Cwm Ystwith "Level Fawr" Mine System
| Location: | Just over 1 Mile east of the village of Cwmystwyth on the north side of the unclassified road. Cwmystwyth is Approximately 16.6 miles East of Aberystwyth, Mid Wales. | |
| Nat. Grid Ref: | SN804747 |
The entrance to this system is set back from the road. An archway is semi blocked with a steel frame leaving a small crawl way to get in. Be prepared to get a little wet as the tunnel floor is flooded to almost waist hight, but this will soon go after about a hundred feet. From the entrance you go along a long passageway, which has some passages leading off to the sides but none that lead anywhere.
Once through this passage you then arrive at a junction with a rail truck. From this passages to the right, leads to ladders that lead up and down chambers and back to where you came from. There are various routes with one up a shaft that has been semi blocked by a hand built wall and the descends down other passages.
From the rail truck you can go striate on but this Leads to a dead ends, and on our trip we had a feeling of stale/Bad air so didn't bother with it.
To the left you come across a vertical railway. We have not explored the lower levels but information from various sources say that it is up to your neck in water!! So we decided to leave that until we get board? Having now explored all other passageways that could be accessed up to this point the only way on is up the vertical railway. The climb is not to difficult though its a long way down!! You climb until you reach the bottom of an ore shoot, which you climb through.
Climbing up from hear then opens up to more passageways. We have not explored all of them! We continued up through various chambers going up and down ladders and in places ropes. We found a chamber that we could see light, though no way up. We could see an upper passageway that could lead out. One of us climbed the cliff wall and crossed sleepers that crossed them but it was blocked. Then following other passageways we found a small crossroads that we could feel some fresh air. We followed some of them but did not find the through route.
Having now been underground for 5 1/2 hours we were now past the point which we had set for turnaround. The return trip to the entrance took about an hour and we now have in total spent about ten hours exploring in this system but haven't yet found the trough route.
According to our research there should be at least one left in this system, when the mine was in use there were four other mines joined into this system.
If anyone else has any info on this system, then we would love to hear from you.