JAMES GRASBY : Hello and welcome to the National Trust podcast.
I'm James Grasby, a senior curator with the National Trust.
Today we're journeying deep into an ancient world at the UK's
only known Roman gold mine. Dolaucothi in Carmarthenshire,
Wales. We'll be uncovering hidden treasures and unearthing
the ingenuity of the Roman Empire. [
Speaking Welsh] Mae n bwrw glaw, mae n bwrw glaw heddiw.
It's a soft rainy day in beautiful Carmarthenshire and
I'm approaching what I can only describe as the remains of a
Roman Amphitheatre buried in ancient woodland.
What an astonishing space ground, rising on all sides.
A flat central area with a shanty town of corrugated iron
buildings and the pitter patter of this soft, pristine Welsh
rain. It is a wonderful and enigmatic place.
There's the winding shed, the shed, the sied weindio, the
gweithdy, the workshop and the sied daclu. The kitting up shed.
Now look, I think that I'm going to find my friend Donna in Here.
DONNA TAYLOR: James, croeso i Dolaucothi!
JAMES GRASBY : Donna, hiraeth has drawn me back, a sense of
longing to be back in Wales.
Now look, what gear have you got here? We're inside the dressing.
Shed?
DONNA TAYLOR: Sied daclu.
JAMES GRASBY : Sied Daclu, and what went on in here?
DONNA TAYLOR: So this is where we get kitted up with our hard
hats and miners lamps ready to journey underground.
JAMES GRASBY : I'm going to get changed now, am I?
DONNA TAYLOR: You're quite tall and we wouldn't want you banging
your head.
JAMES GRASBY : Thank you, that's very good!
DONNA TAYLOR: And then we will also get you kitted up in one of
our lamps. So if you could just hold that pack on your side.
JAMES GRASBY : Very good.
DONNA TAYLOR: And then we'll just clip the lamp onto the
front of your hard hat.
There we go. How does that feel?
JAMES GRASBY : Feel it feels absolutely Splendid.
DONNA TAYLOR: Excellent!
JAMES GRASBY : Thank you very much indeed.
There's a bit of time travel going on here, isn't there?
Because in amongst this very modern equipment is stuff that I
would go- I guess, goes back at least 100 years?
DONNA TAYLOR: And that's mainly evidence of what you'll see in
the mine yard today, so shall we leave the shed and go and have a
look?
JAMES GRASBY : Lead the way.
DONNA TAYLOR: So we are going to visit a couple of our mines and
you might be forgiven for thinking that to go underground,
we'd be heading down.
JAMES GRASBY : Yes?
DONNA TAYLOR: But at Dolaucothi we like to do things slightly
differently. So we're gonna be heading up the hillside.
JAMES GRASBY : That's perverse! Up the hillside?
DONNA TAYLOR: Up the hillside!
Well, the reason is is that we're standing at the bottom of
an open cast pit, so we've actually got to climb our way
out of this open cast pit to find the rest of the mines.
JAMES GRASBY : So we're going uphill in order to go down?
DONNA TAYLOR: Yes.
JAMES GRASBY : Right.
DONNA TAYLOR: Few steps, but it's a nice walk.
JAMES GRASBY : What a lovely spot. It's hard to imagine this
place being the centre of such an important industry.
DONNA TAYLOR: It's an amazing landscape, isn't it? So today
we've got fantastic oak woodland, part of the Celtic
Rain Forest, and so it doesn't really hint at the massive
industrial activity that would have gone on here.
So we can we've got a good view then into the valley and you can
just about make out the river Cothi down at the bottom there.
And you can also make out a collection of buildings through
the trees there.
So that's the village of Pumsaint. But it also is the
site of a Roman Fort.
So the Romans would have occupied this area from around
74, 75 AD.
And the fort would have been down right underneath where the
village is today. So the Romans would have been in control of
this area and it's where the military would have been based.
JAMES GRASBY : And this was right on the very edge of an
enormous Roman Empire?
DONNA TAYLOR: Yeah. So the Romans, I think had a shopping
list of what they wanted to get from Britain, and a lot of it is
our mineral and metal wealth.
So they would have sent scouts to find out where all these good
deposits were and then bought the military in behind them.
It took them an additional 30 years to get into Wales.
Wales was so heavily defended and one of the reasons that we
think the Romans wanted to come here is because they knew of the
gold deposits here.
So it's likely that the local people were already using the
gold deposits, maybe making jewellery and trading the gold
and then the Romans would have known that there was gold coming
out of here.
So yeah, an extra 30 years to come this far and then apply
their mining techniques here.
