Archived report · 3 min read · Set in The Dunmore Workings ·
The Map That Shows My Lamp Post
At the annual survey of the Dunmore workings the great map carries one numbered lamp post the ground does not hold, the stores do not issue to, and no crew walks to.
- filed: "at the annual survey"
- reference: "DW/MP/09"
1. This report is made at the annual survey of the Dunmore workings, taken this year from the 9th to the 13th of the month by the undersigned assistant surveyor with a two-man chain party. The purpose of the annual survey is to prove the great map against the ground and to enter every difference in the survey statement book before the copy goes up to the mineral board in the spring.
2. The great map hangs in the plot room at the works. It is drawn on linen at forty feet to the inch and carries every fixed thing the workings are answerable for: the kilns, the sidings, the clay hopper, the weighbridge, the boundary fence, and the lamp posts of the Light Order. The Light Order of 1953 settled ten posts for the yard and the roads, numbered 1 to 10, and ten circles stand drawn on the linen with a plain number against each.
3. On the ground the chain party proved the ten. There is an eleventh circle on the map at the head of the north tip, where the tipping bank runs into the old clay pit: a small circle, the number 11 in the same size of figure as its fellows, and the letters L.P. against it. On the ground at that place there is no post, no plinth, no wiring and no stub of one, and the party's statement carries the entry, no post standing at 11.
4. The Light Order is kept by the lighting crew under the foreman, Mr T Harker, and his maintenance book runs from 1 to 10 and no further. Each post takes its cleaning and its lamp renewal in turn, the stores ledger issues the new lamps against the numbers, and no issue has ever carried the number 11. The crew is four men; the north tip is on none of their rounds, and the wiring schedule ends the circuit at post 8.
5. Checks were made under the survey rules. The correction history shows the eleventh circle first cut onto the tracing of 1956, in a hand the senior draughtsman cannot put a name to, the tracing carrying no initials at that corner. From that year to this the annual statements have carried the line for the post, entered first by Mr E Nelsey, who retired in 1962, then by Mr F Colley, and this year by the undersigned, each of us signing against the same words.
6. The amendment traces are the part the statement book found hardest to carry. In each of the last eleven years a trace has been cut lifting the circle off the linen, marked for correction and sent to the plot room, and the traces lie filed in the drawer to the number of eleven. The map has taken none of them up. There is no record of refusal, no objection from the board, and no minute anywhere of why a correction raised every year should stand unmade every year.
7. The papers otherwise agree together. The valuation list lights the works by ten lamps and strikes the lighting rate on that count; the electrical undertaker holds no supply record past post 8; the rate book carries no chargeable post on the north tip; and the register of this Archive holds no writ against the tip, or against any lamplighter of it.
8. For the annual return I can certify ten posts proved and one entered as not standing, with the ledgers behind me. What the return cannot settle is the map itself, which has carried the circle and its number at the north tip these thirty-one years, with nobody to maintain it and nothing to light. The question I am obliged to leave standing at the foot of this report is whether the linen is in error about the ground, or the ground is in arrears about the lamp, and one of the two has been keeping every spring survey in its turn.