nextDecember 2009
The Skippers road, built in the late 19th c., runs 16 km from Skippers Saddle to the abandoned settlement of Skippers. The 19th c. road has not been significantly altered since its construction and many of the original features, revetments, stone walls and evidence of blasting still exist.
The winter weather of 2009 brought about a series of slips from the road edge down into the canyon below. The natures of two of these slips, where a portion of the road’s width was carried off, led to emergency maintenance being commissioned. An archaeological investigation was necessary during this maintenance.
At both sites, the cliff face that rises from the road surface does not rise perpendicular to the road, rather at an angle of 40° back from the vertical. Trickles of water coming down these slopes are a permanent feature. The slope of the cliffs are a natural phenomenon rather than one created by 19th c. road engineers and appear to be made of a harder packed schist than the vertical cliffs that surround both sites. However, it is evident that in the case of one of the slip sites it appears that a large portion of schist that made up the cliff above the slip area parted company with the mountainside, possibly causing the winter 2009 damage to the road.
The artefactual material recorded on this site shows that several attempts had been made in the recent past to ameliorate erosion damage to the wall in this section.
On initial observation these efforts were indicated by the presence of three lengths of iron of about 2 meters in length; these blade-shaped objects have been identified as coming from a recent type of road-grading machine. Two of these were in-situ on a line with the base of the existing wall, the third had fallen out with the slip.
There were further attempts. A railway iron, almost certainly a vestige of the line of telegraph poles, whose construction began in the 19th c., that ran down the gulley to Skippers, was uncovered running along the width of the slip above the grader-bars. The text stamped to this railway iron identifies it as having been made by the Barrow Haematite Steel Co. Ltd. of Barrow-in-Furness, in the northwest of England, possibly in 1904. By the mid-1870s this steelworks at Barrow was the largest in the world. The stamp indicates the grade of steel weighing 56lbs of steel per yard, putting the total approximate weight of the artefact at 127kg.
Further investigation revealed that above this railway-iron, further attempts had been made to prevent slippage by the insertion of iron rods into the hillside. It is possible in older photographs to identify many more of these rods running the width of what would become the slip area. The three rods that survived the 2009 slip were bound to each other and the rock of the hillside by metal wire.
Once the remaining portion of the road surface was scraped away by maintenance machinery, it became quickly clear that the level road terrace created by the original road engineers in c. 1888 at other parts of the road did not apply to this site. When partially cleaned up, the well defined edge of a cut into the bedrock becomes evident. The cut gradually tapers from its widest point at road level (a radius of about 2.2m from the centre of the slip), down to about 1m radius at the lowest level that the mechanical digger could reach.
This cut, which was behind the now missing retaining wall is likely to have been a geological anomaly in the country that the road was to pass over, requiring a retaining wall with a fill to bring the level up to a parallel with the road. However, the nuances of the unstable schist, led to an accelerated erosion at this point, with much of the original fill being washed out, leading to subsidence and a gradual failure of the dry stone wall; this would have precipitated the unsuccessful attempts in the 20th c. to provide stability with the materials recorded at this site. Finally, the loose schist above the site was washed down in the winter rains of 2009, carrying any remnants of the wall with it.
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