds, flitted through the oxygen rich air, and rat sized millipedes scurried through the fallen debris. As yet, however, there were no rats or birds, for their ancestors were just beginning to crawl their way out of the mud.
For millions of years these vast swamps persisted, the continual cycle of growth and decay giving rise to a form of peat. When the land sank, or got blown over by encroaching desert sands, the Carboniferous peat was covered over and compressed into coal. Geologists estimate that it took thirty metres of this dense peat to produce one metre of coal. At Castlecomer, the enormous pressure from rocks above, was sufficient to produce anthricite, a coal of exceptional quality. Compared to the mines in Britain, where methane was an ever present danger, miners at Castlecomer could light up their lamps because flammable gases had already been squeezed out of the anthricite coal.
Before the swamps there had been a desert, the remnants of which are exposed as the Old Red Sandstone of Munster. Harsh, dry conditions prevailed on land, but at sea there was an abundance of fish life. This was the Devonian era, often known as the age of the fishes, and it ended with a disaster. It is thought that 80 per cent of all life was wiped out, and about the same time as this mass extinction, the old sandstone desert edge began to sink. Swamps formed, creating a new environment half way between the sea and land. Evolution, as we now know, is not really such a slow process, and there was an explosive growth in diversity led by the plants.
The remains of those early plants make up the bulk of our coal, and although long extinct, we know what they were like from their fossils, and like present day plants, they have been given species names. One group, with distinctive diamond patterned stems, are known as the Lycopods, and these could be up to 35 metres high. Another group, known as the Cordaites, had tangled roots, similar to present day mangrove trees, and there were giant ferns, all growing so abundantly that they had a major impact on the atmosphere. It is thought that the air above the forest was so rich in oxygen that insects could grow to enormous sizes. Insects have no lungs, most breathe through body holes, known as spiracles, and having more oxygen in the air would have allowed them to go up in scale. Fossil millipedes from the Castlecomer coal were up to three metres in length, and dragonflies were found with wingspans of 75 centimetres.
Most of the fossils in coal are of plants, and when these first came to light it was widely assumed that they had been left over from the Biblical Deluge. The Earth itself, as Archbishop Ussher had calculated, had come into existence 4004 years before Christ, and a few crushed looking plants were unlikely to upset that view. However, the Scottish geologist, Charles Lyell, in looking at sedimentary rocks, had come to a very different conclusion, noting that fossils were like the writing in a much older history of the Earth. Not just thousands, but millions of years, and for the Creationists, surprise at that idea rapidly turned into unholy horror as more animal fossils began to turn up. Just five years after Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species the focus of attention moved to Castlecomer where miners had come across some peculiar fossils. Scholars and geologists made their way to the mines, drawings were commissioned by the Geological Survey, and Edward Percival Wright, a professor at Trinity College Dublin, realising that this was a discovery of major importance contacted Darwin's friend and defender, Thomas Huxley as he was the acknowledged expert on vertebrate fossils.
A year later, Thomas Huxley, in a letter to Charles Lyell wrote of how he had gone to Ireland to look at the "Carboniferous corpses". "The journey was well worth as any I ever undertook. In a morning's work I turned out ten genera, vertebrate animals, of which five are certainly new."
In 1867 Huxley and Wright published a joint paper describing these fossils, including a small creature which had been 'baptised' Keraterpeton galvani. These vertebrate animals were relatively small, Keraterpeton was just a few centimetres long, but their significance was enormous. These animals had legs and lungs, so, in evolutionary terms, the conquest of land by vertebrates had begun.
As we know, from a fossilised trackway discovered only a few years ago in Kerry, animals with backbones had already begun to take their first tentative steps up onto the shore in the previous, Devonian, era, but with the spread of the tropical swamps, life on land became more attractive. Plants gave shelter and food, and in their new environment vertebrate animals diversified into an every widening variety of forms. Keraterpeton, with its flattened tail and wings each side of its head was similar to modern newts, Ophiderpeton had become legless like a snake, and Megalocephalus pachycephalus had appeared as a large aquatic animal, lurking in the shallows and seizing prey with its sharp backwards pointing teeth.
Most of these animals were amphibians, and like modern frogs and newts, they could not survive and reproduce far from water, but later the egg laying animals appeared, liberating the dry skinned vertebrates from their watery environment.