BARRY BURNHAM: The Romans clearly had an ability to
identify worthwhile resources.
The Roman state and the Emperor effectively owned all gold
mines, all lead, silver mines, and some of the iron mines
across the empire.
So this would have been an imperial estate more than
likely.
HELEN BURNHAM: It was relatively near the surface and it's very
likely that the gold that they found was'free gold' which would
be fairly easily processed by methods that took advantage of
the fact that gold relative to most other things is very heavy.
BARRY BURNHAM: I'm Barry Burnham.
HELEN BURNHAM: I'm Helen Burnham.
BARRY BURNHAM: At the moment, my wife and I, Helen and I are
heritage archaeology rangers. We’re the only two in Wales as
such.
HELEN BURNHAM: I met Barry when we were both students. We've
been married now for 44 years.
BARRY BURNHAM: But we've been actively exploring the mines
since 1982.
We knew that the Romans had an auxiliary Fort for 500 or
perhaps 1000 soldiers on north side of the river, about a
kilometre away. They brought with them the highest levels of
technology that they had.
They'd inherited quite a lot of that from the Egyptians and from
earlier civilisations, it wasn't as if they started from scratch.
They brought in significant amounts of water to work the
site because you can clear debris, you can use it to
process the metal that you're trying to get at.
HELEN BURNHAM: 'Free gold' is a kind of gold that sometimes
people are lucky enough to find in other parts of the world
where you can see gold and you can just pick it up.
And sometimes there are quite large Nuggets, though that's
very unusual.
BARRY BURNHAM: Most of the rest it's just hard manual labour.
The reality of the mine itself is that this is a mechanical
mine. It's driven by picks, mining tools, chisels. It's not
sophisticated in any sense. It's just hard Rock mining.
Once the material was actually mined, it would have to have
been crushed, turned into a powder, and then washed in such
a way that the rubbish was allowed to wash away and the
gold would then have been collected.
At some point in that process it would have been combined
presumably into some sort of bullion and it would have been
taken out of Britain down to the mints, probably in Rome,
possibly Leon, where it would have been turned into coinage.
JAMES GRASBY : Donna, we've come around the corner and there is a
very much more prominent opening in the hillside. I can see a
horizontal tunnel, an adit, going into the hillside.
DONNA TAYLOR: Yeah, you're quite correct an adit.
So the term adit is mining terms for a horizontal or self
draining tunnel.
This was known as ogof cau which means a a bowl or a cauldron.
So that kind of conjures the imagination a little bit.
But what we have here is we have a fantastic square tunnel driven
into the hillside that opens out into a gallery. So-
JAMES GRASBY : Wow.
DONNA TAYLOR: You ready to take a look?
JAMES GRASBY : It feels like we're entering some ritual
space, an amazing temple or something. It's like the
entrance into the underworld. Donna lead the way.
The walls are square wrought, directly, into the bedrock and
an astonishingly flat ceiling. And this is this is precision
quarrying.
This is Roman work that we're looking at?
DONNA TAYLOR: That's as far as we believe to do with the way
that it's been engineered and the technology that the Romans
had available to them.
But if you look up the tunnel, you can see how beautifully
square it is and it's very wide. And in some instances, we might
call this over engineered because when you're mining out
this bedrock, it's waste rock and you're throwing it away.
So this tunnel is- it's just too wide, really.
All around you here you can see all the scratches. So these are
all the pick marks that have been left behind by the people
that mined this out.
So if you put your hand on a pick mark there that was mined
out around about 2000 years ago.
JAMES GRASBY : That is quite astonishing. It's time travel.
DONNA TAYLOR: So you'll notice that we're walking very slightly
up hill as well.
JAMES GRASBY : Yes, a gentle incline.
Not much of one, but what was the reason for that?
DONNA TAYLOR: No, but it's enough to drain the water out of
the mine.
JAMES GRASBY : Right.
DONNA TAYLOR: So any water that's flowing into the mine
from the surface or coming through the rocks is going to be
drained out and through this nice square tunnel.
JAMES GRASBY : We've come to the end of this adit, into a into a
sort of transverse excavation, a much higher tunnel, almost a
cavern, a cave?
DONNA TAYLOR: So this gallery is known as a pillar and room
working, so we're currently stood in a room and just here we
have a pillar or a column of rock and you can see either
side, we've blocked them up now, but they're almost like doorways
and we think those would have gone through and extended out
into another room the other side.
JAMES GRASBY : Have you found any? I mean- Do you see a
twinkling bit of gold?
DONNA TAYLOR: I have found gold and then lost it within within
about an hour.
