Parys in the the Autumn

The post title is riffing on the famous visual trick: “Paris in the the Spring”, where “the” appears twice on separate lines, and many folks just read out “Paris in the Spring”.

Anyway, this Parys is Parys Mountain on the lovely island of Anglesey in North Wales, and I was there last week.  It’s an abandoned copper mine that was, at one point, the largest copper mine in the world.  It’s an almost Martian landscape of colours and textures.

One standout feature is the huge opencast pit, “The Great Opencast”, with the remnants of a wind-powered pump at the top.  It’s a barren landscape in ochres and browns.  The pump was used to remove water from the deep tunnels made after the opencast had been mined out.

There are numerous pools and ponds around Parys Mountain.  They were used as settling ponds to remove copper from mine drainage water. I was lucky to be there on a sunny day, and the reflection of the sky in the water gave a lovely contrast to the mounds of rust-coloured mine debris around the pools.

In another area of the mine there’s the remains of the Pearl shaft engine house that once held a steam-powered Cornish beam engine to pump water from the mine workings.  Unlike the wind-powered pump it would run in any weather, so was a more reliable means of removing water from the mine tunnels.  There was a small pool near the engine house and, given the engine’s task, I thought it appropriate to reflect the engine house chimney in the water.

I’ll try and get back to Parys Mountain as soon as I can.