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Worsely Delph is an area of beauty and also here lies a story of how Coal and Sandstone, (both linked to each other) and common to this area, worked together to see an enormous underground canal system being built as an aid to the coal mining process.
The location your GPS will bring you to here is an area of great beuaty, however it hasn't always looked like this, centuries ago this spot was a heavily worked sandstone quarry, as you will see there is a huge sandstone cliff left behind from these days gone by.
Many years later when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing and the demand was high for Coal to power all the steam powered machinery, lots of the land nearby was being heavily mined for Coal, one such group on mines were The Duke of Bridgewater's mines, the Duke had travelled to France to see the mine systems and canal's there and he had decided that a similar system was to be built here in Lancashire to help transport the huge amounts of extracted Coal from the mines, one of the problems with the Duke's mines was that that they suffered from persistent flooding caused by the geology of the Irwell Valley, which is permeable to rainwater.
The Duke needed 2 things, a way to drain the flooding mine's and a way to link his mines to the Canal being built at Worsley to Salford (The Bridgewater Canal)...
The solution was found in the form of local sandstone, or rather the removal of it, the Duke decided that the soft sandstone between the mines and the start of the new canal would be tunelled and a large network of underground canal tunnels be built, this would mean that his coal could be brought efficiently to the main canal, and his mines could also drain into these tunnels keeping his mines free of water, genius !
The Underground Canal or "Navigable Level" as it was known, starts at the Delph at Worsley and runs north westward under Walkden and Little Hulton to Dixon Green. The four levels and numerous side branches give a total length of almost 52 miles. Work started in 1759, small teams of miners cutting the rock by hand, with pick, shovel, hammer and drill. By 1770 they had reached Walkden and Buckley Lane by 1801. For many years over 100,000 tons of coal a year were brought out through the underground canal, and it continued to be used for this purpose until 1887. It then served as a drainage mechanism, water being pumped into it from the mine workings until the closure of the last pit in the area, Mosley Common, in 1968, made it redundant.
The only visible sign of the canal is right here - look for the two entrance tunnels at the base of the Sandstone cliff' behind the gates lie 40 miles of underground canal !
You will also notice both here and locally along the Bridgewater canal that the water has been stained bright orange, odd you may think, the reason for this is that since the mines closure the water is still draining through the old underground canals as it designed to, this however is depositing large amounts of Iron oxide into the water here and is now the subject of a multi million Pound clean up operation.
The Duke is said to have spent nearly a quarter of a million pounds on his great canal ventures, which later brought him an annual income of £80,000. But the reward was small compared with his simple joy in bringing cheap coal to the poor. What wealth his canals created in Lancashire cannot be estimated.
About coal & sandstone, and how they are linked together:
Most of our coal was formed about 300 million years ago, when much of the earth was covered by steamy swamps. As plants and trees died, their remains sank to the bottom of the swampy areas, accumulating layer upon layer and eventually forming a soggy, dense material called peat.
Over long periods of time, the makeup of the earth's surface changed, and seas and great rivers caused deposits of sand, clay and other mineral matter to accumulate, burying the peat. Sandstone and other sedimentary rocks were formed, and the pressure caused by their weight squeezed water from the peat. Increasingly deeper burial and the heat associated with it gradually changed the material to coal. Scientists estimate that from 3 to 7 feet of compacted plant matter (peat) was required to form 1 foot of bituminous coal.
This was formed as long ago as 400 million years ago in a period which we refer to as the 'Carboniferous period', Coal is called a fossil fuel because it was formed from the remains of compacted vegetation as mentioned above . It is often referred to as "buried sunshine," because the plants which formed coal captured energy from the sun through photosynthesis to create the compounds that make up plant tissues. The most important element in the plant material is carbon, which gives coal most of its energy.
There are FOUR different types of Coal, and there are FIVE major groups that Sandstones fall into based on their mineralogy and texture.
To claim this cache and also to show a level of geological education please answer the following questions by email (and not in your logs)
1. name the FOUR different types of Coal.
2. Name TWO of the major Sandstone groups
3. What colour is the large Sandstone cliff ?
4. Post a photograph of you or you GPS at the information board with the large Sandstone cliff in the background.
At the information board you will find much more information on the mines, their workings, the people that worked them and how they were worked, along with a map of the system, you may have to look elsewhere to answer some of the required questions, hopefully you will learn something about our Earth in the process.
PLEASE NOTE: I receive a very high number of Earthcache emails, I can’t reply to them all otherwise I’d be doing nothing else all day, as has always been the case there is no need to await a reply from me regarding your answers…. However due to numerous people thinking they can just log these caches without emailing any answers, and/or completing the required tasks these will be picked up, and the logs will be deleted without further communication. To facilitate this Please email your information either before, or AT THE SAME TIME OF LOGGING THE CACHE, Thanks.
I hope you enjoy your visit.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Gur bayl pyvss sbe zvyrf !!