Avoca's vanishing industrial heritage

Time was when the mines around Avoca employed hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Not so very long ago, much of the countryside around here was a peculiar shade of rugged brown as a result of the quest for copper. Nowadays, however, green is the predominant colour as plant-life edges back to cloak the ravaged valleys and hillsides. And the softening process is accelerated by the State, which owns the land, sowing grass-seed or planting trees on slopes of mining waste.

Nick grumbles with dismay: 'They have bulldozed and buried everything. This is garden centre stuff,' he adds, bristling with despair as he surveys freshly installed wooden works he considers a pale pastiche of the real thing.

Anyone who wishes to look behind the picture postcard, picture perfect veneer should pencil August 20 into the diary. That is the day on which Nick presents his annual National Heritage Week stroll around mining territory. He will peel back the landscaping to tell a tale of multinational companies, engineering genius and child labour, to mention only a few of the ingredients.

A Galway native, married to a Wicklow woman, he was brought up near to the Tynagh lead and zinc mine in his native company. He studied physics at university but gravitated towards geology after finding work at Tynagh. Now retired at the age of 67, Nick made his living as a prospector, looking for gold and all manner of metals in them there hills.

His career took him around the world to assess the commercial potential of finds in Scotland, Canada and Australia. Closer to home, his main claim to fame in mineral exploration was his work around south Wicklow. The lithium deposits there continue to attract attention from as far away as China, where lithium is in demand for the manufacture of batteries. These are laurels which the Galwegian chooses not to rest on.

Instead, he prefers to devote much of his passion and energy to the study of the largely redundant Avoca, describing himself as a geologist fixated by history. Parked close to the river mid-way between Meeting of the Waters and Avoca village, he dives into the boot of his car. He emerges with a chart which illustrates the bewildering extent of the mine workings riddling the hillsides and the ground under our feet.

The chart, the result of a survey carried out in the 1950s, shows a cross-section of territory running east to west where the river flows north-south. He likens the deposits of copper, other metals and minerals here to a string of sausages on a line from Ballymoneen at one end to Kilmacoo at the other. In between are the townlands of Ballymurtagh and Ballygahan to the west of the river, Tigroney, Cronebane and Conary to the east. Each fat sausage on the string had its own network of passages dug horizontal into the earth, linked by vertical shafts.

'See that chimney,' asks Nick, pointing up the hill. 'It sits over a shaft that goes down 800 feet.' The deepest such shaft reaches close to 1,000 feet below the surface. The passages and shafts shown on the chart are all still there but they will probably never welcome human visitors again. Most are flooded and all of the entrances have been sealed up to keep the curious firmly excluded. Our guide tabled outline proposals several years ago that would have given tourists access to some of the bigger and safer tunnels but the plan never took off. So he must content himself instead with walking on the surface and picking out the remaining indicators of the herculean efforts below ground of long gone miners.

Hints that these hills may have attracted prospectors thousands of years ago in the Bronze Age are hard to substantiate. What is incontrovertible is that the metal ore extracted by the Macclesfield Copper Company in the 1780s from their Wicklow holding was made into coins. The Cronebane halfpennies, pictured right, are collector's items, considered better quality than the Ballymurtagh halfpennies minted for the firm's rivals on the other side of the valley. The mines were worked on and off for maybe three centuries up to the final closure in the early 1980s, when a Canadian-led consortium finally threw in the towel after failing to make a profit in Ireland.

'This place has more history than any other part of Wicklow,' suggests Nick Coy. 'It gave employment for 300 years and Arklow owes much of its industry to Avoca.'

The sulphur liberated by the pursuit of copper, tin, tungsten and gold, which polluted the waters of the River Avoca for decades, inspired the setting up of the NET fertiliser factory downstream, he explains. And the same sulphur was also valuable to Kynock's, the munitions manufacturers in the town, whose factory exploded so spectacularly with fatal results during the Great War.

The route of the railway running between Arklow and Wicklow was diverted inland through mining territory in the mid-19th century so that 100,000 tonnes of ore per year could be delivered to Arklow on its way to be smelted in Britain. Before that, horse drawn carts were deployed - half a tonne per cart and up to a thousand carts per working day.

The geologist turned historian is old enough to have seen Avoca in action several times when modern methods made mining safer than in Victorian times. The Canadians then in charge had the explosives and mechanical diggers which allowed them simply to dig a big hole more than 100 metres across into the hilltop without any need to go tunnelling.

The crude hole they excavated may still be seen at the top of the walk up the rutted mine road which he will follow during the Heritage Week. The massive depression is now fenced off as a sanctuary for nesting birds of prey. Peering through the wire, it is possible to make out a couple of the old tunnels (also known in mining parlance as adits), little holes in the cliff face dating back to Victorian times.

Without semtex or electricity, the miners had only dodgy gunpowder and their own muscle power to borrow by dim candlelight through the rock. Their working conditions were appalling beyond belief, required to shin down wooden ladders - up to 45 of them, each 20 feet long - for hundreds of feet at the start of each shift. Then they had to haul themselves back up into the fresh air at the end of an exhausting day, rung by rung. Massive effort was required to haul the broken rock along the adits in wheelbarrows to be relayed up to the surface.

'The deeper you go, the more the water comes in,' Nick points out, underlining that much of this subterranean activity was far below the level of the river. At least the water in the mines was good for keeping infection at bay from cuts as it was a dilute form of sulphuric acid. The acid was capable of dissolving an iron nail within six months but had the effect of preserving the timber used in the ladders and in the props that lined the tunnels. Imported Oregon pine was considered all but indestructible, capable of surviving for many decades without any need for replacement.

The work of keeping the tunnels dry and of hauling ore up into the open air was achieved in the 19th century with the assistance of powerful steam engines installed with Cornish expertise. The steam technology replaced water wheels, 50 feet in diameter, served by mill races which remain visible to those who know where to look.

'At one stage there were 2,000 people working here,' estimates Nick, who laments how little is known about the experiences of the miners which were characterised by raw effort, drudgery and misery. 'The financial records are in the National Museum but no one recorded the lives of the workers. There are volumes of social history here in Avoca - most of it never written.'

It appears that teams of men walked from Arklow, from Rathdrum and from all over the surrounding district to try their luck underground. They were supported at one stage by swarms of children, some as young as nine years of age, whose job was to break up the extracted rocks. The big kids wielded sledge hammers while the weaker ones tapped at the stone with small implements. Their Dickensian exertions made it easier to grade the rock, so that only the good stuff was sent on for smelting.

Nick Coy feels that his is a lone voice, that the county council and the Department of Energy do not share his enthusiasm: 'The largest steam engines in Ireland were here,' he exclaims, vexed that the remaining engine houses are off limits behind security fencing. 'It would be lovely to be able to take people underground - with imagination and money you could have a great attraction here.'

In the meantime, he will be conducting the annual walk from the Farrier's Inn on Sunday, August 20, starting at 3 pm.