Going Underground | Inside a Roman Gold Mine

Hello and welcome to the National Trust podcast. I'm James Grasby, a senior curator with the National Trust. Today we're journeying deep into an ancient world at the UK's only known Roman gold mine. Dolaucothi in Carmarthenshire, Wales. We'll be uncovering hidden treasures and unearthing the ingenuity of the Roman Empire. [ Speaking Welsh] Mae n bwrw glaw, mae n bwrw glaw heddiw.

James, croeso i Dolaucothi!

Donna, hiraeth has drawn me back, a sense of longing to be back in Wales. Now look, what gear have you got here? We're inside the dressing. Shed?

Sied daclu.

Sied Daclu, and what went on in here?

So this is where we get kitted up with our hard hats and miners lamps ready to journey underground.

I'm going to get changed now, am I?

You're quite tall and we wouldn't want you banging your head.

Thank you, that's very good!

And then we will also get you kitted up in one of our lamps. So if you could just hold that pack on your side.

Very good.

And then we'll just clip the lamp onto the front of your hard hat. There we go. How does that feel?

Feel it feels absolutely Splendid.

Excellent!

Thank you very much indeed. There's a bit of time travel going on here, isn't there? Because in amongst this very modern equipment is stuff that I would go- I guess, goes back at least 100 years?

And that's mainly evidence of what you'll see in the mine yard today, so shall we leave the shed and go and have a look?

Lead the way.

So we are going to visit a couple of our mines and you might be forgiven for thinking that to go underground, we'd be heading down.

Yes?

But at Dolaucothi we like to do things slightly differently. So we're gonna be heading up the hillside.

That's perverse! Up the hillside?

Up the hillside! Well, the reason is is that we're standing at the bottom of an open cast pit, so we've actually got to climb our way out of this open cast pit to find the rest of the mines.

So we're going uphill in order to go down?

Yes.

Right.

Few steps, but it's a nice walk.

What a lovely spot. It's hard to imagine this place being the centre of such an important industry.

It's an amazing landscape, isn't it? So today we've got fantastic oak woodland, part of the Celtic Rain Forest, and so it doesn't really hint at the massive industrial activity that would have gone on here. So we can we've got a good view then into the valley and you can just about make out the river Cothi down at the bottom there. And you can also make out a collection of buildings through the trees there. So that's the village of Pumsaint. But it also is the site of a Roman Fort.

And this was right on the very edge of an enormous Roman Empire?

Yeah. So the Romans, I think had a shopping list of what they wanted to get from Britain, and a lot of it is our mineral and metal wealth. So they would have sent scouts to find out where all these good deposits were and then bought the military in behind them. It took them an additional 30 years to get into Wales. Wales was so heavily defended and one of the reasons that we think the Romans wanted to come here is because they knew of the gold deposits here.

The Romans clearly had an ability to identify worthwhile resources. The Roman state and the Emperor effectively owned all gold mines, all lead, silver mines, and some of the iron mines across the empire. So this would have been an imperial estate more than likely.

It was relatively near the surface and it's very likely that the gold that they found was'free gold' which would be fairly easily processed by methods that took advantage of the fact that gold relative to most other things is very heavy.

I'm Barry Burnham.

I'm Helen Burnham.

At the moment, my wife and I, Helen and I are heritage archaeology rangers. We’re the only two in Wales as such.

I met Barry when we were both students. We've been married now for 44 years.

But we've been actively exploring the mines since 1982. We knew that the Romans had an auxiliary Fort for 500 or perhaps 1000 soldiers on north side of the river, about a kilometre away. They brought with them the highest levels of technology that they had. They'd inherited quite a lot of that from the Egyptians and from earlier civilisations, it wasn't as if they started from scratch.

'Free gold' is a kind of gold that sometimes people are lucky enough to find in other parts of the world where you can see gold and you can just pick it up. And sometimes there are quite large Nuggets, though that's very unusual.

