Approximate location of the West Mine:
The mine straddles land to the north and south of Whitebarn Road.
Please note: the locations described within West Mine are owned by the National Trust and a private landowner. Access is only possible upon request to Derbyshire Caving Club (DCC) who organise tours. A huge thanks must go to Olly King of DCC for guiding me around West Mine in February 2023.
Although there may be limited evidence for earlier workings, West Mine was mostly excavated – for the extraction of copper ore – by the Alderley Mining Company between 1857 and 1877. Attempts were made to reopen the mine on several occasions during the early twentieth century but the copper seams were found to be almost totally worked out. The mine was originally accessed from a large opening that lay to the north-west of an open-cast quarry, the site of which is now part of Windmill Wood. This entrance was blocked up during the mid-twentieth century and the mine is now accessed via shafts sunk by DCC in 1975 and 2002.
West Mine is a self-contained entity which straddles locations to the north and south of Whitebarn Road. It was mapped by Brian Hampson, based on surveys begun in 1941, and the rather charming names for the various features referred to here were his own device.
Almost exactly one quarter of the action in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen took place within the mines underneath Alderley Edge in the central five chapters – Plankshaft, Prince of the Huldrafolk, In the Cave of the Svartmoot. ‘Where No Svart Will Ever Tread’ and The Earldelving. For many this section can be a dizzying exercise in claustrophobia and panic as Colin and Susan become lost in a labyrinth of svart-infested tunnels. That the children ended up in the mines beneath the Edge was perhaps a narrative inevitability from the point, early in the novel, when Gowther warned them:
“But when you’re up th’Edge sees as you dunner venture down any caves you might find, and keep your eye open for holes in the ground. Yon place is riddled with tunnels and shafts from the owd copper mines. If you went down theer and got lost that’d be the end of you, for even if you missed falling down a hole you’d wander about in the dark until you upped and died.”
Garner, A., 1960 (1989 edition), The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. William Collins / Lions. London. p19.
Colin and Susan did briefly explore some of the upper mine workings, such as the Devil’s Grave, on their first visit to the Edge. However, they accidentally entered West Mine whilst trying to escape from the hounds of the Morrigan at St Mary’s Clyffe. After the rescue of Firefrost the children took refuge within a cupboard, located in the kitchen, which turned out to be an elevator that dropped down a shaft into the mines. Terrified that Selina Place and Grimnir were about to pursue them, Colin and Susan ran down a long, twisting tunnel until they came to another shaft with a rope ladder suspended from an iron spike.
This feature has been identified by Olly King as Doctor’s Shaft. It should be noted that there is no known underground passage between Doctor’s Shaft and St Mary’s Clyffe – which lay approximately 640 metres to the north-east. Yet, if we allow Alan Garner a spot of artistic licence on this point, the environment that Colin and Susan encountered from this point onwards is only too real.
There are four tunnels leading from the base of Doctor’s Shaft and, spooked by movement on the rope ladder, the children dashed down a partially flooded passage which exited into a larger cavern. Olly King has suggested that Colin and Susan probably headed west from Doctor’s Shaft, turned north into a passage known as Boom Way and emerged from The Crawl into a chamber called the Grotto Fullnous Puln.
From this point it becomes a little difficult to exactly trace their movements as Garner only gave a rather general description of the underground journey:
“Tunnels entered and left the caves at all angles and levels. They turned, twisted, branched, forked, climbed, dropped, and frequently led nowhere. They would run into a cave at any point between roof and floor, and wind out onto dizzy ledges, which in turn dwindled to random footholds, or nothing at all. And the square-mouthed shafts were a continual hazard. Through some, the distant floors of lower galleries could be glimpsed, while others disappeared into unknowable depths.”
Garner, A., 1960 (1989 edition), The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. William Collins / Lions. London. pp95-96.
Eventually, Susan mooted the idea that they should only venture into tunnels which sloped upwards in a logical attempt to regain the surface. The next location which can be definitively identified from their journey is Plankshaft: “The widest shaft they had yet come upon lay before them, and stretched across its gaping mouth was a narrow plank. This was wet, and partly rotten, and no more than three inches rested on the lip of the shaft at either end” (Weirdstone, Chapter 10 – Plankshaft). With some trepidation the children nervously edged their way across the plank.
The plank itself features in several photographs in the collection of DCC but has subsequently been replaced with a modern metal bridge to facilitate better access. There is a possibility that a collection of timbers stored in the northern section of an adjacent passage called the Trail of Broken Memories may be the remains of the most famous plank in all of English literature!
