I have received the following email from the farm owner by the copper mine and she has asked for help with her petition to save the mine and the immediate area from development. If you are interested, please get involved.



Ian


Hallo
I found your post on the Cwm Cynfal copper mine. I live in Cwm Cynfal at Cwm Farm and i am writing to ask for your help.

The Cynfal craig including the waterfall and the ravine including the area where the copper mine is located is owned by 3 brothers who live 15 miles away. They bought the land with the explicit intention of putting a hydro scheme on the waterfall. They submitted one planning application a year ago which was rejected. They have now submitted another application. I am hoping that you will write to the National Park to oppose this.
The main reason I am hoping you will oppose the scheme is that the construction of the scheme will almost certainly result is serious damage to the Cwm Cynfal ravine and may result in the destruction of the copper mine itself. They will need to build a road all down the west side of the ravine in order to construct both the pipeline adn the turbine building next to the river. That road needs to be 3.6m wide and have a construction corridor of 6m. The exisiting track is nowhere near that wide so they will have to rock-peck or blast their way down the Cwm. I am seriously concerned that any blasting could cause a catastrophic collapse of the copper mine tunnels. The route of the road crosses directly over the Hobbit Hole.

The Applicants are oblivious of the presence of the copper mine and less than entirely honest about having to construct a road at all. They are claiming they will construct the turbine house by coming along the access road to my house but that cannot happen as the road is too narrow and too overhung for the size of wagon they will need and and they have no right of access across Cwm Farm land. They know this but haven’t changed their method statement to accurately describe the construction process. They did do an acrcheological survey but the consultants failed to recognise most of the visible remains as mine and have mis-labled them quarry remains - including the hobbit hole.

At the moment there are only two of us raising objections based (among other things) on the risk to the ravine side and the copper mine and it would really help if you could contribute as they would listen toy you. There is no one who knows more about this copper mine than you do!

This is the link tot he planning application:
planning.snowdonia-npa.gov.uk/swiftlg_sn...ch%20Results%3C/a%3E
The closing date for comments is next Friday 13 December.

If you have the energy to read any of the documents then try the Method Statement and the Archaeology Assessment.

And thank you!
And any time any of you fancy exploring the mine do knock on my door - a free cup of tea is always on offer.
Best wishes and thanks - if it wasn’t for your web site and post I would never have known about the copper mine

Pat

This should be posted on aditnow and maybe the Welsh Mines Society.

I will attend to it!

Dave

planning link is crap. The planning reference is probably: NP5/59/495B


planning.snowdonia-npa.gov.uk/swiftlg_sn...%20Results%3C%2Fa%3E


Dave

draw up a petition on behalf of the club and we can all sign it if in favour ,mike murphy against the plan,
keep the mine

What about the green energy argument

keeping it as it is green making a new road will mean diesal, tarmac newmatic drills to clear the rock to get the screw in and they will be driven by a smoking generator, why damage a valley if they were that keen they would do less damage putting a wind turbine up on the hillside

madmicks wrote:
Where do you think Liverpool gets its water from.
The trweryn village was evacuated and the whole valley flooded.
Just saying

Ignoring the green-ness (or otherwise) or whether anyone in Liverfool uses water......


Bick, David Ewart (1982), The Old Copper Mines of Snowdonia. Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing ISBN: 0906885027

Page 104 refers to John Robertson & Partners of Sunderland as the owners and Cynfal Mining Company employing eight or ten men below ground. It also mentions The Geologicl Survey (this will be one of the volumes of 'Memoirs of the Geological Survey, Special Reports on the Mineral Resources of Great Britain but I've not checked exactly which yet) referring to a big pocket of copper ore worked at Cwm Cynfal.

There are also a couple of other geological references listed in Jeremy Wilkinson's Gazeteer and it's possible Dave Linton has looked into those.

Does anyone know of any other references that can be used to question the validity of the Archaeological Survey part of the planning application? They clearly made little effort to look at the mining having dismissed it's significance based solely on it not being recorded on maps. It is easy to show examples of things missed from maps - I was surveying a limekiln recently that shows on pre-OS maps in 1760, shows on First Survey OS from 1830's, disappears from maps for 150 years and is shown again on current Mastermap. The kiln wasn't removed in the intervening time!

Documented evidence from multiple sources will be far more effective than more general emotive objections.


edit:
Whilst multi signatory petitions can be effective the Planners will likely see multiple messages with differing wording as more indicative of objection rather than 'organised objection' (whereby it's easy to get people to sign without them actually having a real interest).
I presume all the farceblog/instaflam/twatter users have been plastering their objections all over those?

Also, should this be in public rather than private Ian?

ILT wrote:

Fair point - I have shifted it

I am further confused on reading the documentation:

From the ecology report submitted:

"1.0 INTRODUCTION
The owners of Cwm Farm, Cwm Cynfal, Llan Ffestiniog wish to construct a
run-of-river HEP scheme on the Afon Cynfal, the Intake a little above the main
Rhaeadr y Cwm."

Pat lives at the farm and is objecting to the PA? The ownership scope shown on the map doesn't include the farm itself (not that it necessarily would have to show that as it falls outside the development area).