Yeah, I I was in the mine doing the mine inspection. So for
safety we come and check the mines before any visitors come
underground.
And there was a a small bit of of loose rock and and I've
managed to remove it with my hand And for some reason I
thought I bet there's gold in this, so I put it in my pocket
and when I got to back to the mine yard was speaking to my
colleagues about it.
And I looked in this piece of quartz under a microscope and
there was this smallest piece of gold and it was absolutely
beautiful.
I handed it over to my colleague to have a look and he couldn't
find it. And when he passed it back to me, I couldn't find it
either.
So I'd managed to lose it, but it was just so tiny. But there's
a saying that, you know, gold when you found it. And there
was, without question, a speck of gold in there.
JAMES GRASBY : Donna we're now leaving the gallery and heading
upwards, up this narrow companion way back into the
daylight from this underworld, this twilight world.
I'm turning my torch off and my back in this ancient woodland.
What an extraordinary tour.
DONNA TAYLOR: So we've come out of an underground working, but
we're still in a mine.
JAMES GRASBY : We're still in a mine. I mean, this is a deep
hollow again, one of those workings that you were
describing on the way in. This is all man made is it?
DONNA TAYLOR: Yeah. So we've got a trench system that runs
through here.
JAMES GRASBY : When I first met you down in the yard, you talked
about the end, really, of mining here in the in the 1940s. But
was there continuous mining going on here from perhaps the
Bronze Age period through the Roman period, right up to the
1940s?
DONNA TAYLOR: It is one of the intriguing things about
Dolaucothi, so we know that we have very early workings here,
but we're not entirely sure as to when the mining stopped.
But we do know that the mining did stop and then gold was
forgotten about. Now how can you forget about gold?
It's always been so valued, but it might be because a lot of
Roman places were known as places of evil, so we have
stories of witches and wizards which used to frequent these
mines, and the site was then referred to as the Ogaufau,
which means caves.
NARRATOR: After the Romans abandoned the mines, the mining
had been abandoned, but the mines themselves weren't.
They'd always been remembered as a place of suffering and
torment, and so these bad places attracted bad people.
An evil wizard had taken up residence in the mine.
And he hated good people.
One day, five saints were on pilgrimage to St Davids, and as
they were travelling past the mines, the skies grew black.
As the skies grew dark, the saints looked around. The wind
rose up, lightning flashed across the sky.
Wind and rain rushed around the ancient pits. The evil wizard
knew that they would never reach St Davids.
The five saints were determined to press on regardless of what
we're trying to stop them from reaching their goal.
But the evil wizard was cunning and clever. He summoned giant
hailstones that threatened to throw the saints off the road.
At this the saints had to pause. They climbed down into the old
pit, seeking shelter, but all they could find was a great
rock.
They huddled tightly against the rock, trying to shelter against
the hail, the wind, the rain.
The lightning flashed and the thunder roared around them.
And the evil wizard cackled.
He knew he had got them.
As the sky brightened and the suns rays returned, the saints
had gone and all that remained was the imprints of their
shoulders and heads against the rock.
DONNA TAYLOR: So if you want to keep your friends and your
family safe, you might make up stories to keep them out of
these dangerous places.
People avoided them, and so the knowledge of gold here was lost.
So much so that the Johnes family, who were the estate
owners were given the Dolaucothi estate by the monarchy.
Now no royal is going to give away a known gold mine. So that
does tell us that the story of gold was forgotten about at that
point.
JAMES GRASBY : So the Romans came and went, and the dark ages
as you were describing commenced.
And the mines became almost lost, certainly forgotten.
And became part of folklore and myth.
And at what point did the search for gold start again? When was
that ignited?
DONNA TAYLOR: So the Johnes family owned about 4000 acres of
the countryside around here, running up to the cothi valley,
and they had a large game estate and they would have invited
their friends to enjoy the Dolaucothi, countryside.
And one of those friends was a geologist, and he noticed that
these caves, as they were known we're actually mine workings and
wondered what people could have been mining for.
He noticed the amount of quartz that we had here and managed to
find that elusive speck of gold. And so then we have our new
phase of gold mining in the Victorian and early Edwardian
times.
JAMES GRASBY : So Donna is there evidence of that later working
of the mine here?
DONNA TAYLOR: Yeah, there absolutely is. And we can have a
look In those mines.
JAMES GRASBY : Oh good, lead the way!
Donna what a lovely walk descending through that woodland
and you brought me to another astonishing sight, which is a
gaping cavern in the hillside with enormous oak trees hanging
over it.
This is a man made landscape that has become naturalised into
an intriguing place, what am I looking at?
