Parys Mountain

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Horus
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Parys Mountain

Post by Horus »

One of the places we visited was ‘Parys Mountain’ located on the island of Anglesey just off the coast of North Wales, this island was also the last refuge and stronghold of the ancient Druids against the invading Roman army. My son had not visited this place before so as we were only an hours drive away I decided we would spend a day over there. To reach the island is easy enough as it is only separated by a small stretch of sea known as the Menai Strait, this is an extremely fast flowing stretch of tidal water and before the building of the Britannia Bridge the crossing was difficult.

Parys mountain is located near the far end of the island near the town of Amlwch and is the site of an ancient copper mine that still has an estimated 6 million tons of ore remaining with about a 10% mixture of Zinc, Lead, Copper, Gold & Silver, although it is not profitable to extract at current prices for the metals. Mining here goes back over 4000 years to the Bronze age and continued through Roman times up to the present day.

For anyone interested here is s series of video taken exploring the old workings.


The various colours of the waste rock make the place look unreal like some lunar landscape, but it is very beautiful. It is also difficult to judge its size by these images, but compare the size of the tower on the horizon in some images to gauge the size and depth of the open cast mining, also the roads and tracks visible inside the main crater. The tower is all that remains of a windmill used to pump water out of the 18th century workings.
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by Ruby Slippers »

Lovely photos, Horus, although they make me feel a bit ashamed that I've never visited the land of my father yet! So much history and so much of it personal to me. My father used to talk about Wales all the time when I was knee high to a grasshopper and loved and missed it all the rest of his life!
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by Grandad »

@Horus
Very interesting H :up
Many things in history amaze me and mining copper in Parys Mountain now joins that list. The question I often ask myself is HOW HOW did they make the tools to carve out the tombs along the Nile and now, HOW did they smelt the copper to make an alloy strong enough to chisel into rock, and HOW could they possibly work in the tunnels by, presumably, oil lamps.
Oh to have Dr Who's Tardis and go back and see for myself :lol:
Good to see Alice Roberts on the group in the video. A very accomplished young lady with an impressive CV :up
The colours of the rocks are impressive. I remember something similar when going to St Catherines Monastery from Sharm. There the strata seems to have been turned on its side with different coloured layers visible.....But I am wandering off topic as usual ;) :lol:
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by Horus »

@ RS, yes you should make the effort, ;) although it is easy for me to talk as I can be a fair bit into Wales within a couple of hours drive from my home. I believe you live in the Southern part of the UK, so a trip along the M4 would take you into the area that MD lives and along that Southern coast you have some lovely scenery after passing over the Severn Bridge, try to visit Tenby and further along at St Davids. Crossing up the centre over the Brecon Beacons is a lot wilder, but beautiful. Continuing up the West coast via Aberystwyth towards the North and the Llŷn Peninsula will take you through some glorious scenery of mountains and valleys with wide shallow rivers, sandy beaches abound in places like Blackrock Sands, Portmadog, Shell Island, Fairborne, Harlech to name but a few. I have visited most parts of Wales but my favourite part is the Llŷn Peninsula with its proximity to Anglesey. Mountains gouged open by slate working now softened by erosion and clothed in all sorts of flora, others clothed in Pine trees. Wide valley bottoms with pasture land each side and gentle rivers slowly meandering through and rippling over the smooth rounded pebble bed. Twisted stunted Oak trees clothed in lichen and moss giving their trunks an almost reptilian look as they cling on along the low banks ready to brace themselves against the next onslaught as the mountains disgorge streams and waterfalls into the placid rivers to turn them into raging torrents soon to subside again, but I am waffling on too much, just promise yourself a visit it is a magnificent part of the UK.

Grandad, from what I can deduce a lot of ancient mining was carried out using just Deer antlers. It was also quite small scale and they would follow the vein of Copper downwards wherever it went, thus creating meandering narrow passages that would honeycomb the rock. Alongside of the copper vein would be a mineral called Malachite that is a deep green in colour and extremely rich in copper, they would gather this and pound it as small as possible with large pebble stones as it is quite brittle. The next process was to light a big fire and cook the pounded ore to release the metal which would pool at the base of the fire, they would then beat this lump into a shape by repeatedly heating it again to anneal the metal to create the item, obviously a lot more effort was involved than my simplified explanation.
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by Grandad »

Was it really as crude as that H? That is even more amazing..... I had assumed that they must have been able to form some sort of cupola from clay and heat it on a fire??? But what do I know, relatively speaking their technology was as advanced having regard to their life in general as ours is today by the same yardstick......if you get my point? ;)
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by Horus »

I think the clay cupolas came a bit later Grandad, its still a far cry from how we used to extract the copper from the ore body out in the mines of Zambia, all the rich veins have gone and Malachite is as rare as rocking horse wee, but just for you I have raided my display cabinet and taken a couple of images.

The first one is a polished egg shaped lump of pure Malachite, note the deep greens and the veining effect, this is about 80% pure copper if melted down, so in this case about 1 lb of actual copper enough to make a small chisel.

