IRELAND 1960: “COW IN THE MINE,…OR SO I WAS TOLD.”

alan skeoch

March  2018

     Science says there are no ghosts.   So would you believe folK stories told with no evidence?  Ireland… IN the summer of 1960  a lot of stories were told.

The Knockmahon Mine closed in 1879. It was not  a nice place to work…dangerous.  Miners had to climb down a series of wooden ladders in the dark to

reach the stopes far below..stopes that eventually extended out beneath the ocean.  Even so, by 1840 the mine was said to be in ‘the most important mining district in the British Empire.”  The cliffs of Knockmahon drew miners as far back at the 18th century and even deeper in the past.  Lead, silver and especially copper drew mining entrepreneurs big time in 1824, and by 1834 profits rolled in for a decade. Mining costs got higher and higher the deeper they went until the Knockmaon mine was  abandoned.   Where did  all the miners go?  They moved, all of them to North America.  Were they Irish?  No, Cornish families from abandoned Cornwall mines.

What remains?  This chimney and the ruins of the power house.  Both stand as  stone ghosts above the tiny Irish village of Bunmaon, County Warterford. What did they leave behind?  Our company in 1960 hoped they left lots of residual copper.  The local Irish hoped the mine would reopen and the region become prosperous once again but that was not to be.  There were anomalies…blips on our Turam receiving console.  But the whole area is so badly faulted that no mining company  had any prospect of profit.  So the ghost remains.

What story was  true?   THE COW IN THE MINE:

PICTURE:  Some of our crew on the Irish job.  John Hogan (left) and  Dr. Joh Stam (far right), Barney Dwan (4th from left)

We hired several others not in picture.  One handicapped teen ager just guarded the motor generator all day, not worried  about thieves but very worried about cows.

PICTURE:  Payday … includes pack  of cigarettes for each man

PICTURE:  John Hogan and i sharing a glass or Guinness in Kirwin’s pub.

The Irish job was unusual.  We were subcontracted by Dennison Mining Corporation to see if

the ancient Knockmahon copper mine had  any  residual copper.  The mine  closed  in 1879,had not been profitable

since the 1850’s but Knockmaon,in the 1840’s,  had been one of the great mines of the British Empire.  We arrived

more than a century later.   We?  Three of  us, John Hogan, a geologist employed by Dennison Mines, Dr.  John Stam, a Dutch/Canadian

geophysicist, and me, a University of Toronto student whose  job was  to climb through the brier, push aside

the semi wild hogs  with those lethal  jaws, climb the stone fences,.. Avoid the ticks that covered the cows noses…and  GET THE NUMBERS.

For many  moments  I felt like John Wayne, as in ” The Quiet Man “ which was running  forever in a Dublin movie theatre. That movie was my introduction to old Ireland.  Could the County Waterford

be anything like that?  No!  Impossible!   Wrong.  It was exactly like the Quiet Man including the Catholic priest’s concern for his  flock and  red headed colleens living

in turf covered cottages  up the boreens.

Community life was centred  around  Kerwin’s pub during the week and the local Catholic church on Sundays.  We got to know both places but spent more

time in Kerwin’s than at Mass.  Plenty of black beer with brown foam spilling down the pint glasses.  Guinness stout was new to me then but I got to know it well.  Liked it.

It was  in Kerwin’s one night that I first heard  about the lost cow and  the hidden mine entrance.

“Did you lads get that machine to give you lots of pings up above Bunmahon?”

“We call them anomalies…odd readings…I guess  pings  says it all.”

“Anything happen…anything go bump or whatever that tin box does?”

“We got something up there, yes “ Was I betraying some kind of  secrecy by saying that?

“I  know there’s  something there…all of us know.”

.

We had  12 or more employees and paid  them less than

 $2 a  day  plus  a pack of Wild  Woobine Cigarettes as a bit of a bonus.   Later I added chocolate bars.

Big man.  Egomaniac.   My boss back in Toronto, Dr. Norman Paterson, wondered  why  I needed so  many men.   I had  an answer but it was  not quite  true.

We really waned  to give some employment to the community.

“Dr. Paterson, I need  four men to cut our lines, 2 men to guard  the grounding rods from cattle and  pigs, particularly the pigs, 1 man  with the front coil,

1 record  keeper, 1  watching the motor generator, 2 men  patrolling the base line to keep the dairy cows  from eating the copper cable, 2 or 3 men to dig

trenches where Dr. Stam thinks bedrock might be interesting, and  1 man

to lift me over the stone fences  and through the thorny briar parches.  Pay all of them a total of around $ 24 a  day plus bonus…cheaper than  cost of  one man in  Canada.”

