Field sessions of the Second Workshop Heritage and History of Mining

As part of the 2nd Scientific Workshop “Heritage and History of Mining”, which took place on October 3-4, 2020 in Ludwikowice Kłodzkie (Góry Sowie, SW Poland), two field sessions were conducted. The sites of the first of them, a pedestrian one, were located in Ludwikowice Kłodzkie. The first object shown was the Henryk adit (formerly Hellmuth), which was part of the 19th-century Glückauf Louis hard coal mine, incorporated into the Wenceslaus mine in 1914. The adit features a well-preserved brick wall housing and an explosives chamber from 1922. The Gontowa facility, an element of the Nazi RIESE complex, was built at the end of World War II. It is a system of two adits and drifts connecting them with a total length of 800 m. Elements of the geological structure and the preserved relics of the technique of mining works are perfectly visible in it. The second field trip led through the region of Walim, Zagórze Śląskie and Świerki. The small Silberloch adit is located below the Walimska Pass. The oldest archival records about it come from 1548, it was already considered old then. Earlier, silver ores were searched there, the works were carried out by hand. Traces of the use of hammers and irons are perfectly visible in several places. There are also blasting holes in the deeper part of the excavation. Near the Bystrzyckie Lake, there are remains of underground mining works carried out before the 18th century in the village of Schlesierthal. Lead, silver, zinc and copper ores were searched for in quartz-barite hydrothermal veins. In Świerki there is a large, closed melaphyre quarry, established in 1902 by the company Steinwerke C.C. v. Thaden. Ten years later, the plant was modernized and a nearly 3-kilometer long ropeway to a nearby railway siding was built. The mine, with breaks, operated until 2012. An interesting fact was the presence of a 1.5-meter-thick jasper seam in the deposit