3. Copper mining in North Wales

Gold is all very well. It is pretty lustrous, malleable, does not tarnish and you can find it in its pure form, all those nuggets just lying around underground or more accessibly in streams and rivers. That is also the problem; because it is virtually inert it does not combine with many other elements and has little practical use other than as precious metal. Copper on the other hand is pain in the backside. It is found chiefly as an ore, a green ore, Copper Oxide that is more usually called Malachite. Once extracted into its pure form it will readily combine back again with Oxygen and a host of other elements. In the first Millennium B.C. it was discovered that if it was smelted with tin the metallic compound Bronze was produced. Bronze was a much harder material than copper and could be readily used to make really good weapons and armour.

It is estimated that mining in Wales for copper started on what is now the Great Orm near present day Llandudno  about  4000 years ago. The Orm was riddled with seams of the green ore and family groups harvested it. Digging their own mini mines with animal bones and harder rocks they extracted the ore and then sold it to the Smelter Druid as it was only he who could extract the pure copper and turn it into bars for trading or shipping.

Each family protected its own seams but often as not squabbles would beak out above and below ground as the seams meandered with scant regard of any set boundary. The Smelter Druid acted as arbitrator in these concession disputes the most awkward being an underground break through. Initially when one family accidentally, or more often than not deliberately, broke through another’s mine, then both sides would be blocked with a large rock and the cavity filled with a curse by the druid. The curse tendered to be a collection of animal guts that when the sealing motor was tampered with would exude the odour of death. This was deemed sufficient for decades and only an accidental break through generally would occur.

The smelter druid also had control of one of the largest and richest concessions where in the maze of exhausted shafts and tunnels his father before him and he stored the pure copper bars before shipping. To create the secret chambers suitable for the safe storage of the copper they became expert in disguising the entrances with hidden rock panels and cantilever slabs of stone. So confident in their ingenious methods of hiding the metal that each year they would challenge the Orm families to discover their cache, no one ever succeeded.

Fame of the Orm druid’s expertise spread through the land.