“Did you say  bonus?”

“Yes, every  pay day…every week…I give each man a  pack of Wild Woodbine cigarettes  or a chocolate bar..”

“Is this  a joke?”

“Why do  you need

a man to lift you  over the fences?”

 “Tiny fields here in  Ireland…stone  walled  fences  surrounded with dense brier hedges…impossible to get through without help…and keeps the

cattle at a distance…ticks are ugly.”

PICTURE:  DR. Stam autorized a crew to dig several deep trenches down to bed rock when a promising anomaly was found by our survey equipment.

That attracted pigs as can be seen here.  Free running pigs could be dangerous if a bore was present.

“And Dr. Paterson, sometimes  I  buy a round of beer for the lads in the evening.”

“are you running some kind  of popularity contest, Alan?”

“Suppose so…influenced by John Wayne..”

“Have you seen  the movie The Quiet Man?  Great movie. Has had an effect on me.  And it is very important to be on good terms

with the community…public relaitons.”

I  am not sure I said  all this to Dr. Paterson but I was ready to do  so.  Years  later when he asked  me to tell his  men’s club about

the Irish  job he described  me  as being   “precocious” whatever that means.

Getting the trust of the community paid  several dividends. One such was the ‘legend of  the lost cow and the mine’

PICTURE:  This may be the boreen where the mystery adit was located.

PICTURES:  Adits  to the old mine are located many place along this cliff face.

John Hogan and Jon Stam went along with our adventures.  See them above.

Those hole are ADITS…horizontal mine ecavations used for air or as entrances

SHAFTS … are vertical excavations … to get deeper.  We used the old adits and one venture into a shaft which we regretted.

Barney Dwan was my  Irish sidekick on the job.  We were about the same age and had  a  similar devil may care love of life.  At his suggestion we

spent many evenings crawling in the old  mine adits  from the copper stained  cliff faces that hung over the ocean.  Dangerous beond  belief really

for sometimes we were flat on stomachs wedging our bodies (then thin) across  a four collapse  or leaping over a narrow  shaft filled  with crystal  clear water

that had inched  up from the ocean filled workings far below.  The Knockmahon mine had been worked  under the ocean some time between 1833 and the closing in 1870.

Men had  climbed  down  these shafts  on long wooden ladders in the dark. In 1960 mine exploration any deeper than the adits would require scuba gear.

Was there any justification for our risk taking?  Not much.  Although the walls  of the adits  were bright blue and green with copper staining and occasionally pink

with what I thought might be cobalt.  One of these water filled shafts even had  an old  ladder spanning its mouth.  Was the ladder 90years old or was  it left here

by Barney and  his  palls?   I preferred the  latter but crawled across  it anyway.  At the time I thought The worst that could  happen was a  cold swim.  No danger of falling  down hundreds feet or so to the old mine working below.  Why?  Because about 20 or so feet down was water.  The old mine had been reclaimed by the sea.  So if the ladder broke, I would fall a short distance and have a cold swim.  My second thought was not so optimistic.  How could I climb back up to the adit?  Barney would have

 to get a rope.  And if we both fell?  I put that thought aside.  We were across the chasm..  Now and then we would stop and light a  candle just to be sure  there was  enough oxygen to continue.

PICTURE:A simple decision needed here.  Should we cross this shaft on the ladder provided?  Second question.  How old is the ladder?  Third question. How deep is the shaft…the old

mine working are supposed to be a hundred or more feet down.  Fifth question.  Do I see water about 20 feet down…think so.  Then the mind must be filled with water.

Sixth question.  If the ladder is rotten and I fall down there, how long will it take Barney to get a rope and haul me out?  Seventh question.  Suppose we both fall down

into that water, who knows we are in here and who would launch a rescue?   These questions seemed important at the time.

On another of these explorations  we got ourselves in serious trouble.  We were slowly crossing a large open space with piles of football sized rubble.  The space was  angled  down at about 30 degrees

and may have been a  deliberate slope that ore and rubble were sorted by hand by the miners  wives and children.  Our flashlight, however, did reveal  some kind of  iron contraption below where the cpen cavern like room narrowed down.  We entered  the slope from the adit about the mid point and were crossing it carefully to the  other side where the adit continued.  Big  mistake!  We loosened  the boulder  strewn incline and  the whole face started  to slowly slide to the hole below.  We froze.  Thoughts of death intruded.  Should  we make a  broken field run for the  adit?  Should  we wait and  hope the sliding talus  slope would  hang up on some intrusion.  Panic.  Turn around?  No time for that.  We were riding  a stony sea.  Then the movement stopped  and  we got across to the other side.  That even

shook Barney who seemed to have spent his teen age years crawling in and out of these old mine adits. “No wonder the IRA felt safe hiding in here.”   Was Barney putting me on again or was he speaking the truth?  Got so I never really knew.