 

Labyrinth with eleven miles of roadway

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lthough a British Government enquiry into child labour in 1842 reported that no one under the age of 18 was employed at Castlecomer, many, and perhaps most of the miners began their working life as teenagers. The miners recalled a great sense of community, but conditions underground were far from pleasant. Seams of coal were thin, and before mechanisation in the later years, miners had to lie on their sides hacking into the coal with a pick. Big lumps of coal then had to be loaded into wooden sleds, and hauled out by 'hurriers'. Passageways could be as low as three feet, and the 'hurriers', wearing a girdle, hauled their loads along with a chain until they reached the shaft where the coal was winched up to the top by hand.
With the expansion of activities in the early 20th century improvements were made, both in equipment and in working conditions, but even so mining remained a hard and dangerous life. Between 1930 and 1960 seven men were killed in accidents. Apart from the dangers of being hit by moving machinery or falling rocks, many of the men developed lung problems, leaving them old before their time with, as one said, 'no wind to work'.
The underground labyrinth was extensive, and at the Deerpark mine there was eleven miles of underground roadway. As miners worked out one area they moved on into another, and the abandoned passageways, known as 'gobbin roads' were used as latrines. Walking miles back to the surface was not an option, and the entire working day was spent deep underground. There were rats, but the miners if not exactly regarding them with affection, were glad of their company for they formed the resident cleaning brigade.
The rats, of course, would eat whatever they could find, so lunch boxes were suspended on strings from the roof. Smarter rats discovered that they bite through the string. The miners were also wary of the rats for another good reason, for they knew that the rodents can cause Weil's disease. Those infected can suffer from prolonged fevers, and the complications from the disease can be fatal. This disease, caused by a bacterium, Leptospira, can be transmitted in rat urine. So, while the rats were useful in cleaning up the latrines, they were likely to contaminate any water in the mines.
Machinery and mechanisation made it possible to mine on a grander scale, and to go a lot deeper. Without powerful pumps to draw out 60,000 gallons of water an hour, the mines at Deerpark could not have gone down to 700 feet below, and without the winches to pull carriages along, it would not have been possible to draw a sufficient volume of coal out of the depths to give a return on the enormous investment involved.
The owner, Captain R H Wandesforde, was certainly prepared to invest, and under him a whole range of improvements were made. He was highly creative and was ambitious for the mining enterprise to expand. Once the railway link had been made to Kilkenny, he had overhead 'ropeways', similar to ski lifts, installed so that coal could be brought in to the central depot from different mine sites. Some of these aerial ropeways were up to two and a half miles long, and the coal was carried in big buckets, each holding about what would now be measured as just under half a metric tonne. There were in all about 200 steel buckets, and they swung along at 140 yards a minute. Naturally, the sight of so much coal passing over their heads, attracted the attention of some locals who became quite adept in using long poles to tip the buckets over.
Because the coal was being brought down, the ropeway was quite efficient, and powered mainly by gravity, it only required a modest input of power to keep it going.
At one point, the ropeway went over a road, and a wooden bridge was built to stop traffic being hit by falling lumps of coal. These structure have since been swept away, but in places the foundations for the lift remain.

 

Nixie and the Captain
The Captain was an innovator and he was also interested in improving conditions for people in the surrounding area. Houses were built, a weaving industry started, and he was involved in the early co-operative movement. Even so, he lived at some remove from the grimy reality of the daily life of 'his' miners, and he was reminded of this by another exceptional character, Nixie Boran.
Nixie, who had started work in the mines as a young teenager, was a remarkable man, and he soon realised that the way society worked was fundamentally unjust. The miners who dug out the coal had no say in how the mine was run, and they had little or no influence in improving the conditions under which they worked.
Nixie thought there had to be a better way to run things, and in protest he called a strike. He was immediately sacked, but his fellow miners had him reinstated. Not satisfied with the outcome, and fired up with reforming zeal, Nixie, in spite of being refused a visa, then went off to Russia to see what the recent revolution had achieved.
At the time, the establishment, church and state, with good reason, had a great fear of reform, and when Nixie smuggled back to Castlecomer by bus in 1930 he was greeted by police who immediately took him in for questioning. Nixie was already popular with his fellow miners, and they demanded, and got his release. Some of the local clergy, appalled that there was now an ungodly 'red' running loose among them, denounced Nixie from the pulpit.
Nixie was a born leader, and instead of causing the anticipated grief and disorder, he proved himself to be a reasonable and fair minded man who went on to inspire a great deal of trust on all sides of the mining community.
Having had his eyes opened by seeing what was happening in the world, he realised that the conditions that miners were expected to work under were simply unacceptable. Pay was poor, the work was dangerous, and after working long hours underground, miners did not even have a place to wash off the grime. Instead they had to tramp back home in filthy clothes
The Captain did not like the idea of being told how to run his great enterprise, but gradually he accepted that Boran and the miners had a point. Although it took the best part of a decade to arrange, the long awaited showers and lockers were set up in 1939.