On the far side of the plank the children were utterly dismayed to learn that the passage beyond dropped steeply downwards into a feature known as the Great Slide or Street of Forty-five. This was created by miners trying to resolve the problem of a geological fault in the copper-bearing rocks and was cut at a steep incline through both bedrock and marl.
Despite the angle of slope, Colin and Susan decided to press on but were further confounded at “a ledge overlooking a great void… seven or eight feet below was a lake of chocolate-coloured water, capped with scuds of yellow foam. Some yards away a bar of sand showed above the surface, but beyond that there was nothing” (Weirdstone, Chapter 10 – Plankshaft). Although they agreed to turn back, they could have been close to freedom as Fenodyree later revealed to them that: “the water is little more than a foot deep, and the way from there leads to the gate, not half a mile distant” (Weirdstone, Chapter 13 – ‘Where No Svart Will Ever Tread’).
The ledge is a feature known as Chicken’s Ladder and the lake (now drained) lay within a cavern called the Sphinx Chamber. From here, the children could then have walked along a passage named the Trail of the Dim Grey King and into the Valley of the Dawn. This is the largest space in West Mine (see header photograph) and was originally accessed from the external quarry working in what is now part of Windmill Wood.
From the ledge the children retraced their footsteps back to Plankshaft. On the return crossing Susan, who had been the more confident of the two on the first trip over, made the mistake of looking down into the deep chasm – whereupon she saw multiple pairs of eyes blinking in the depths below. This, understandably, caused a terrifying bout of vertigo which led the children to seek refuge in a dead-end tunnel.
Susan was then snatched by svarts and almost immediately rescued by Durathror and Fenodyree. After swapping tales of their various movements that day the children and dwarves began to try and reach the surface. En route they entered into a sizeable chamber: “The tunnel opened into a broad gallery; before them rose an outcrop of rock, and it was the shape of a lion’s head. Above the head the gallery stretched to a great height, cutting through other levels and caves as it went” (Weirdstone, Chapter 11 – Prince of the Huldrafolk). Here, in the Cave of the Svartmoot (also known as the Lion Chamber), they heard the gong summoning the svarts to a meeting.
The children and dwarves were forced to rapidly climb the Lion to an upper gallery where they witnessed the Svartmoot: “They were on a wide platform : far beneath lay the cave. At the back of the ledge was a recess” (Weirdstone, Chapter 11 – Prince of the Huldrafolk). From this vantage they watched as Arthog and Slinkveal released the fire-drake blood, which protected the svarts eyes from light, and ordered the hunt for the fugitives (Weirdstone, Chapter 12 – In the Cave of the Svartmoot).
Fenodyree revealed that from this point they would be unable to reach the only entrance to the mine (at the Valley of the Dawn) and must resort to the Earldelving. During the journey to the entrance the fugitives encountered a band of svarts, armed with stone hammers, whom the dwarves bested in a fight (Weirdstone, Chapter 12 – In the Cave of the Svartmoot). Such stone hammers have been recovered from other mines under the Edge and have been dated to the ancient Bronze Age workings.
Fenodyree led them to the next of their challenges: “Before them the tunnel ended in a drop : they were in the roof of a cave, and across the emptiness another tunnel lay. A broken ledge, no more than a few inches wide, and sloping outwards, ran to it along the overhanging wall” (Weirdstone, Chapter 12 – In the Cave of the Svartmoot). This can be identified as Pin Shaft, so called because of the iron spike which gave the fugitives some respite on their traverse. From here the journey took them along a tunnel to Chain Shaft – identified by Olly King as Garner’s entrance to the Earldelving:
“They were at the corner of yet another cave. Two of the three walls that they could see were like any other in the mine, rough hewn and fluted. But the third, immediately to their right, was awesomely different. Its face was smooth and grey and it shot almost vertically, like a steel spade, into the ground – or rather where the ground should have been; for at the dwarf’s feet lay a shaft, a sloping chimney of stone. And it was into this that Fenodyree was pointing.”
Garner, A., 1960 (1989 edition), The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. William Collins / Lions. London. p122.
The fugitives climbed into the feature but only made it a short way before Fenodyree stopped them again to explain: “The shaft is like a bent knee, and we are in the crook, therefore the slope down which we can climb is on the opposite side from us… If we jump from here and grasp the ledge we shall be well on our road” (Weirdstone, Chapter 13 – ‘Where No Svart Will Ever Tred’).
From here we must leave the travellers as they passed out of West Mine and into the Earldelving…
