When you stand next to the Cornish pumping house and peer through the chain link security fence into the gaping chasm below you called Martha Quarry then there’s no doubting that someone really wanted the gold down there. Gold was discovered here in 1878 by two prospectors, John McCombie and Robert Lee, who decided that the gold was not present in sufficient enough quantities to make commercial mining operations worthwhile and promptly abandoned their claim. This would turn out to be potentially the worst decision they both would ever make in their whole lives. The following year a new prospector took on the claim which he named Martha, after one of his family members, and, in short, Martha mine is now the most important gold mining site in the whole of New Zealand.
The area now produce 100,000 ounces (2.83 tonnes) of gold and 750,000 ounces (21.26 tonnes) of silver every year. With the current gold price of NZ$2,209.99 (£1,154.61) per ounce this place oozes more money than you can shake multiple sticks at and the gold price just keeps inexorably reaching dazzling new highs every week at the moment. As I was gazing awe struck at the tiny looking enormous dumper trucks in the quarry far below it’s quite possible that a debt scare in Italy or a jobless rate increase in the US was silently and invisibly adding millions of dollars on the value of the land below my feet just in the few minutes that I was standing there, crazy as.
(Marth quarry, that's the bottom you can see at the bottom there.)
Talking of 'crazy as', the Cornish pumping house didn’t used to be sited where it currently is. Its original location, some three hundred metres away, was at risk of subsidence from abandoned underground workings and plans to extend the quarry would have engulfed the building. Being a listed building the quarry owners had a duty to preserve this historic structure and the best course of action was to literally move it out of harms way, but weighing in at 1,840 tonnes this was no mean feat. The move happened in 2006 when the structure was ‘sawed’ from its foundations and slid along Teflon plates centimetre by centimetre until it’s current location was reached. It has the epithet of being the largest concrete structure in the southern hemisphere to be moved in one piece. I always find the phrase ‘biggest/largest/fastest etc in the southern hemisphere’ a bit less impressive than I think its Antipodean promulgators expect me to find it. Not to doubt that some of the feats are very much worthy of admiration but when your competition is, Australia, southern Africa, Latin America, Antarctica and unimaginably vast areas of ocean then it does take the wow factor out of the phrase a bit.
(The Cornish pumping house.)
My reason for heading into Waihi first thing today was to go on a tour of the gold quarry and processing works. It turned out that I was the only person booked on the tour this morning so I had the whole minibus to myself. The tour took us to the outer edge of the quarry to start with which was mainly to demonstrate an old preserved mining building and some replanted native trees, because mining companies like to do nice things, but what I found most interesting was the pile of worn out dumper truck tyres. Costing NZ$20,000 a shot and measuring in with over a two metre diameter they were piled in serried lines, perhaps twenty or thirty of them just lying there in worn down retirement. When I asked what will happen to them I was surprised to hear that they’ll probably all end up at the bottom of the quarry when it’s flooded in several years, obviously they don’t recycle them here. As the tour continued I heard how the ‘greens’ can be a problem with some aspects of the mines activities, I was going to comment on this but I think the guide liked me so I didn’t want to make him change his mind halfway through the tour. We continued past the processing works where there were spinning ore crushing drums and fans blowing steam into the air from corrugated steel buildings connected together with networks of stainless steel pipes. Did you know that purple is the international colour for industrial cyanide, I didn’t either. Or that roasted coconut shells are integral to the gold smelting process, interesting stuff. Finally we went to the tailings dams where I was told about a rare type of bird that has nested next to the pools for a few years now, I never saw it but I decided to take his word for it anyway. As I arrived back at the Visitor centre I decided to ask about the Cornish Engine house and if it once had a chimney, like engine houses in Cornwall do, and other Cornish related things because I was genuinely curious. I found out that it once had a steel chimney which is now gone.
(Relayed tramway, the truck is chained down, so no joy riding.)
Following the beach and a brief sojourn to Paeroa to get my hair cut I headed back to Karangahake to walk along the Watewheta Gorge. I only loosely decided to go on this walk but I’m so glad I did because it has to be singularly my favourite part of the whole of New Zealand so far. The walk is called ‘The Windows’ and it follows two disused gold mining tramways. When I arrived there I found that the Department of Conservation had relayed tramway along the route of the track bed, wow, it mustn’t be considered a health and safety trip-hazard in New Zealand. Another thing I found very unusual was the amount of old mining artefacts that remain just lying around. As I walked along the tramway I came across a some old machinery which included a connecting rod about as thick as my arm that was bent, I don’t know what bent it but I certainly wouldn’t liked to have been nearby when it happened.
(Entering the gorge side.)
It soon became apparent how the walk gained its name. As the sides of the gorge became sheer cliffs the tramway cut a tunnel into the side of the gorge and only re-emerged once more favourable gradients, i.e. not vertical, were reached further up the river. The ‘windows’ are tunnels that intersect the main tramway tunnel and lead from the gold mines on one side of the tramway to the cliff edge on the other side. This allowed for waste materials to be tipped directly from the mines into the river quite a long way below. This makes for a very interesting atmosphere where the long dark tunnel is interrupted by shafts of light emanating from the world outside. It also helps you see where you are going.
('The Windows.')
Further upstream is the entrance to Crown Mine which in its day was the predominant mine in the Karangahake area. Today it’s only a fraction of what it used to be, there is a gated off empty chamber, some iron poles in the ground and an old rusting boiler perched perilously in the undergrowth above the far side of the river. Even the entrance to the mine is now a denuded shadow of its former self. In its day this location was a hive of activity, a hydro electric generator, a large tramway bridge and a wooden lift to both levels of the mine as well as other temporary wooden structures. I’d like a time machine to be invented so I could go back in time and see what mines used to be like, all the activity and precarious wooden structures working away without the use of inordinate amounts of energy or huge machines.
The tunnels however weren’t over yet because on the far side of the gorge there were more of them, the jewel in the crown though was the underground pump house. This was in a cavern half fenced off and my tiny campers head torch could just about cut through the dampness to make out what looked like a large iron beam like those used in Cornish engine houses. This is the type of thing that you hear about in Cornwall but you never get to see because the scrap man came when the mine closed or the tunnels flooded when South Crofty stopped pumping. But here was one right in front of me, nice. I stared at it for a bit and found a gap in the railings where I thought I could just about fit through, this will remains conjecture for now as I was becoming rather hungry so decided to go and make food.
(The bridge is on the site of an older tramway bridge, the miners got a pretty good view, eh.)
Back at the backpackers I found that the riots were still happening across the UK and Gloucester was involved now, I always viewed Gloucester as a nice city but I might have to reconsider that now.
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