Underground at North Skelton, the Archive was not going to hazard a guess at to what is going on in this photograph, and awaited for someone out there to tell. Chris Twigg came to the rescue with : “I believe its a Walker compressed air drill.” Presumably this would be prior to inserting explosives into the holes for blasting? Danny Plews adds: “The drill bit was at least 4 to 5 feet long and had its dangers with possible finding gas or in the case when I was down there, WATER from another old mine tunnel. When this happened the driller got a soaking – it didn’t happen to me but saw it happen which meant that we had to attempt to plug the hole – not an easy task. When this happened we started another tunnel to try and get all the ore that we could possibly extract!”
Image courtesy of the Pem Holliday Collection and others; thanks to Chris Twigg and Danny Plews for the updates.
The drill bit was at least 4 to 5 feet long and had its dangers with possible finding gas or in the case when I was down there, WATER from another old mine tunnel. When this happened the driller got a soaking – it didn’t happen to me but a saw it happen which meant that we had to attempt to plug the hole – not an easy task. When this happened we started another tunnel to try and get all the ore that we could possibly extract!