Owert Kilns - the saga continues
Over a few years I’d visited Jim’s
dig up in the field next but one to the farm and marvelled at the industry that
both he and Lionel had put into the ground. However, I did notice that they tended
to throw stuff out of the shakehole only to have it run back in and undo all
their hard work. When they had eventually given up the ghost Andy Walsh visited
the site and did his best to make it stock-proof and left.
Having exhausted all the possibilities
in Avon Pot, Sam and I were looking for a new project and I remembered Owert
Kilns, so that’s how it all began, again. Not wishing to have the whole
shakehole descend upon us we opted for scaffold, clamps and solid boarding as
we carefully remove a litany of fibre glass sheeting, aluminum bars, plastic
buckets, hardboard and chipboard almost all in various stages of decay.
Water constantly poured into the dig
from a tiny waterfall just at the west side of the shakehole and made digging
unpleasant, although Sam seemed to like having his right hand glove constantly
filling up with cold water, numpty! I decided this was not necessary and
fashioned a tub as a collector and fed the water down a pipe so we could direct
most of the unpleasantness somewhere out of the way. Digging was easy and stuff
flew out of the hole and carried up the slope to our walled depository at the
top of the shakehole, for later return when we’d finished. The removal of waste
was helped on occasion by Andy Whitney and Andy Hall but the majority was
removed by just Sam and I.
Down we went and eventually a hole
appeared and we were soon at a small passage heading roughly south-ish. The
slope down to this needed stabilising so Sam’s skill as a Waller was brought
into action and we had a nice entrance. The small passage sloped steeply
downward and needed a little enlarging and stepping. Digging out the steps led
to a small but noisy collapse of some of our wall leaving one edge hanging in
space so Sam had to slide through the small gap in our little passage and into
the small chamber below the entrance to shore everything up. A tiny bit of
persuasion was needed to make the slide through Duffy-sized but we were now at
the top of a narrow rift. Below we could see a drop but it was partially
blocked by very large boulders and a very big cobble.
We needed more scaffolding to shore
up one side of the drop as although one wall was solid the other was
undetermined. Sam did a good job of rearranging some of the rocks into place to
strengthen the loose wall but the scaffold made fairly sure it would all just
squash anyone below. By this time we’d been joined by the excellent Philip
Withnall who climbed to the surface and sawed the tubes to length, brilliant.
The next visit our nemesis, the big black cobble was dispatched by Sam thanks
to Mr Hilti and down he went to push the bottom of the rift, returning a little
whiter-faced with tales of a small Chamber of Horrors but also a small
clean-washed passage. This passage needed work to get into but looked
promising.
The surveying trip saw me attempt to
get down to the very end, quite entertaining with one useless arm but I
confirmed the existence of the Chamber of Horrors and Sam’s enthusiasm for the
small passage. However, in the intervening week our surface scaffold had moved
downward at one side lending credence to our belief that the whole north side
of the shakehole was on the move, also cracks were appearing in the turfs on
the slope, worrying is it not. We were forced to try and wall right up to the
top of the scaffold to prevent a major collapse, too late. I started to
continue our lower wall further up the side of the scaffold but was finally
thwarted by two huge plastic palettes one inside the other. Hauling them out
didn’t work as they were pinned under tonnes of earth so while Sam was on his
Norwegian Holiday, Philip assisted by myself managed to drill and saw enough
away to build the wall to a higher level.
Just as we were leaving for the night that side of the shakehole refused
to defy gravity and slumped. Fortunately, we had built a staging across the
hole with scaffold bars and wood to stop anything blocking the entrance should
something untoward should happen and it just had.
I spent three days in very wet
weather trying to beat the shakehole but it was winning as huge turfs, boulders
and earth rained down as I struggled to build a wall with continuous
gravelanches and the occasional boulder slumped into the hole.
Ray Duffy