There's Manganese in Them Thar Hills! Traditional Cache
There's Manganese in Them Thar Hills!
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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A short walk (7 minutes) from a public car park by the Well of the Lecht. Boots advised but on a level track.
Well, it does not have the same sort of ring as "There's Gold in Them Thar Hills" but Manganese is exactly what was mined here in the early 1800's.
At the head of the Conglass a vein of Manganese containing 20-40% iron runs for a distance of three miles along a fault. From 1736 to 1739 this was worked for Iron Ore by the York Buildings Company. One of the Company’s operations was the purchase and floating of timber down the Spey. They looked to other enterprises and the manufacture of Iron was considered. However, fuel other than peat was scarce in the district and this necessitated the transport of the Iron Ore on pack horses over the river Avon at Fordmouth to Culnakyle in Abernethy where it was smelted using wood. To produce “Stradoun Pigs”. This phrase in the company papers caused historians some confusion as it is the old name for Strathavon. It was soon evident that the distance that the ore had to be transported made the scheme unviable and the operation collapsed.
In 1841 on the initiative of a local man, the mine was reopened for the extraction of Manganese. For the first year the Duke of Richmond & Gordon kept the business in his own hands employing 12 men to dig and 15 boys to crush the ore. Thereafter the production was put in the hands of a Newcastle firm and a mill, the current building, was erected to process the ore, probably in 1842.
There were two pairs of wheels, in the mill, one being 25 feet in diameter and another weighing a ton. These were made in Aberdeen and had to be brought across the Lecht. Apparently the local minister’s bull had to be used to assist the horses in pulling the wheels up the Lecht but sadly this was also to be a short lived venture.
Mining continued for six years with the shaft reaching a depth of 85 feet. £1 per ton was paid for carting the material to Speymouth where it was shipped to Newcastle for use in bleaching. However, the discovery of new bleaching agents and the availability of cheap Manganese from Russia brought the price down (from £8 to £3 per ton) to such a level that the mine, which had employed 63 people at its peak, was forced to close.
The building was substantially restored and re-roofed in 1983 by Moray Council. Much of the information above comes from "Tomintoul, its Glens and People" by Victor Gaffney.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Oruvaq Vasbezngvba Obneq.
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