Wrexham County Borough 93 - a disappointment /a change of plan/booking in the weighbridge/how quickly things change /the mining museum slowly decaying

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How quickly things can change ? How often does it happen that you have a plan and something happens that changes everything ? It must have happened to us times many over the years . Coming home from Venice - the volcano in Iceland erupts and an easy couple of hours flight home turns into an epic train, car and ferry journey home . The Greek sailors striking meaning no way out of Greece and the wait until the strike was over . A gite holiday planned with a flight into Bergamo . Cancelled due to the seat problems on the airplane . Covid getting in the way of Scandanavia . So many plans . So many times we have come up against the immovable object . Sometimes we have found ways round it but sometimes we have to just give in and move on. The last few days have been days of trying , days of disappointment and days when things just would not work . In the end we had to give in and replan . Perhaps that is what holidays are all about . Giving in, resigning to the fact that the plan has to be changed and move on .We could have carried on trying to find a solution . Ring other insurance companies but we were sure the answer would still be the same or go for a cheap and nasty company who promised everything until something happened .

Instead we concentrated on filling up Gabby with all the things we had taken out in order to fit the fan in. It was good to be putting the bedding back in, the medicines we needed for the trip and the books that I would read . We sourced a local weighbridge just to check out Gabbys weight on her axles and arranged to take her in a couple of days time . She needs new tyres on the front . They are five years old and still in pretty much good order with enough tread for a few more journeys . However Greece will eat up nearly 5000 miles and there is nowhere near enough tread to be safe . She needs a service and an MOT but that can wait until we return home . We checked passports for the umpteenth time . Feeling neurotic about the dates I must have taken the passports out a few times to check the issue date was still in order , put them back only to get them out again . Brexit has caused us many more problems than we expected . Gabby needs filling with fuel and that will need to be done shortly even though the price of diesel is artificially high . "Don't grieve . Anything you lose comes round in another form". I kept telling myself that as read the thought for the day from Rumi. There was no point in grieving . We could not cancel the ferry to Greece , we had no other plan and we were just going on with it but in another form .

The next few days we set to re-arranging everything to suit the new plan . Should we go to the Dorking away match and try to park somewhere near to Leatherhead ? It would be different and nearer the tunnel . But then we would need a train in, there might only be 300 tickets for away fans and it was standing not sitting . Could we stand for 2 and a half hours ? The crossing day had changed too. Instead of leaving the UK in the late afternoon on the Monday we were now booked for early morning on the Sunday . We had changed this some weeks ago in order to give us enough time to get down to Ancona . So change of plan for the first night stop. Out had gone Arras and in had come Les Islettes an aire we had used a number of times over the years . Whether Sarable and Altdorf would change remained to be seen . Fontanellato was a must see and had to fit in with the castle opening . Otherwise we would be seeing nothing on the way to Ancona other than the road and our overnight stops .

A map was copied from one of our books and a route drawn around Greece . We chose the places en route that we missed last trip and added a few new places in . These had been the lesser known sites . Last time we concentrated on Athens and the ancient Greek theatres and temples , the main monasteries and anything else we thought we needed to visit. This time we could be more selective and choose quieter sites and take in what we had put down as our should see but needed more time . Perhaps not going to Turkey was going to give us that time .

Our trip out for the day today was to the Bersham Colliery industrial museum . It was run by volunteers and only opened on the last Sunday of the month . We had no idea if the site would be busy or extremely quiet . It was only a few miles away from us so driving did not take us long . We parked up and were the only visitors at 10 when the site opened so we had it to ourselves . Not that you could really walk around on your own . There was no order to the exhibits and they were all piled up quietly rusting away . With them was going the memories of the last working coalmine in the Denbighshire coalfield . One of the pitstock heads was still there . That too was slowing decaying . The cost of putting up the scaffolding required for health and safety too expensive for the trust to pay for . No painters wanted to go up to paint the metalwork . It needed a coat of looking at , perhaps a cage attached to it and the ropes running back from the big winding wheel to the drum in the building opposite . Our guide explained things to us as we walked . Old tubs that used to once lie at the bottom of the coal shafts . He told us how many tons of coal could be lifted per day . How there was a second smaller shaft to take goods and materials down . Built so that the coal never stopped coming up . Goods going down meant less men on the coalface and less production . Two old trams stood in a corner . They once had graced the tram network in the town running from Wrexham to Rhos . Long abandoned . Someone had promised to renovate them - I wondered if that was the tram museum at Crich but the council refused to let them off site . So instead of being saved the rain and the weather was destroying them a little every day .

We watched a film about mining and the colliery . We were interested for once as it told a story we both knew . The old ex miner had tales to tell and we hoped that the museum had taped him or made a video or a booklet on the machines and the processes . Once he had gone there was no-one left with first hand knowledge of mining in the colliery . The small museum held plates commemorating the mines , booklets about mining issued to young apprentices , badges and Mr Archibalds boots . The lady sitting in the room who was taking our names and keeping an eye on the exhibits and the donations box told us about Mr Archibalds boots . As she told the story it emerged that he had been killed in the Gresford Disaster . After the event a young apprentice at the pit walked past Mrs Archibalds house . His boots falling apart. The soles and heels coming away Mrs ARchibald shouted " I can do better than that " as she ran in and brought out Mr Archibalds boots complete with replacement heels and soles packed inside the unused boots . Dead mens shoes , The lad never wore them and they looked brand new today . I chipped in - my gran lived next to Mrs Archibald . The lady was intrigued as I told her the story of how I knew the family . She moved on to pit ponies and asked me if I knew where they were kept . I remembered those , feeding them when I waited for dad to finish his shift . I remembered the old man who looked after them . He lived to be a 100 and had so many stories to tell .

We were taken to see the lamp room full of the old lamps with the miners tags attached to them . Memories kept flooding back of seeing the miners blackened with coal carrying their miners lamps draped around their shoulders . When the colliery first opened it was not called Bersham but Glan yr Afon meaning Riverside . The first shaft was sunk in 1864. The workings were left abandoned until 1871 until it was deepened by the new owners the Barnes family from Liverpool . Two shafts were sunk No shaft and No 2 shaft . Only one remains . The colliery worked for six years without incident until 1880 when there was an explosion which killed 9 men. In 1947 along with the rest of the coal industry Bersham was nationalised and placed under the care of British Coal . It was modernised with new pit head baths , canteen and offices . Canteens where the miners could eat subsidised meals and the children would visit for Christmas parties . The pit ponies who numbered near 100 were retired . There was some subsidence and despite the coal board leaving pillars of coal beneath Erddig Hall the subsidence continued and Erddig became structurally unsound . Maps of the underground workings covered the walls of the offices . The large winding wheels and machinery were still intact and if the museum had the money and the manpower they could be brought to life . As it was it was impossible to let visitors range free amongst the exhibits .

The mine closed in December 1986 due to unfavourable conditions such as the fault lines which meant the coal face ended abruptly . It became costly to follow the line of the coal .Markets disappeared - the mine once supplies Shotton Steelworks . That market closed and the colliery became uneconomical to run . Strikes were common and all in all it was not long before the last of the mines in North East Wales closed forever . Much of the equipment was lifted and moved to other collieries or just left outside . The remaining equipment still stands underground left to rot in the dark tunnels .

Two days , two very different visits . The visit to see the Wrexham Quilt and today to visit a run down industrial site with a big history . Next trip out a visit to the weighbridge to see just how heavy our girl Gabby is and more planning for the next holiday .

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