The aerial ropeway trestle at The Bog

When in the Shropshire Hills be sure to visit the visitor centre at The Bog. It's housed in what was the school for this lost mining village and serves tea and wonderful cakes, as well as selling local crafts and books on the area.

I got there using the Shropshire Hills shuttle bus, which will run on every Saturday for the rest of September. I remember the days when these buses would take you to far off places like Much Wenlock and Knighton. They have gone along with reasonable funding for local authorities, but they still take you round the Long Mynd and Stiperstones.

This time there was a new (for me) attraction at The Bog: a trestle from an aerial ropeway that has been put up as a tribute to all who worked at the mine here.

The Shropshire Mining Club explains:

Bog mine was redeveloped before the 1st World War and different ways of transporting ore from the mine to the railway at Malehurst and of coal back to the mine were considered. Traction engines would cause extensive damage to the roads, and extending the railway from Snailbeach would be prohibitively expensive. 

The solution adopted was a five mile aerial ropeway which took less land and could cope with rough ground and gradients. Its drawbacks were its limited carrying capacity, problems in frost and high winds and the amount of maintenance it required. 

It was designed and constructed by "Ropeways Limited" during 1918, much of the construction work being done by German prisoners of war. The mine closed in 1925 and the ropeway with it.

The trestle, which is of the same design as those used on the original ropeway at The Bog, came from Claughton Manor Brickworks, which had the last functioning ropeway in the country. You can see a video of it in use on this blog.

The trestle isn't as tall as I expected, which makes sense of the stories you hear at Minsterley. There the ropeway taking coal up to the boilers at Snailbeach mine ran across people's back gardens. If times were hard, residents would reach up with a stick to tip a bucket as it passed overhead and receive some free fuel.

And then it was time to get the bus to the pub at Bridges to meet another friend from Twitter.