Most of the rest it's just hard manual labour. The reality of the mine itself is that this is a mechanical mine. It's driven by picks, mining tools, chisels. It's not sophisticated in any sense. It's just hard Rock mining. Once the material was actually mined, it would have to have been crushed, turned into a powder, and then washed in such a way that the rubbish was allowed to wash away and the gold would then have been collected.

Donna, we've come around the corner and there is a very much more prominent opening in the hillside. I can see a horizontal tunnel, an adit, going into the hillside.

Yeah, you're quite correct an adit. So the term adit is mining terms for a horizontal or self draining tunnel. This was known as ogof cau which means a a bowl or a cauldron. So that kind of conjures the imagination a little bit. But what we have here is we have a fantastic square tunnel driven into the hillside that opens out into a gallery. So-

Wow.

You ready to take a look?

It feels like we're entering some ritual space, an amazing temple or something. It's like the entrance into the underworld. Donna lead the way. The walls are square wrought, directly, into the bedrock and an astonishingly flat ceiling. And this is this is precision quarrying. This is Roman work that we're looking at?

That's as far as we believe to do with the way that it's been engineered and the technology that the Romans had available to them. But if you look up the tunnel, you can see how beautifully square it is and it's very wide. And in some instances, we might call this over engineered because when you're mining out this bedrock, it's waste rock and you're throwing it away. So this tunnel is- it's just too wide, really.

That is quite astonishing. It's time travel.

So you'll notice that we're walking very slightly up hill as well.

Yes, a gentle incline. Not much of one, but what was the reason for that?

No, but it's enough to drain the water out of the mine.

Right.

So any water that's flowing into the mine from the surface or coming through the rocks is going to be drained out and through this nice square tunnel.

We've come to the end of this adit, into a into a sort of transverse excavation, a much higher tunnel, almost a cavern, a cave?

So this gallery is known as a pillar and room working, so we're currently stood in a room and just here we have a pillar or a column of rock and you can see either side, we've blocked them up now, but they're almost like doorways and we think those would have gone through and extended out into another room the other side.

Have you found any? I mean- Do you see a twinkling bit of gold?

I have found gold and then lost it within within about an hour. Yeah, I I was in the mine doing the mine inspection. So for safety we come and check the mines before any visitors come underground. And there was a a small bit of of loose rock and and I've managed to remove it with my hand And for some reason I thought I bet there's gold in this, so I put it in my pocket and when I got to back to the mine yard was speaking to my colleagues about it.

Donna we're now leaving the gallery and heading upwards, up this narrow companion way back into the daylight from this underworld, this twilight world. I'm turning my torch off and my back in this ancient woodland. What an extraordinary tour.

So we've come out of an underground working, but we're still in a mine.

We're still in a mine. I mean, this is a deep hollow again, one of those workings that you were describing on the way in. This is all man made is it?

Yeah. So we've got a trench system that runs through here.

When I first met you down in the yard, you talked about the end, really, of mining here in the in the 1940s. But was there continuous mining going on here from perhaps the Bronze Age period through the Roman period, right up to the 1940s?

It is one of the intriguing things about Dolaucothi, so we know that we have very early workings here, but we're not entirely sure as to when the mining stopped. But we do know that the mining did stop and then gold was forgotten about. Now how can you forget about gold?

After the Romans abandoned the mines, the mining had been abandoned, but the mines themselves weren't. They'd always been remembered as a place of suffering and torment, and so these bad places attracted bad people. An evil wizard had taken up residence in the mine. And he hated good people. One day, five saints were on pilgrimage to St Davids, and as they were travelling past the mines, the skies grew black.

So if you want to keep your friends and your family safe, you might make up stories to keep them out of these dangerous places. People avoided them, and so the knowledge of gold here was lost. So much so that the Johnes family, who were the estate owners were given the Dolaucothi estate by the monarchy. Now no royal is going to give away a known gold mine. So that does tell us that the story of gold was forgotten about at that point.

