(09-28-2023, 11:56 AM)F2d5thCav Wrote: Yeah, mine shaft would be better. Deeper and no "fresh" dirt exposed by digging.
I've heard of places in the Appalachians where there are "holes" in the ground, essentially vertical cave shafts, and yes, purported to be useful for disposal of unwanted ... items.
Cheers
I grew up about 15 or 20 miles southeast of where I live now. Where I live now is transitional, the liminal space between the Appalachian Plateau and the Ridge and Valley region. The Appalachian plateau is noted for it's coal deposits which are missing from the area where I grew up - that area is what is called "karst" terrain. It's mostly a limestone bedrock.
The Appalachian Plateau is around 315 to 320 million years old, Pennsylvanian age, where the coalfields are. I live on the eastern slope of it. The Ridge and Valley region is a lot older, between 500 and 600 million years, Cambrian, Devonian, and Silurian ages, where the limestone bedrock is exposed. That's where I grew up. The Clinch River is a rough line that separates the two.
There is a slab of exposed bedrock on the hill above the house where I was raised that has ancient fossils in it. I've recovered fossil stromatolites there, as well as something that even the biology professor at the university could not identify = it was doughnut shaped, about 2 1/2 inches across, and full of little diamond-shaped bumps, like grinding teeth. I've since found an identification for it, but can't recall what it was called. The rock is old, from about the time of the Cambrian Explosion, the beginnings of multicellular life.
Limestone dissolves in water over time. Over the ages, the karst area where I grew up has been honeycombed with caves, some of which run for miles underground. As those cave roofs collapse in places over time, it develops "sinkholes" which are usually funnel-shaped depressions with a hole in the bottom of them. That hole leads into... a whole 'nuther world. An area of Russell County, VA, called "Glade Hollow" is noted for the thousands of sinkhole at the upper end of the valley. It's a long "holler", about 6 or 8 miles long and contains Daugherty's Cave (archaeologically significant, with artifacts going back around 11,000 years), Gray's Cave, and another big cave at the lower end of the valley whose name I don't know. All 3 of those caves are interconnected in a vast underground network of caverns, with an underground river in it. I've accessed that river through Gray's Cave. There are at least 3 creeks in that holler all named "Sinking Creek" from the fact that they arise at a spring, run for a while, and then just disappear into a hole in the ground - they just "sink" into the ground, hence the name.
There are "things" in that cave system. Once, when I was at the bank of the underground river that I accessed through Gray's Cave, I saw a smooth, oval, gray "rock" out in the middle of the river. it was about 4 or 5 feet long, 2 1/2 feet wide, smooth surfaced, and wet. As I played my mining light along it, it just sank into the river, leaving barely a ripple.
Some times, the holes going into the underground are not accompanied by the funnel-shaped depression, they are just a hole in otherwise unremarkable ground. I suspect those were formed by earthquakes over time - there are several fault lines that run through here, too.
There are at least two such holes on the farm where I grew up. One was an offset crack in the rock, about a foot wide and 4 or 5 feet long. Not big enough for a man to get into, but big enough for pieces of farm animals that died natural but suspicious deaths to be dropped into. That was where we disposed of farm critters that we didn't feel safe eating. It went down about 20 feet or so, and then branched out to the east and west into a cave with no other discovered opening. No idea how far it ran The rock at the top of the fissure had a "low" side of the crack and a "high" side of it, with about 2 or 2 1/2 feet of elevation difference, which is part of why I believe earthquakes formed some of the holes. I could sit on the high side and comfortably rest my feet on the low side, like a chair.
There was another one, on another hillside near the top, that just looked like a normal groundhog hole. No idea how it formed, as there was no fissure, no offset in the rock, no sinkhole, and it was just round, not an oblong crack like the other one. It wasn't but about a foot and a half across it, but it went down... WAY down. I could sit at the top of it and drop pebbles in, and listen to them "clack" against the sides of the walls for 30 seconds or so as they fell, before hearing a faint splash when they hit bottom. I would guess it went about 400 feet straight down, but never calculated how far it probably went.
So, yeah, there really are such holes, and they've been used to dispose of unwanted detritus for generations.
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