The second one is a chunk of Copper ore bearing rock plus a few other metals and minerals mixed in maybe weighs 1 lb. The gold looking bits are not actual gold, but Iron Pyrites or better known as 'Fools Gold'. The actual copper in this chunk is miniscule and barely visible to the human eye, it would maybe make a matchhead sized piece and has to be extracted by crushing it to powder and extracting the copper by a method known as flocculation, oh happy days. :D
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by LovelyLadyLux »

I haven't watched the video yet but the photos are phenomenal H!! I'm sure the landscape is fantastic and while your photos are wonderful I'm betting they're not a match to seeing the real thing in terms of the actual size of the landscape.

I love malachite myself and have some jewelry that is 'real' stone which is quite beautiful (meaning the stone is very beautiful).

I'm on the page as Grandad when it comes to figuring out how the ancient people mined and extracted and did with they did to make tools to make more tools to make buildings etc. I always thought they maybe somehow chipped away at what they did & got material by making huge fires under a section of stone and then throwing water on it to cause fast shrinkage of an expanded heat spot thereby making it more brittle - my theory :ni: only. Must say yours makes more sense.

The landscape definitely does resemble Mars......(more in a bit - am having a hard time today with E4U as I can type a sentence before any of the typing appears and I've gotten 2 General Error messages so signing off now - but will return ;))
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by Kiya »

Horus , sounds like a very interesting day out , the photos look great. How far do you get down the cave these days.
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by Horus »

Kiya I assume you mean how far can you get down the old mine these days and not how far do I go underground? I used to go potholing (caving) but have not done so for many years now although I have done some caving in Wales at another old copper mine on ‘The Great Orme’ near Llandudno and I will post some pictures of this seaside resort later.

In the video those cavers are exploring the old mining passages that were rediscovered. What happened is that the later commercial mining that was done by creating ‘adits’ which are basically sloping entrances to go deep underground, then at one point a modern adit intersected the very old workings which you see in the video and it is these they are now exploring. No ordinary person would be allowed to explore these passages as they are far too dangerous. I believe that you can get a tour of the more modern mine workings, but I have not done one, nor is it a regular event. The actual passageways extend far beyond the large area you can see in the photos, but how far is not yet known, it is literally honeycombed by narrow passages, but at least several kilometres of passages exist. They are on many levels and some are so narrow that only children could have worked the seams.

Copper in itself is very soft, but here in the UK we have deposits of Tin mainly in Cornwall and they soon discovered that if you add a bit of Tin (which is very hard) to copper then you get Bronze which is hard enough to make axe heads and other tools, hence the start of the ‘Bronze age’.
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by Grandad »

I know I am drifting off topic but that is how my mind works. :lol:
Horus mentioned the alloying of copper and tin to make bronze. This lead me to think was it coincidence that the ancient Egyptians and others further east also must have used bronze, many centuries BC. A search on Google produced this interesting map of the timeline for the development and spread of the use of bronze.
This seems to confirm that eastern civilisations like the Chinese, predate most others in the use of tools.
Metallurgical_diffusion.jpg
I still marvel that at 4000 to 3000 BC people of that time were able to smelt ore and to alloy ores to make the bronze. :up
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by Horus »

Not really sure about that map Grandad, the Bronze age certainly happened in the UK about 4000 years ago and why does it not show Tin deposits in the Southern part of the UK. At one time Cornwall was considered to be Europes main source of the metal with some deposits in the Alps region, even the mummified remains of 'Otzi' found frozen in the Tyrolean Alps was believed to be involved in the smelting of copper. Some experts also reckon that Cornish Tin was traded as far as Egypt.
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by Grandad »

Yes H that is strange because they have copper ringed in north and south Wales. You mention trading in tin; the article that accompanied the map talked about trade in bronze from the east.
I think there is still so much we don't know about life and times thousands of years ago. Was the wheel even invented then? If not, then all trade must have been on the back of beasts.....
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by Horus »

Grandad wheel technology certainly goes back to the Bronze age, even in the UK a wooden wheel was found dating to around 1500 BC. It can be found in carvings of chariots from Iruk in Turkey dating back over 4000 years. It is supposed that most Cornish Tin was sent to Europe and the Mediterranean by small boats hugging the coastline, or bartered and collected by traders from further afield.
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by Grandad »

Horus, this has developed into a very interesting thread. :up :up
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by Horus »

Grandad, the threads on this side are always interesting, we are interesting people with multiple facets ;) :lol: :lol:
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by Kiya »

@Horus Thanks for the explanation & yes I did mean the mine ;)
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Re: Parys Mountain

Post by LovelyLadyLux »

I find or found it interesting they were using deer antlers in mining. I wouldn't have thought antlers were hard enough.

I really don't believe we really know as much as we think we do about ancient civilizations and what I can't grasp at all is the actual span of time (going back) we talk about when we talk about ancient civilizations. It is fine to say 1000BC but when you start measuring that in terms of human life span that is one awful lot of life spans. Even thinking about how ideas/new ideas were passed around is also interesting.

Following another thought I can only imagine how life changing it would be for an ancient family to acquire a hard axe head. Would have been an absolute game changer.
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