lead mining – The Potwell Inn

Captured by the spirit of a place

These lead mining rakes could go back to Roman times

Yesterday we drove back from Cornwall. It’s just over 200 miles to the most southerly point of the UK and with the help of a great deal of EU money it’s either a motorway or improved dual carriageway almost all the way down to Penzance. Even with the B road connections at both ends of the journey we can still do the trip – which used to be something of an adventure – in not much over four hours. I’m not a great fan of long journeys on motorways. They seem to lack any sense of where you actually are and for all their rapidity you can still sit in a traffic jam for half an hour while a couple of blokes dig out a flooded drain, negating any time saving. Anyway what’s so important about speed? To me, the feeling of boarding a plane in cold and rain and leaving three hours later it in fierce sunshine and blistering heat is a bit deranged. I once helped an old friend to move some beehives on to the heather on Exmoor and as we drove back we got stuck behind a tractor. “Oh good” he said, “I love it when we have to slow down”.

Anyway, as we came into Somerset yesterday the satnav chuntered away about delays on the M5 (there are always delays on the M5) and suggested an alternative route. I’ve never done it before but yesterday I thought – let’s give it a go and see what happens. So we followed the instructions and minutes later we entered the real world after three hours of tooth grinding boredom. The new route took us across the top of the Somerset levels by Brent Knoll which I’d never seen so close before, and onwards, passing a view of Cheddar Gorge which showed it off to perfection and then to the north of Blackdown passing Rickford Rising where the rain that falls on Blackdown emerges after travelling through the limestone rocks. Past the bottom of Burrington Combe, and into the villages of Blagdon, Compton Martin and West Harptree before crossing the reservoir and into Bishop Sutton. If we had any sadness at leaving Cornwall, this was a serendipitous reminder that many of our happiest memories are vested in the Mendip Hills.

I fell in love with the Mendips when I was seventeen and was introduced to caving by being taken down Swildon’s Hole. It was an awesome experience and emerging cold and wet after hours of scrambling through the cave the first breaths of Mendip air were always sweet. Madame never took to it and so my underground adventures were curtailed, but before we got together I would go up to Blackdown with my closest friend Eddie and explore the easy caves with – occasionally – reckless abandon. Our biggest problem was getting someone with an interest in getting cold wet and muddy who also had a car and was prepared to take us. It was rather like the inevitable compromises that aspiring bands have to make in seeking a half-decent bass player. Luckily, Madame liked walking up there and once we’d got an old Morris 1000 pickup she grew to enjoy hunting for plants and fungi; so we’ve thrived on Mendip air for many years.

I love Mendip, I love Cornwall, in fact I love almost anywhere with a complicated and even ancient industrial history that’s been overgrown by time. Although there’s almost no trace of it now, I was born on the edge of the Bristol coalfield. There was an elderly retired miner just up the street and I can remember passing the open cast mine at Harry Stoke when it was still open. Eddie and I used to play around the capped pithead of Parkfield colliery near Pucklechurch and the local hospital was named after Handel Cossham an unusually kindly mine owner, lay preacher and benefactor so, I suppose that laid the foundation for my inner landscape. My interest in plants that can survive in post industrial landscapes was born, like the passion for the old dramways (notice the soft mutation you linguists!) – in childhood. The moment I find one of these places I feel at home – whether here in Bath, or on Mendip or in Cornwall – I know where I am. Perhaps that’s why I love South Wales and its people.

I don’t know if all this explains how the Mendip Hills captured me, but the fascination wasn’t something I picked up late in life; it was there from the earliest days and I only had to stumble into it, almost by accident, to find myself there; to feel integrated (if that makes any sense at all). So here are some photos of the Mendips, of Velvet Bottom (who could resist that name?), Longwood valley, Black rock quarry, of high Mendip and Priddy above Swildon’s Hole across to Blackdown and Crook’s Peak which you’ll recognise as you blast down the M5 south of Bristol. Trust me – the walk up there beats arriving anywhere ten minutes quicker.

A Mendip wordfest!