So the Romans came and went, and the dark ages as you were describing commenced. And the mines became almost lost, certainly forgotten. And became part of folklore and myth. And at what point did the search for gold start again? When was that ignited?

So the Johnes family owned about 4000 acres of the countryside around here, running up to the cothi valley, and they had a large game estate and they would have invited their friends to enjoy the Dolaucothi, countryside. And one of those friends was a geologist, and he noticed that these caves, as they were known we're actually mine workings and wondered what people could have been mining for. He noticed the amount of quartz that we had here and managed to

So Donna is there evidence of that later working of the mine here?

Yeah, there absolutely is. And we can have a look In those mines.

Oh good, lead the way! Donna what a lovely walk descending through that woodland and you brought me to another astonishing sight, which is a gaping cavern in the hillside with enormous oak trees hanging over it. This is a man made landscape that has become naturalised into an intriguing place, what am I looking at?

Well, you can see why this site was known as Ogaufau, the caves can't you? Because it's got it's great big gaping cave like mouth to it.

Can we go inside?

Absolutely yes.

Gosh it's dark and damp and drippy in here, isn't it? Donna, what is striking is that this is a very different quality of work to the labour we saw done by the Romans in the earlier adit, this is really quite crude and broken surface and irregular.

Yeah, in the Roman mines you could see that the walls there had almost become dressed. They were very smooth surfaces, whereas here we're blasting our way through the rocks. So we're using hand drills to create a hole and then we're using explosives to blast the way through the rock, which leaves behind these very jagged surfaces. So this is an area where we assume that they found gold because we've come out of that small narrow tunnel and we're now in a much larger space.

Donna these torches penetrate the darkness amazingly, and you begin to see the colours. These vertical striations of the natural rock and greys and ochres and umbers and sort of rusty colours. But what is quite astonishing, if I look upwards, is an iridescence, a silver sparkle. Which looks very improbable and unreal, what is that?

It's a question that our visitors quite often ask us, but amazingly, it's a fungus and the bacteria that live on the surface of the rock there. It's scientific name is Acidithiobacillus Ferrooxidans. So it's a fungus and bacteria, and it lives in a symbiotic relationship. So they need each other to be able to survive and it's surviving feeding on the surface of the rocks there.

Say the name of the name of the thing again.

Thiobacillus Ferrooxidans.

You've been practising!

That's your password to get out the mine!

Donna we've reached- We've reached a dead end. How we how are we going to get out?

So to get out, we're gonna climb our way out of the mine.

Climb our way?

Yes. So if you look right above your head, you can see that patchwork of woodwork, and that forms a handrail. So we've got a few steps leading to a hole cut out into the rock and then we can climb our way up there so are you prepared for one more adventure?

Well you lead the way, you lead the way and i'll follow, it looks rather daunting! This is a Lara Croft, Tomb Raider moment isn't it really?

Yeah, I think It's probably best not to look cause it looks worse than it is!

Have you done this before Donna?

Several times!

You're sure you know the way?

Absolutely yeah!

No look at me!

If you look back down below us-

I don't want to!

That's where we were standing!

I'm beginning to get a glimmer, a glimpse of daylight flooding into the entrance of this mine. Donna that was absolutely wonderful, memorable! The huge forces of nature and all that labour to dig those tunnels. I could have gone on exploring that all day. We're now heading downhill back towards where we started. Donna, there's more exploring to do?

Yeah, we absolutely still have loads of riddles to solve at Dolaucothi. Right from the archaeology to the geology, we don't actually fully understand why there's gold here in the first place. It's a bit of a geological anomaly.

And this is a material gold, that resonates today as something precious and valuable and fundamental to our economies and basic to our ornament and decoration of jewellery. This is something excavated, mined worked by people for more than 4000 years in this country, certainly 2000 years here from the Roman period and onwards and it started here! And what would we do without the Romans? Thank you for listening to this episode of the National Trust