PIICTURE:  Not exactly stable

“In  the  Time  of the Trouble, people  hid  out in here,” Barney said

“Time of the Trouble?”

“1920’s when  the Black  and  Tans were around.”

“‘Black  and  Tans?”

“The British.”

The dark politics of  Irish history took  on a  life of  its own suddenly.  The Time of the Trouble were years of killing by both sides. Irish  nationalists  versus British  imperialists to oversimplify.   When Barney spoke of those years he always had a  lopsided  grin…knowing with that grin that I was likely on the other side of the Union question.

“See  that old bricked  up church?”

“Abandoned?”

“Filled with Protestants in the Time of the Trouble.  They’re still in there.”  And  Barney grinned.

Sick Humour between two  22  year olds  who were not

part of those years of death and hate.  My  wise  decision to attend  weekly mass  bridged that  ideological chasm. fortunately.  Everyone  relaxed and  told funny stories about those past years.  Like the story about Kirwin’s pub.  There was the main  bar room …a low ceilinged tiny space filled  with tankards and long  black beer pulls.  Then  there was the locked room.  “What’s behind the door, Barney?”  “Don’t go  there.”  “I saw shadows moving  across the gap below the door..”

“One of the killers lives there…old man now…touched  in the head.”   Killer?  Barney inferred  that a  hatchet man for the IRA was  firmly closeted  behind  that door.  Was this  true?  I have no  idea.  Likely not for Barney had that  lob side grin when he spoke.  The village  of  Bunhahon was rife with stories like  that.   Twentieth century legends.  Perhaps  containing a  kernel of truth.   I know readers will have a hard time accepting these potentially hate filled stories.  But they are part of the folk traditions.

Which gets to the points of this article.

Barney seemed serious one day…trying not to grin.

 “Master Skeoch” he called me that for some strange reason, “remember that story about the boreen we worked across today.”

“Something about little green men, Barney”

“No, although those stories are told as well.”

‘Is that why few people crawl into the old mine adits?”

“Suppose so.  But I have a different story today…a real story…not that those other stories are not real.”

“What story, Barney.?”

“A long time ago…long before I was born…maybe back before the Time of the Trouble…after the mine had closed down …”

“After 1870?”

“Sometime after.”

“the story about the farmer that lost a cow in one of the mine openings…It happened  here in this boreen,” (this valley)

“No openings here now.”

“The farmer filled in the opening with piles of wild and rocks…still here.”

“But where?”

“right here beneath this patch of brier…story has been told again and again.”

“Do you think we could open it up?”

“We could…maybe find out if the pings in the tin box mean something.”

“Good idea, if Dr. Stam agrees, we’ll hire one of the men to dig here for a couple of days…give him a pick and shovel

and just let him work at it alone…worth a try.”

So we put a man on the job and continued marching along our grid pattern checking for anomalies.  Might have been two or three days later that we got word about the hole.  Our pick and shovel man hit the old mine entrance dead on target.  The adit … mine entrance… had filled up with water over the past century…tons and tons of water.  At some point his pick or his shovel released the pressure and a wall of muddy water exploded forth.  Scared the shit out of him.  As it would anyone working alone and sceptical.  He ran.

By the next day the adit had drained enough for us to enter.  This was not a small ventilation adit like those on the cliff face. It was a major opening.    Perhaps seven or eight  feet high and four or more feet wide.  Once the draining got down to a trickle all of us walked in with

flashlights and candles.  The walls were slick with dirty brown chemical staining.  No bright blues or greens or pinks.  Perhaps under the slime there were traces of copper but I don’t remember any.  Of  course our attention was riveted on something else.  She was there…in place…exactly as the legend said.  About 100 feet into the opening there was the cow.  Her body was wedged into a narrow point.  Hips must have got caught and she died there.  Her skull was facing into the mine, her arse facing out.  Just bones.of course.

Sceptics on our crew said that she was dumped here long ago.  She died in a field or stable and then was buried here.  Possible.  But doubtful.  The skeletons of animals along with broken furniture and piles of old bottles were dumped in the mine shafts not in the adits.  Easier to do that.  The main shaft where the old buildings still stood had a wide shaft totally plugged with garbage and dead animals.  This was different.  It had the cow exactlhyin place.

John Hogan checked the geology and did not notice anything remarkable.   I too ka few pictures of the brown slime walls the bones of the cow and a perfect collection of crystal stalactites that must have taken 90 years to form in the stillness and utter blackness  of this place.