Where else in the world could you get the sheer sensual pleasure of writing “buddle pit”; “Velvet Bottom”; and “swallet” in the same sentence? That’s a rhetorical question because there’s no other correct answer except Charterhouse, a tiny hamlet in the Mendip hills, surrounded by what’s called gruffy ground -an area that’s been surface mined for lead and occasionally copper since Roman times if not before that. The names themselves have a vaguely erotic undertone, like West Country soft-porn – unless, that is, you’ve actually been there; and if you’ve been reading this blog for any time you’ll know that it’s one of my favourite places on earth.

So today we decided to celebrate the late autumn and early winter by going for a wander down the valley. It’s an extraordinarily rich environment. Years ago we took the boys for a walk there and spotted two of the biggest adders we’d ever seen – sunning themselves at the bottom of the shallow pit in the photo at the top. This pit, and others further down the valley are the buddle pits where the pounded lead ore was left to settle – the heaviest and richest falling to the bottom. Obviously a pretty dirty and polluting process, and a new sign board near the best preserved dam describes how an angry mob from Cheddar came up and destroyed some of the head works because the polluted water had travelled underground and was emerging in Cheddar where it was killing the fish. The story of pollution – painfully familiar today – didn’t end in Victorian times because not so long ago the residents of Shipham, nearby, were told not to eat produce from their gardens because of residual cadmium pollution from the same group of mines.

Of course this marginal post-industrial landscape is a paradise for plant hunters and is, nowadays, a great place to find some rare plants. Today we watched three Buzzards circling beneath a mob of agitated seagulls which had been enjoying the muck spreading in one of the fields above; but not much by way of wildflowers apart from a few brave Red Campions huddling down in the sheltered pits.

But there’s never a day when you don’t learn something interesting up there, and today it was a lesson in pteridology – ferns. I’m quite new to fern ID, and so I’m still at the disambiguating stage. Bracken is pretty easy, but down in the valley today it was accompanied by almost equal numbers of Common Male ferns. In summer and from a distance the way to tell them apart is that bracken just spreads untidily whereas Male Fern grows in scruffy but obvious shuttlecocks. Today we could see that the bracken in winter dies back to a familiar pale brown, whereas the Male fern turns almost black as it dies back. You can see it quite clearly in the photo at the top, as you can equally see that some kind of banding is going on with the Bracken and Male Fern each having their own preferred spot. All these clues add up towards an instinctive recognition of the jizz of a species. Elsewhere, and all the way down the track, we could see where badgers had been scraping the grass back looking for something to eat.

We stopped and ate a sandwich at Black Rock quarry and then strolled back up rather more quickly as an early sunset was likely under the thick cloud. A nice walk.

You’ll know where we are if you’ve been following!

Yes – of course we’re back on Mendip but this time just above Velvet Bottom because today we thought we’d explore the Ubley Warren and Blackmoor nature reserves. This is such a unique environment that it comprises getting on for ten nature reserves, some of them SSSI’s (sites of special scientific interest) and all of them with a handful of rare and nationally rare plants.

You’ll see that the ground well and truly deserves the local description of “gruffy” – that’s to say thoroughly worked over by lead (and possibly silver) miners since Roman times. These deep cuttings are known as rakes and the spoil heaps, although mostly no longer bare, are a specialized environment for plants tolerant of heavy metal contamination.

Having found the Spring Whitlow grass – Erophila verna in Velvet Bottom a couple of weeks ago I was keen to see if we could find another specialist called Spring Sandwort and so we concentrated on likely looking ground – all to no avail because I think we were a bit too early.

Anyway, we did find a rather knackered Early Purple orchid (Orchis mascula) snapped off at the bottom of the stalk – possibly by a marauding dog – and then as we carried on looking through the list of likely/possible rarities we came across Dwarf Mouse Ear – Cerastium pumilum – which is nationally scarce, and also Alpine Pennycress – Noccaea caerulescens which is similarly rare. And if that sounds either lucky or clever I’m reminded of a story I heard about a very well known local drystone waller who was asked how much he charged. He answered that it was £100 a yard – at which his questioner backed away, saying it was a lot to pay for a load of stones. Well, he said, it’s a pound for the stone and ninety nine for knowing what to do with it! My luck today owed everything to the research I was able to do before we even left the flat, and I contributed nothing at all to the incredible databases and local floras that showed me exactly where to look. As per Mark Twain; it’s 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.

