The entrance to the Silver Seal Mine

Image: © Peter Barr Taken: 10 Mar 2010

Gypsum is used for; Drywall Board, plaster, Plaster of Paris, Tofu,fertiliser, and an agent in traditional Chinese medicine. And here's a funny story about a mine near Bunny; "Here's one you reminded me of EJB, when I was at BG's Marlaegis mine at East Leake a mate who was a shotfirer told me this one. Marblaegis is, or was made up of two mines, Marblaegis and Silver Seal. This wasn't always so, Silver Seal was entered from the Bunny drift just down the road from Bunny in Notts, Marblaegis was entered via a drift at BG's East Leake end near the big plaster board works that the mine supplies. The gypsum reserves at Marblaegis were running out, so BG decided to continue the mine through the older Silver Seal mine reserves, but a new ventilation fan was needed plus the drift requiered a lot of work as it was unsafe. My mate was gived the daily job of driving around the country lanes to Bunny and do the shotfiring work with another shotfirer. He was given police permits to carry a certain amount of explosives, Triminite, in the boot of his car for the days work. Day one, they had drilled the shot holes in a very large boulder and charged it much the same as they would underground! Forgetting they had no roof cover, they fired the round and in his own words, it rained rock pellets down on us! Almost instantaneously, police cars were arriving in droves, turned out the main road, many hundreds of yards away was also pelted with rock debris from the firing!. Same bloke same heading, only now they were under a good roof inside the drift some weeks later, very wet conditions from drippers. He was using a Beethoven 100 shot battery, he'd wired the round to the battery, wound the handle until the neon glowed red and pressed the fire button, one shotfirer thrown backwards head over tits, he'd got himself strung across the battery output via moisture! He said he'd never had such a shock in his life!" Quoted from http://coalmine.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=gen&action=print&thread=208

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