 

Bells Heap

Bells Heap
In many places where there were mines, big conical mountains of waste remain. Castlecomer also had its mountain, a 350 high heap, covering three and a half acres. Known as Bells Heap, this was a mountain of spoil rock taken out of the mines. The spoil was drawn along and up to the top on rails before being tipped out. Although regarded as waste, some lumps of coal found its way onto the tip, and some locals made a living by picking these out.
When mining ceased, the tip remained, and might still be there if someone had not spotted an opportunity to use the spoil. The rock had a value, and it was taken away by lorries to a cement factory in Limerick. For fifteen years five lorries a day made the trip, and eventually the heap was no more.
Coal picking was a tradition as old as mining, and the dust, known as culm or duff, was gathered and mixed with yellow clay to make 'bumbs'. The methods used to make bumbs varied from 'dancing the culm' to rolling a large grinding stone over the mix. Bumb making was an industry in itself, and some enterprising producers around Castlecomer used horses to draw the crusher around large circles of culm.

 

Wash outs
While the Carboniferous swamps persisted for millions of years, the land and sea levels, as now, could rise and fall. The Castlecomer coal beds eventually disappeared under a cover of later rocks. In places, sand and grit laden water flooded over the swamps, flushing out the decaying vegetable matter. These 'wash-outs' were a troublesome feature miners encountered 200 feet below in the Skehana Seam, because where this type of incursion of water occurred, the coal was replaced by sandstone. Tunnelling past a wash out was time consuming and expensive, and there was no certainty that coal deposits would resume on the other side.
To the miners, the overlying shale was just a barrier that they had to dig through, but when the mines closed, its value for brickmaking was realised. Shale could be exposed by stripping off the thin covering of soil, and diggers often exposed the remains of old pits where miners had once burrowed down into a thin seam of coal.
A large brick-making factory was established by Cement Roadstone, and while it kept industry in the area going for some years, the recent end of the building boom left the Castlecomer works with accumulated stacks of unsold stock.

 

The Discovery Centre

The mines are closed, the railway is gone, but the history lives on at the Discovery Park. The park, located just outside Castlecomer, is on part of what was once the extensive Wandelsforde estate. Overlooking a courtyard of craft shops, the Discovery Park centre is a former grass drying building, and that in itself is just one part of the Castlecomer story. Apart from owning the mines, Captain Henry Wandelsforde was what is generally known as "an improving landlord", and having access to an abundance of coal, his grass-drying project could well have been a smart way to make hay despite the damp Irish weather.
Sandra McGrath is the Discovery Park director, and she explained that the idea of starting a mining heritage centre had been under discussion for some time. At first the proposals were for a relatively modest museum, but support for the project was strong, and finally a number of interested partners, including the town council and Coilte, joined forces to open the Discovery Park in 1997. Different sites and options were considered, said Sandra, but in the end it was decided that it would be best to have a bundle of attractions in the one location. Visitors can stop, shop, walk through the forested grounds, fish in the restored lakes, or learn all about Ireland's Carboniferous past through the 'Footprints in Coal Experience'. This is an audio visual tour through the history of coal in Castlecomer, going all the way back millions of years to a time when amphibians, having survived one of the Earth's greatest mass extinctions, were beginning to crawl up into the swamps.
Footprints in Coal is indeed a fascinating experience, and it is an exceptional production, created for the centre by a team of geologists, local historians, and technical experts under the guidance of Jonathan Mason. Lots of drama, and a cast of larger than life characters such as Nixie Boran, denounced from the pulpit as a 'red', the Captain, his employer from the 'big house', and of course the miners, who rightly prided themselves as 'a breed apart."
Una Patterson is in charge of educational activities at the Discovery Park, and she said the Footprints in Coal Experience is popular with schools, and a lot of the material on display relevant to the primary and secondary curriculum. Groups come for the day, she said, so having a mix of indoor and outdoor resources helps to keep everyone busy.

 

Find our more

A web site, created by pupils at Firoda National School has lots of excellent first hand material, some gathered from friends and relatives who worked in the mines. The school was one of those selected in 1999 to run a demonstration on how computers could be used in education, and the site is a wonderful example of how local history can be gathered, preserved and presented.

The pupils had great help from Seamus Walsh, an ex-miner, who has written a book describing what it was like to work underground. The book, 'In the Shadow of the Mines' is on sale at the Discovery Centre.

www.discoverypark.ie

www.sip.ie/sip019B/index1.htm