Radging = Random wandering to see if there's anything there..... (colloq)
Anyway, I'm going to be just a little bit shy about the exact whereabouts of this little expedition, but Ive included it to suggest to peeps that you dont always necessarily have to have a definite objective to your wanderings, and, indeed, wandering about having a look at things and generally poking around can be very rewarding.
Sooooo me and my pal brian from Nenthead had a second "radge" up this little glen (we'd been there before...) with no plan at all in mind and, really just to see what we could find.... and this is what we found....
The first interesting thingy was that we noticed the extensive coverage of some serious flood debris and one or two places where the valley sides were in a virtually liquid state and, apparently, about to slump - which could be a bit scary in some circumstances.... Next up was a rather nice carb limestone rock with some nice fossilised reef plants in it.
Then we found a small mine entrance and explored it a little way Close by were the ruins of the miner's dormitory or "shop".
A bit further upstream and we found our interesting specimens of very sparkly and shiny stuff sitting in a rock which appeared to be lumps of iron stone. There were green and gold hues in the rock and we thought these might be iron pyrites - or fool's gold. We managed to confirm this afterwards. Despite the fact that my lump weighed in at nearly 4kg, I rescued it from the water..... along with a few other smaller but still shiny things....
Just upsteam from this we came across a very beautiful limestone gorge (deep pools ideal for a hot summer's day, whatever a hot summer's day is....) with another ruined mine shop and a capped shaft which we measured to be about 6 metres deep.
Back the way we came, and we found some more rock samples and another level near an obvious spoil heap. This was followed for about 70 metres underground to a collapse.... and there was a lot of water coming in from above. We noticed that the water was not coming out of the entrance, though - which begs the question about where it was going..... The level was light-bulb shaped and lined with some fine sandstone work.
A little later, in a sink hole, we discovered a badger sett. This is one of the reasons why I'm not going to say exactly where it is. Somebody may be able to recognise the place from the pics below, but I doubt it.
The statistics for the walk say it all, though - we managed 6.5 km in 5 hours. This includes an hour's snooze by the river and two short trips underground. (I'm not recommending that peeps go wandering off into lead mines by the way as they can be failry hazardous!)
