Report - Cults Limestone Mine - Fife - January 2018

[DaveFM]

This was a relatively short visit, about 3 hours, I'd no particular plan for this visit so just wandered eastwards from the east entrance, Cults always seems to have another section you've never seen before and I found some good areas that were completely free of string and arrows, much of the mine is blighted visually by about a thousand painted arrows and several thousand feet of string in various colours as well as moronic graffiti here and there. In the eastern areas you often hit flooded passages as the seam dips down to the south and east, the innermost sections worked in the 1960's are now over a hundred feet beneath the water table. There were signs that water had been flowing recently and some passages are obviously silting up slowly, judging from the smooth sandy floors free of footprints.

 

[The Lone Ranger]

Nice to see, still somewhere I need to stop off at on my trips up North

 

[DaveFM]

Nice to see, still somewhere I need to stop off at on my trips up North

Thanks, if you visit Cults get an exact location for the entrances as you can waste a lot of time searching for them, they run in from a long wooded bank about a mile long where limestone was first quarried before they started mining, there were once many entrances but down to two now.

 

[The Kwan]

Nice pictures Dave and some really nice colours, 100ft below the water table sounds like good potential for getting wet

 

[RachelLi]

Great pictures, looks like an interesting mine. That barrel is really cool

 

[DaveFM]

Great pictures, looks like an interesting mine. That barrel is really cool

There isn't much in the way of old mining equipment in Cults, apart from bits of rail and coils of wire rope, one haulage route in the central area has some wagon remnants and steel piping from the pumps but thats mostly it as far as I've seen, I'd not seen the old barrel before.

 

[DaveFM]

This was one of the tunnels with a silty floor, as if waters flowed at some point.

 

[DaveFM]

The main kiln where the crushed stone was burned for agricultural lime and a tiny shoe from a pit pony, the shoe was 3 inches wide, the smallest shoes for horses are about 4.5 inches wide so must have been quite a small beast. Would have been donkeys years ago when ponies were hauling stone out of there, if you'll excuse the pun!