Wouldn't change my opinion that the plan should be rejected due to the sub-standard archeological report. Mis-interpreation of the surface remains and no mention of the underground workings is not really acceptable. It has implications for historical significance and H&S during proposed excavation.

deleted

Ian,

can you PM me the email address and surname (if known) of pat - Dave Linton (of WMS) is going to put in an objection.

Cheers,
Dave

Done

DaveT wrote:
Oh no he's not!

In response to an email from DaveT I've put together information about the mine and some possible specific grounds for an objection for the WMS committee to act on and make a representation to SNPA if they so wish.

I've done it this way because I think a representation from WMS as an organisation should carry more weight than one from just an ordinary WMS member.

Dave

Ramble -

A while back, in our Councils local newsletter, a lady asked for help in objecting to the 'thinning' of 2000 trees in the valley on the way to Bryn Celyn/Milwr campsite place. Needless to say, I was a 'bit busy' so did nothing.

Having been there recently, my inaction will be to my eternal shame as the chopping looks like total devastation, it's awful!

So, lesson learnt, I was wondering Dave L. if you'd consider putting your 'pointers' on the forum so if anyone wants to write about Cwm Cynfal, they can send an individual letter as ILT suggests because they definitely carry more weight than a petition?

Thanks either way

Shan

Photies of Bryn Celyn:









Just some slight thinning!

shananna wrote:
I agree with Shan that individual representations carry more weight than petitions and I would prefer not to make an internal WMS document public.

I think a better approach is for individual representations to focus on different aspects of the scheme. The WMS response will raise specific concerns about the impact of this scheme on mine itself and the possibility of contaminated ground as a result of mining operations. Ms Thynne has put together an eloquent argument on behalf of the landscape and the ancient trackway and the damage that would be caused to these aspects by the construction phase of the scheme. However, having said that, Ian does have a copy of my information for the WMS committee, so if you feel you need to see it I suggest you approach him.

Other approaches might be

• - to look at the installed electrical capacity of the scheme and make an estimate of how often this output would be achieved in practice (possibly not very often)
• - to estimate what the effect of the abstraction of water would be on the appearance of the waterfall.

tohatchacrow.blogspot.com/2014/02/hydro-...atkin+path+waterfall provides some interesting reading (with further links) with regard to the hydro electric scheme that was installed in Cwm Llan by the National Trust and which has taken some fo the flow from the waterfall visible from the Watkin path.

Dave

Had an email from the lady concerned this morning .....



Hi Ian - I have jusst read the thread - it is all hugely helpful and I am so grateful - and releived. Thank you. And if anyone does come to have a look the offer of tea still stands. If it were accessible by an untrained old lady I would love to have a look myself I have always been fascinated by caves and tunnels and don’t mind getting wet. But today is slated to be seriously wet so probably not wise!
Regards
Pat

I visited the site today in fairly grim weather and found the adit about 20m below the tramway and almost in line the the surface shaft (described as a 'quarry scoop' in the archaeological report). I think the report may have deliberately chosen this term to avoid highlighting mining features which might be problematic for the project - certainly missing an adit in the vicinity is a bit of a giveaway...

The adit mouth has a narrow path running in front of it and then the ground falls away vertically to the river below. There is spoil on the slope down to the river and there may be other mine features concealed which would not be visible without recourse to ropework. The adit heads on a bearing of 310 degrees magnetic into the country rock for about 29m and ends in a collapse. There are a couple of side passages; one 22m from the entrance is about 9m long which ends in a forehead; The other 26.5m from the entrance is about 2m long and seems end at a collapsed shaft. The mine passages are about 1.5m high and about 1.2m long. I will try and post a survey later. The mine seems a bit shorter than Bick's book notes so maybe some has been lost to collapses and I couldn't find any of the described rises.

Grid refs:
Surface shaft hole: SH73594 41645 alt 322m
Adit: SH73630 41633 Alt 304m

There were two lesser horseshoe bats present in the mine and these were undisturbed. It may well be that there are other bats, like pipistrelles, lodged in cracks but I didn't look to avoid disturbance. The floor is wet and so no bat droppings were obvious.

I have posted some photos below (more on aditnow), some are rotated and one caption is wrong. I couldn't find a way of fixing this - maybe I am just being thick - PM if there is a way for me to edit/rotate or delete them!

I think there are serious issues about building a roadway above the mine. Given the passages and stopes are probably close to the surface then there is a real possibility of collapse, but a bigger problem is that of pollution.

The surface has remained undisturbed for years and so any water percolating through the workings will have leached out any copper salts in its path many years ago when no-one cared. If work disturbs the surface then the hydrology will change and the water will almost certainly find new routes through and will leach out other areas. This will add a heavy metal load which the river hasn't experienced for many years. Given NRW are seeking to clean up rivers to reduce metal pollution then I cannot see them agreeing to work which may result in new pollution of a fairly clean river.

Dave

Aggh! some of the photos are rotated. I had the same problem on aditnow. Is there an easy way to fix this?

Dave