Luxulyan Valley Mining Heritage part 2

We returned to the Luxulyan Valley to complete the Heritage Mining Earthcache, choosing to park in a different place to avoid the extremely narrow roads to the Black Hills carpark where we parked yesterday. (We're sure that road must be the narrowest in England! Barely wide enough for a car). It also meant we could do another cache at the other end of the valley.


There was so much to explore:-


Tunnels...






...and amazing brickwork.










Streams....




... bridges and waterfalls.

We then reached the china clay dry. This is where clay slurry was dried before being sent to factories to be used in the china and paper industries. 






We saw the furnace, the dries and the stack which drew the hot air through underground pipes below the dries.

The stack

Walking along the dry,
with the stack in the background

The dry was working until 1965 and is in quite good shape considering it was abandoned 45 years ago, you are still able to walk through it and have a good look around. That really helped us understand how it worked.


All around the site were wild strawberries- surprising as they weren't many in the rest of the woods.

Once we completed the earthcache we went searching for another and ended up following a puzzle cache leading us along bit by bit. We climbed high into the woods, passing some very verdant lush rock shelves/cliffs. It reminded Sean of the jungle in the Indiana Jones films...


 










We came across this spectacular tree.










We found the cache and came across our favourite ever signature item- this Time Lord card- Dr Who? 

 This valley is fantastic, we will definitely be going back...


Until next time
Gillian