DONNA TAYLOR: Well, you can see why this site was known as
Ogaufau, the caves can't you? Because it's got it's great big
gaping cave like mouth to it.
JAMES GRASBY : Can we go inside?
DONNA TAYLOR: Absolutely yes.
JAMES GRASBY : Gosh it's dark and damp and drippy in here,
isn't it?
Donna, what is striking is that this is a very different quality
of work to the labour we saw done by the Romans in the
earlier adit, this is really quite crude and broken surface
and irregular.
DONNA TAYLOR: Yeah, in the Roman mines you could see that the
walls there had almost become dressed.
They were very smooth surfaces, whereas here we're blasting our
way through the rocks.
So we're using hand drills to create a hole and then we're
using explosives to blast the way through the rock, which
leaves behind these very jagged surfaces.
So this is an area where we assume that they found gold
because we've come out of that small narrow tunnel and we're
now in a much larger space.
So we believe they've been following these veins of quartz
off in different directions.
So wherever the veins of quartz are going, the miners are
following them, removing them, pushing them out through the
mines on mine carts.
So right through the mines, we would have had like a railway
track in which the carts would have run and those would have
been pushed in and out of the mine by people.
JAMES GRASBY : Donna these torches penetrate the darkness
amazingly, and you begin to see the colours.
These vertical striations of the natural rock and greys and
ochres and umbers and sort of rusty colours.
But what is quite astonishing, if I look upwards, is an
iridescence, a silver sparkle.
Which looks very improbable and unreal, what is that?
DONNA TAYLOR: It's a question that our visitors quite often
ask us, but amazingly, it's a fungus and the bacteria that
live on the surface of the rock there.
It's scientific name is Acidithiobacillus Ferrooxidans.
So it's a fungus and bacteria, and it lives in a symbiotic
relationship.
So they need each other to be able to survive and it's
surviving feeding on the surface of the rocks there.
It's incredible because without our torches underground, there
is no natural light underground, so it's able to survive in these
conditions.
JAMES GRASBY : Say the name of the name of the thing again.
DONNA TAYLOR: Thiobacillus Ferrooxidans.
JAMES GRASBY : You've been practising!
DONNA TAYLOR: That's your password to get out the mine!
JAMES GRASBY : Donna we've reached-
We've reached a dead end. How we how are we going to get out?
DONNA TAYLOR: So to get out, we're gonna climb our way out of
the mine.
JAMES GRASBY : Climb our way?
DONNA TAYLOR: Yes. So if you look right above your head, you
can see that patchwork of woodwork, and that forms a
handrail.
So we've got a few steps leading to a hole cut out into the rock
and then we can climb our way up there so are you prepared for
one more adventure?
JAMES GRASBY : Well you lead the way, you lead the way and i'll
follow, it looks rather daunting!
This is a Lara Croft, Tomb Raider moment isn't it really?
DONNA TAYLOR: Yeah, I think It's probably best not to look cause
it looks worse than it is!
JAMES GRASBY : Have you done this before Donna?
DONNA TAYLOR: Several times!
JAMES GRASBY : You're sure you know the way?
DONNA TAYLOR: Absolutely yeah!
JAMES GRASBY : No look at me!
DONNA TAYLOR: If you look back down below us-
JAMES GRASBY : I don't want to!
DONNA TAYLOR: That's where we were standing!
JAMES GRASBY : I'm beginning to get a glimmer, a glimpse of
daylight flooding into the entrance of this mine.
Donna that was absolutely wonderful, memorable!
The huge forces of nature and all that labour to dig those
tunnels.
I could have gone on exploring that all day.
We're now heading downhill back towards where we started. Donna,
there's more exploring to do?
DONNA TAYLOR: Yeah, we absolutely still have loads of
riddles to solve at Dolaucothi.
Right from the archaeology to the geology, we don't actually
fully understand why there's gold here in the first place.
It's a bit of a geological anomaly.
JAMES GRASBY : And this is a material gold, that resonates
today as something precious and valuable and fundamental to our
economies and basic to our ornament and decoration of
jewellery.
This is something excavated, mined worked by people for more
than 4000 years in this country, certainly 2000 years here from
the Roman period and onwards and it started here!
And what would we do without the Romans?
Thank you for listening to this episode of the National Trust
Podcast. If you like what you have heard please make sure to
subscribe on your favourite podcast app or visit us at
nationaltrust.org.uk/podcasts.
More information on Dolaucothi and deeper dives into our Roman
history can be found in the links in our show notes along
with information on this year's nationwide festival of
archaeology.
Until next time from me, James Grasby, goodbye