The only downside to a delightful morning were the bags of dogshit abandoned almost everywhere we went – come on you retards – you’ve already picked the disgusting, slimy (and warm) mess, up. Just take it home for goodness sake!!!

All of which ranting brings me back to an often visited question – “does the Potwell Inn really exist?” Well yes it does – in one sense only; because its only physical manifestation is the campervan (called Polly) in which we can close the door against the Idiocy. But it principally exists in the form of a conceptual framework that gives me just about enough head space to survive. The Potwell Inn is the place in my head where poetry and art jostle with spirituality, green politics and where walking and botanizing or looking out for living things are not merely allowed, but encouraged. The Potwell Inn is a space in which the gentle domestic arts of growing and cooking and eating together and building community are not treated as a bunch of hippy idealism or even communist infestation.

So the Potwell Inn hereby permanently bars the cretinous bunch of sociopaths, adulterers, drug abusers, liars, fantasists and thieves in the government, along with all their media supporters, lobbyists, climate change deniers and Russian backers who abuse our intelligence day by day. They should not enter the premises because they will not be served, and if they persist they will be sent to the end of the nearest pier where they can parade their meagre comic talents before an audience of stuffed weasels. This is the only way I can stay sane; by carving out a small space where I can grow to be as human as is possible for me and the people I care about, by creating an alternative to our etiolated spiritual and moral environment which sucks all possibility of creativity out of the air we breathe.

The Potwell Inn is a challenge; a one fingered salute to polluters, poisoners and to the entitled. The Potwell Inn is a refuge; a retreat house and a portal. Everything that happens here is true; but “here” can pop up anywhere – wherever the Potwell Inn sets its foot on the ground. Even if that ground happens to be an old slag heap, buddle pit or mine tip.

Gruffy – 2000 years of history in a footpath.

If Rodway Common was the place that fired me up as a child, this is the landscape that captured my imagination as a teenager – and I’m sorry if my attachment to these rather gloomy, post industrial places offends, but there’s a big chunk of my imagination invested out here.

I came to Charterhouse, Priddy and Burrington Combe not to explore what was on the surface but what was underneath it. I was lucky enough to get a job at the university as what was known as a “Junior Photographic Technician” – it was the kind of work an intern might get these days but there, aged seventeen, they sent me on a course to train as a technical photographer, handed me a very beautiful Leica and a darkroom, and pretty well let me get on with it; calling on me to photocopy; photograph prospective students; and capture whatever else needed recording by the lecturers and post-grads. There was a fabulously well equipped workshop run by a group of oddball technicians whose job it was to turn research proposals into bits of aluminium and electronic apparatus; and Steve was an enthusiastic caver (potholer if you’re from the north, or speleologist in America, I think), who soon took us out with him and his friends .

One of the blocked swallets in Longwood Valley

So this part of the world was the place we came to to learn about caving, using what would now be thought of as completely archaic equipment. The only way of getting a wetsuit was to make your own – which I eventually did, but my gluing of the joints was a bit wayward and it was massively tight in some places and flapped about in others making it both restrictive and inefficient at the same time. The experienced cavers often used electric miners lamps with lead acid rechargeable batteries, but we mostly kicked off with carbide lamps which were smelly, unreliable and occasionally explosive, boiler suits and black helmets that often got soft in wet caves. Ignoring the flora altogether we would crawl and slither down passages that could be very wet or very muddy; soak up the (tall?) stories of exploration and daring by the older cavers and push ourselves to the absolute limit. Perfect fun for teenage boys in fact. If there was a hole in the ground, we wanted to go down it and looking back, we took some hideous risks. My greatest friend Eddy and me had spent holidays playing in the abandoned flues and tunnels in the brickworks so extending our range to natural holes in the ground wasn’t such a great step.

