Great County Adit Trip The longest man made drainage tunnel in the World

In this video we take a look at the amazing Cornish engineering feat which is said to be the longest man made drainage tunnel in the world. Wheal Fortune is a mine which can be accessed via this drainage system and we have explored this before by dropping in through one of its open shafts. The video for that is here: /watch/gtfJyiNao8naJ The great County Adit was a network of interconnecting drainage tunnels that were made to allow water to pass out of the mines at the lowest possible level, saving the mine pumps from having to take the water from deep below the ground all the way up to the surface. The adits construction began as early as 1748 and began to reduce pumping costs to the connected mines up in the Poldice valley. Over the years the adit expanded to many other mine workings, reaching the Gwennap area, Chasewater and even as far as the outskirts of Redruth. As mines exhausted reserves and went deeper, more water needed to be pumped, and the great county adit proved a great investment and saved huge mounts of money by efficently aiding the removal of water from the mines. The adit is said to be almost 40 miles long and at its peak drained 13 million gallons a day. The mines may have shut but the ground water from these abandoned workings still flow down into the Carnon River. Do not attempt to repeat anything you see in this video, do remember we do now what we are doing and you could easily find yourself in a whole lot of trouble by attempting to do as we have done without the right equipment and experience to pull it off. Thanks for watching and dont forget to subscribe for future mine exploring videos.

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