Late night success

Failure to recover those Garrucha photos was still bugging me, after midnight, when I should have gone to bed, but I would have only dreamed about the annoyance anyway, and wondered what I did wrong. So I googled and found a free 'try before you buy' Windows 10 file recovery program

I'd not seen before (it depends of the key words you enter into Google search), then to my delight, it delivered the lost photos within seconds of downloading and running it. It's called EaseUS data recovery program. Well done, those who designed and provided it.

Needless to say, I edited the pictures and uploaded them to Google Photos, as I'd intended to do this afternoon. Such a relief, to find this, regardless of the sleep I may lose catching up. One of the benefits of retirement is, what happens on Monday mornings doesn't often really matter now.

Looking through recovered photos, including more of the industrial site, I got some key information from John, a retired engineer, at this morning's service, which finally made sense of the place. Firstly the narrow gague railway track didn't use an engine to bring the ore trucks (or 'drams', as they were known in South Wales pit parlance) from the inland mines, but were towed by cable partly powered by the weight of empty trucks returning. Just like the transport systems my father worked on for thirty years of his life underground, and became an acclaimed expert in running, to the point where he wrote and published a book on the subject called 'Colliery Haulage and Rope Splicing. I still have his handwritten original draft at home.

John also pointed out that the strange structure, subject of my conjecture, wasn't buried remains of furnaces, but a level ramp where the the trucks ended their journey and unloaded ore, possibly to a long chute for the last hundred metres journey to a ship's hold. This makes sense of its careful solid construction. It means there's no trace visible of smelting furnaces that might have been on the site, but I daresay soil on cleared and tidied up ground tells its own story when analysed.