World War Two Mineshaft dumps in Cornwall... Fact or Fiction ? 

imagine finding barrels marked 'porton down'

I live near to many of the sites you explore in your videos and it's so fascinating to see what's just underneath our feet! Thank you for taking us on these explorations!

So glad I found this channel. Great content !

Fabulous video and again really interesting. You must have nerves of steel. The North Cornish coast truly is stunning though. Thank you for sharing.

We used to visit Perranporth in the 1950 and stay with my uncles at St. Georges Terrance up by the air field ,we used to pick up brass shell cases on the airfield and sell them there where loads of them now i wish i kept some as souvenirs

Great explore and s nice bit of history. The tin lid was a nice find :)

Another fantastic video ben and we've been working on top the airfield to look at some old WWII buildings that are forgotten about

Great vid Ben loving the WW2 angle. Would love to see more like this. Imagine if you did find a Willys Jeep or Spitfire engine down a shaft somewhere! Like you say though, could well be entering some awfully toxic environments.

We have similar stories here in the Forest of Dean. Mineshafts supposedly full of jeeps

Would have been worth getting a sample of the discharge from whatever was dumped down there! Fascinating… you guys are so brave!!!

Those "straws" coming down from the cap are very fast growing. I never saw any longer than about 6ft when I was caving.

That is a fantastic cliff top view...

The Forest Of Dean was a staging area and there are capped dumps.Stories of cavers getting in but equipment was thrown in,not neatly packed,so salvaging anything is virtually impossible.

That's some really high density fiber wood, because i was watching as the lady was passing and against a dark point and there was barely any deflection. Now, she's likely light as a feather, but still. Good bit of timber there. It's incredible how weird environments keep wood like that. We were restoring a 1914 house and the basement's lintels (portal and the "expansion" portals) were basically intact, despite some dampness, some minor rot on the outer most part of the exposed wood. Up top, everything was rotten through, with fractures in the walls as a result. We just stabilized the surface of the wood and let it be, good solid wood.

Ben you make me laugh can imagine seeing you all trudging along with that ladder.

Have you ever thought about diving the slate quarry on the camel trail. The store is when the Americans left they dumped loads of stuff in.

Superb

I wish that some of the old mines and Pitt’s of Telford could be explored. The old Granville colliery would be amazing. Closed innthe 70s apparently a guy I knew was the last guy out and he was told to shut the gas tight doors

the lappa spa valley railway mine was used for training during ww2, theres bullet holes in the chimney

a quality piece of timber that.

Great video Ben, having viewed a number of your other mining videos, is there a way you and I can talk about potentially meeting up for a visit to the area? Vice Chair Shropshire Caving & Mining Club

Where I used to work at RAF St Eval when it was 81 Signals Unit Transmitters West in the mid 90s I heard r rumours of old surplus kit buried down near the end of the old main runway and as this was outside the perimeter fence, the area in question belonged to a nearby farm. I went exploring one day during lunchtime and was in my RAF Uniform so stood out a bit and this farmer had a bit of a pop at me asking why I was in “his land”. Foolishly I mentioned that there was a rumour of buried Merlin’s. A few weeks late the bastard dragged away all of the undergrowth covering the area behind the dispersal and there were some bloody big holes in the ground where I reckon he struck maybe a few old Merlin’s possibly in packing. Crates in oiled rags and probably sold for scrap. I didn’t see the dig as I was a way, anyway looking through the scraped out soil I retrieved 6 Merlin engine exhaust pods, an instrument panel, rudder pedal and an aileron trim tab of a Lanc of which there were many when the station transitioned to Shackleton before it closed in 59. I also saw a pit full of old RAF push bikes … so proof that stuff got buried and if there was a mineshaft near by then probably was full of kit. I’ll bet the shaaaaaaffffft, lol at Sallys bottom around the back of RAF Portreath might have some nasties chucked down her during the days of Chemical days when it was Nancekuke …. Used to loce saying to the lads I’ve been up Sallys Bottom during a drive around the peri track when I worked there too.

There are 2 mineshafts here here me in Muxton telford. Nearby is MOD Donnington and there used to be a railway spur to the 2 disused shafts of Muxton Colliery. It’s alleged that surplus MOD a stock was tipped down the now sealed shafts

Some of those shafts could have been used as latrines, so many troops in one are, hence chemicals used to prevent disease!

I remember talking to an old boy in Cornwall who said at the end of the war he was tasked with dumping dispatch bikes down an open mine. They started them up, dumped the clutch and fired them down the shaft. He was allowed to keep two bikes and eventually (late 80s) restored one. No idea of where this was though sadly

Nerves of steel, you and the lady, venturing into what is obviously now a contaminated dump due to previous haphazard waste disposal. Plus, walking that long single plank!! Daring!! You two had some good Back’n forth banter… Such as her suggesting you chuck the ladder over the cliff. And then you offering those buckets for the garden, and she saying if you’d carry them out! Too funny! I’d say you’d need a Tetanus-shot if you had suffered a scrape or cut back in those polluted workings with all that rusted metal.

there is a rumour about some motor bikes being dumped down a shaft at Rose wall hill st.ives ( consolidated mines ) by commando`s stationed near st.ives , i would love to find out

10/04/2122 Interesting. I understand that around Ipswich Queensland in Oz they dumped RAAF F111 aircraft down coal mines as aircraft capable of carrying nukes were banned/limited under some treaty or another. Not that we ever had nuclear weapons.

Very interesting..what are those strange stalactites seen at 10:07? Years ago, (due to a big increase in the price of tin) there was talk of restarting tin mining in Cornwall-is this still under consideration?

Holy fucking shit.

that plank cross was sketchy

If one of those stalactites came down it would impale you 😢

I don't know where the image at 1:48 was taken, somewhere in the Mediterranean? Sicily? Italy? But it's definitely not D-Day in Normandy to which you refer. Why do creators make such silly, irritating, mistakes?

Wasn't the old perranporth airfield the nancekuke chemical weapon facility during ww2?

Please be extra careful for dangerous contamination. Back then no one worried about certain chemicals or materials that we now know are deadly.