(Clippings from my full article published in Ackroyd Publications' WAB magazine)
It’s Sunday afternoon and I have just jumped off the bus to Spiennes. I walk through the sleepy village looking out for the occasional, confusing signpost to point me in the right direction. The only human activity I see is a man walking his dog. Crossing a bridge over the small stream of the River Trouille I find simple farm land set in quaint, peaceful countryside. Bright yellow wildflowers dot the meadows where fat cows laze and horses graze.
Upon walking up a quiet one-lane road there is no sign or welcoming board at my destination. In fact, I feel quite lost. All I can see is a few parked cars in front of a derelict portable toilet (the extent of the WC facilities) and an abandoned shed erected from sheets of corrugated iron overgrown with weeds and shrubbery in a state of neglect.
I’m at the Neolithic flint mines of Spiennes, a UNESCO world heritage listed site that dates back 6,000 years. The site’s tourism is as primitive as the mines themselves. Fortunately, Jean-Louis Dubois (Vice-President of the Société de Recherche Préhistorique en Hainaut – SRPH ) had sent me all the information I needed to get to the site.
Walking onwards, I hear a few murmurs and laughter through the bushes and follow the sounds to the entrance of the site – a shabby fence once again overgrown. People wearing safety harnesses are grouped underneath the roof of a small makeshift shack of corrugated iron. A wooden shelf on the back wall acts as the museum display, with a modest collection of Neolithic tools consisting of a polished stone axe, core blades, antler picks and a few hand-drawn diagrams.
It’s the very opposite of the flashy tourism package you might expect from a World Heritage Site. The entrance to the mine shaft looks like a well. A ladder protrudes from within. Visitors in single file are hooked up by the harness to a lengthy rope and then descend the long, rusty ladder eight metres into the dark pit.
Jean-Pierre Joris greets me in French. He has been at the mines since 1953 and began the first excavations and tours on the site. He is also the president of the SRPH. He summons Michel Woodbury, a photographer-cum-archaeologist employed by the Walloon region for more than 10 years, to begin the English tour with me.
Reaching the bottom of the abyss, I’m in complete darkness while my eyes adjust. Light from the shaft entrance casts down and bounces off the white chalk walls. Michel explains that this is how the Neolithic miners worked, relying on the reflective capabilities of the chalk. Fire would have used up their precious oxygen.
Michel reconstructs life in Neolithic times, when whole oak forests were removed with their polished stone axes to practise agricultural activities. These technologies that took millennia to cross from the Middle East into Europe substantially increased the standards of living. Despite the wealth in trade and culture, times were still hard and the shafts were sometimes used as graves. A skeleton of a young girl and her newborn baby was found, and suggests the pair did not make it through the birth.
Michel turns the artificial lights on, revealing an incredibly complex network of horizontal galleries and shafts. He explains that the mines are an “engineering genius” and were over-exploited for 2,000 years. The miners excavated the flint stone with red-deer antlers for picks (sharp and durable) and recycled the waste chalk by stabilising the foundation beneath them with it. It created beautiful archways and pillars that, Michel muses, they never saw.
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