Trade Secrets

[admin]

[Mick Harper]

Thanks to Chad everybody can now view the entire one-hour Glastonbury Talk for free:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5NSDXL ... ring&pli=1

For reasons of diplomacy the talk was billed as 'The Megalithic Empire' although most of it was spent detailing a completely new (more revolutionary!) theory on the prehistoric tin trade from a sailing perspective.

Comments on this and of course the Cormorant Problem are welcome.

By the by, Tin Exporting in Ancient Britain is a deliberately downkey title. Suggestions for something racier are always welcome. [I am not allowed by AE regulations to define the object at the beginning of the project so bear that in mind.]

[admin]

[Chad]

[hvered]

Barry Island, on the Welsh side of the Bristol Channel, was joined to the mainland but used to be a tidal island with a causeway or ‘causey’ visited and described by the sixteenth-century antiquarian John Leland.



Barr is hill in Welsh, cf. barrow in English, though Barry is said to be named for St Baruc, an obscure hermit residing in a chapel on the island.

The island has a well and a quite dramatic blowhole "It is remarkable that, in a rock near the entrance of the island, there is a small cavity, to which, if the ear is applied, a noise is heard like that of smiths at work, the blowing of bellows, strokes of hammers, grinding of tools, and roaring of furnaces ; and it might easily be imagined that such noises, which are continued at the ebb and flow of the tides, were occasioned by the influx of the sea under the cavities of the rocks” [Gerald of Wales]

[Chad]

So if Burgh Island and St Michael's Mount were shifting tin... I wondered what was being shifted from Barry Island (which has the second largest tidal range on Earth) and Burry Holm.

South Wales is known for its coal and iron ore mining (and the Romans supposedly mined lead in the area) but I couldn't find any reference to other metal workings. However, Cwmafan (midway between the two said tidal islands) was, until recent times, the copper refining capital of the world... producing almost half the global output.

It is stated that Cwmafan reached its pre-eminence due to the availability of locally mined coal (needed in the smelting process)... it being cheaper to transport copper ore to a coal mining area, than to transport the amount of coal needed to a copper mining area.

This was all a bit disappointing, until I discovered that there is a housing estate in Cwmafan built on land known locally as “Copper Mines”.

So the Copper Works was probably sited there originally to take advantage of the local expertise gained from smelting and refining local copper... and only later, as the enterprise boomed, did they have to import copper ore.

Turns out there are quite a few disused mines scattered throughout The Valleys now thought to be ancient copper and/or lead workings.

The intensity of modern industrial mining has probably all but obliterated any evidence of an ancient copper industry in the area.

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

[Chad]

Whenever you discover an interesting tidal island you are sure to find a Megalithic commodity nearby that needs transporting.

Take Chapel Island near Ulverston for instance:





North of which you will find ancient copper mines at Coniston.

Very conveniently the waters of Coniston flow into the sea at Ulverston, making transportation very easy.

And just to round things off… here is a convenient stone circle (overlooking the island) to guide you overland.