So by the time Madame and me got together I knew this part of the world underground much better than above. It was here that I first heard the term gruffy ground – a miners word for the way in which the landscape is pitted with trial pits and worked out rakes. What I hadn’t thought through at the time, is that these beloved and isolated places were the relics of nearly 2000 years of the industrial extraction of lead. You can see where I’m going here – this landscape had my name written all over it.

Yesterday we waited for the rain to subside and decided to drive up to Charterhouse – less than twenty miles away in the heart of the Mendip Hills. These days it’s a popular place for walkers and there were maybe twenty cars parked above Velvet Bottom, and so we parked next to the Field Studies Centre and walked down to the entrance to the nature reserve. If you were new to this place, you might wonder where the footpath surface came from. It’s shining black and glassy, like obsidian, and it’s slag from lead smelting which began with the invasion of the Romans in the first century, but most of which was produced during the industrial revolution when this must have been a stinking and polluted industrial wasteland. So the first thing about this landscape is that – quiet and beautiful as it might be today – the pollution levels are still so high that it has its own unique flora of heavy metal tolerant plants. Lead, nickel and cadmium levels are so high that tree growth in many areas is inhibited, and gardeners in Shipham just down the road, have been warned not to grow vegetables in their gardens.

Yesterday, though, under a cloudy but clearing sky, the overwhelming first impression was of a very Mendip silence. With Bristol Airport almost out of action (marvellous) the only sounds were wild sounds; of the wind, grasses and trees and of the birds. Up on the ridge in the photograph, a noisy bunch of rooks were enjoying themselves in the air. The second impression was the smell of the sea, of the Bristol Channel, sweeping in from the southwest bearing the scent of salt water and seaweed – the closest we’ll get to the sea this year, I fear.

The plan had been for me to do some grasses while Madame looked for butterflies (she had more luck than me). If you ever ran away with the thought that I knew something about plants, now’s the time to warn you that I really don’t. Within a dozen steps I realized that my carefully researched exploration of meadow grasses didn’t fit. This is the craziest flora. Later, after we got home with me licking my wounds, I discovered that the mixed up flora is the glory of this place. Due to the nature of the underlying soils, there are acid loving plants growing very near to calcifiles and marshy ground specialists. There were old friends but more total strangers, and plants that I knew from elsewhere suddenly popping up as if they belonged there. .More from the British Geological Survey here. It’s the botanical equivalent of the favela – absolutely gripping.

So we wandered slowly down Velvet Bottom (who could resist a place with a name like that?), and found the gated entrances to a cave system discovered long after I gave up, and which turned out to be the fourth deepest cave in the country. It was here we came with the boys once, and watched a couple of adders basking in the sunny heat at the bottom of one of the depressions. The valley deepens and becomes rockier as you descend, and then just before you reach Black Rock nature reserve and then Cheddar Gorge, there’s a footpath that takes you back up the Longwood Valley – another environment altogether, but still bearing the remains of industry beneath the vegetation because water was taken from here to feed the washes in Velvet Bottom. Nowadays it’s yet another nature reserve containing more locked potholes; one of them in particular prone to sudden flooding. Longwood Swallet has a reputation for taking lives.

Until this point there wasn’t much butterfly action; some whites and meadow browns; a skipper which I took a rather bad phone camera photo of; a small blue – too far away to identify properly. Then. suddenly a silver washed fritillary flying high and gliding down to feed on a bramble, then – joined by a second – doing a bit of an aerial display, seemingly unconcerned by our presence and this time I did manage to get a slightly better photo. Acid specialists, calcifiles, marsh specialists and now a broadleaf woodland dweller. If ever there was a ‘phone a friend’ place this is it! We did a field trip with a couple of county recorders leading, near here a couple of years ago and it was pretty inspiring. I must try and persuade them to lead another one on our yesterday walk.

We walked less than five miles altogether and yet what a combination of environments – I could hardly sleep for excitement last night. Mercifully it’s raining again so the allotment won’t need watering today. I need to go back to the textbooks. Oh, and isn’t it good to see that even this landscape could recover from human exploitation.