You are looking for a magnetic micro container attached to a piece of Welsh mining history which contains a log and pencil only. There is no room for swaps or trackables.
Please keep an eye on young cachers and geohounds when looking for the cache, it is placed near a main road that can be very busy at times.
Roadside parking is available nearby, - please see the waypoint.
Extreame stealth is required as the area is overlooked by many houses and cars can approach from 4 directions, hence the 3.5 difficulty rating.
Please replace the cache exactly where you found it to prevent it being spotted by passers by.
A short history of mining in Llanharan:
Originally called Bryn-y-Cae, situated at the southern edge of the South Wales Coalfield work on sinking two shafts at Llanharan began as far back as 1873, but the work was abandoned because of financial difficulties.
The Powell Duffryn Company restarted the sinking to the Steam coal seams in 1922, South Pit was deepened and the North Pit sunk although they did not realize at the time of sinking that they had driven through a "thrust" and the same seams were being repeated 750 feet further down. employing 192 men at this work in 1923.
The shafts were situated 1,000 yards from the southern outcrop of the Coalfield, with, a 1,000 yards to the north of the shafts the east-west thrust area that made that portion of the Coalfield unworkable. The seams are so sharply tilted along the anticline set up by the south crop that the only way to extract the coal was by the horizon mining method the first time that this system had been fully employed in the U.K.
In 1935 the colliery employed 60 men on the surface and 550 men underground and produced 200,000 tons of coal.
In 1938 and 1945 Llanharan North and South pits employed a total of 855 and 775 respectively.
In 1951 a multi million pound development scheme was introduced at this colliery, and 87 men from Wern Tarw Colliery were transferred to Llanharan to help man it. But they immediately encountered difficulties in their attempts to work this geologically disturbed area, out of the seven seams planned to have been worked, only one was worked successfully.
At the time of closure in 1962 it was producing nearly 100,000 tons per year.
Good luck!
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