Cycling for Bubaque 2019: Glengowla Mine

From 1850 to 1865, just after the potato famine, a mine was operated in Connemara by one O'Flahertie, a large landowner who owned more than 4,000 acres (approx. 1,600 ha) of land in Connemara. One of his farmers had a very heavy special stone found, he had it analysed in Swansea and it turned out to be galena to be, a mixture of mostly. lead and silver. The demand for lead was then very high - and the price correspondingly high - because of the American Civil War and the Crimean War, where lead bullets were shot. O'Flahertie smelled money and decided to start a mine.
After the famine, people were desperate and willing to take any job. The wealthy O'Flahertie paid his miners 3ct - the equivalent of 15€ now - per bucket of galena ore. Miners had to pay for their own hammers and axes.

How much blood, sweat and tears (and lives) did a bucket of ore cost?

Hitting a chisel into the rock face required four hours of work with three miners: one held the chisel and turned it half a turn after each hammer blow. The two others took turns hitting the chisel with their hammers. In some pictures, those axe marks to be seen. In this way, three rivet holes made side by side, in total 12 hours of work. To end the 12-hour working day, the axeman would stuff dynamite in the holes, light the fuse and then have to quickly climb to a 'safe hole' to save his hide. The bangs from those blasts made the miners half deaf.

In the lower corridors of the mine, workers stood permanently Up to their knees in the water. As their only illumination, they had a candle on their helmet that burned on rotten animal fat and emitted a foul-smelling smoke. Most miners died at 40 due to inhalation of toxic fumes.

O'Flahertie paid only for galena. For other ores that were brought out, including quartz, marble, ironpirite, fluorite, barite, he paid nothing....

When the price of lead collapsed after the end of those two wars, O'Flahertie closed the mine, had all the stone dust thrown back into it and flooded them so that no one could extract and monetise rock from it... That is why all the materials on display are so rusty. To make the mine accessible to the public, it first had to be completely emptied and pumped out again.