An Introduction to the Underground World
Ever since the start of my diving career at a very young age I was intrigued by shipwrecks. Diving them, and in a later stage documenting and doing research on them became a true passion! The complete story made the ship alive again, and I was happy to share this through my articles and books written on this. Living in Belgium, and diving in the North Sea, means that we only have a ‘short’ season… starting from April towards October, and of course only on days with good conditions. Winters were usually long without diving other than an occasional dive in the lake every now and then.
One day I was asked if I wanted to join a dive to an old slate mine. Of course! I didn’t know anything of it, but it turned out to be an amazing day of adventure to get to the dive site, and also some challenging conditions during the dive. But the mine and the manmade objects, rusty pipes and wooden beams reminded me much of a shipwreck so it got me hooked! I realized that if I was going to do this more often, that I would have to get proper training so I decided straight away to go for my full cave certification.
The Birth of the Mine Exploration Team
I soon learned that this was not the only mine in Belgium. Our underground is like Swiss cheese, full of holes! I enjoyed this new challenge of researching them and discovering more about the heavy life that the workers had.
This underground was ours to play… although that's what I thought. An unpleasant meeting with a forrester brought me back to Earth! I had not realized a lot of things: land ownership and insurance issues in case of an incident to name a few. Another ‘problem’ was that bats became protected and more and more sites became closed by locked gates for their hibernation.
There was only one option: to start a team and try to get official permits to explore and document the sites by producing photo, video and 3D mapping for the owners. So, the Mine Exploration Team was born! Together with my buddy and mentor Dirk Roelandt we started to write landowners and set up meetings to try to convince them what seemed like a hard task. Then, right in the middle of COVID, we got lucky and got our first “GO”!
La Morépire Never Explored
La Morépire or ‘La Moraipire’ as it was called at the time, was one of the slate quarries of the ancient extraction of the Aise Valley in Bertrix. We don't find much of the Ardoisière before 1836, when it was bought by Monsieur Perlot and his family who ran the mine until 1977. In its heyday, they extracted slate in three levels with more than 70 workers!
At the end of the day, the last two workers drilled holes into the slate veins in the large underground chambers. A charge of dynamite was inserted into the holes and exploded. The day after when the dust had settled, the massive block of slate could be cut away. The employees carried the blocks with an average weight of 100 kg to the carts, sometimes by wooden ladders, as seen several times in our explorations. With the large winch the carts were raised and in the workshops they were then transformed into slates. About 60% of the extracted material was waste, and without having to bring it all to the surface, the exhausted fields of the slate were filled with it.
In 1977, the underground mine could no longer compete with the open-air quarries of Spain and Portugal, which were much cheaper to operate. They were forced to close the Ardoisière (slate mine) and had to stop the pumps.
Groundwater takes possession and slowly fills the quarry. In 1996, Mr. Yves Crul began with his project “Au Coeur de l’Ardoise” to provide guided tours in part of the Ardoisère. It takes Yves 5 years to pump the water from the first level and still now it costs him 1000€ per month to keep the level dry.
Diving down into the big gallery for the first time is very impressive! At 5 meters depth already I could see horizontal galleries. There was a massive, very well preserved wooden winch which gave access to a large room: ‘The Italian room’. I learned later when I met Louis, an 80-year-old former employee, that this was the part of the mine where the Italians worked. On the way down there are rails with a cart on them! The gallery is very interesting with many objects such as a telephone, ladders and electrical panels. For a moment my heart stops when my torch lights a head! It seems to be a doll that Yves used and which fell into the water, quite a scary moment!
Exploring the -60 level proves more difficult. The gallery is a tangle of electrical cables, proving a real danger of getting tangled in them. We return with pliers to 'clean' the gallery for safer passage. Squeezing through a tight restriction, I am surprised to arrive in a large chamber where it even has an air pocket! I realize that the air is possibly contaminated and I continue to breathe from the rebreather.
The Ardoisière is full of surprises... when exploring at the 60 level we follow a new gallery, we are super surprised to arrive on our line of the Italian room! Without knowing we made a connection in the circuit and it’s only later, when Dirk made the 3D drawing we understand better. In total we put 4000 meters of line in the system and many photos and videos so that we can complete the topo in 3D. It took Dirk 200 hours of work to completely design the Ardoisière and Yves used the drawing for the site's emergency plan. After our exploration, it is once again forbidden to dive into the site.
Stay tuned for a second installment as we follow more of Stef and his team's mine exploration projects.
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Written By Stef Panis
Stef Panis is a professional underwater photographer, specialized in shipwreck, cave and mine photography.
Stefan started diving at the age of 6 through his father. In 1992 he did his first “official” course. Since than he moved on doing courses like nitrox and trimix, and he started diving an Inspiration rebreather in 2009, and Started photographing in 2013.
Meanwhile he developed a great interest in wrecks and researching the history of the wrecks and mines in the archives.
He did many dives on wrecks in the north sea, the English channel, and abroad in Sardinia, Portugal and Lithuania just to name a few. He was involved in different successful expeditions searching for new wrecks, like the identification of the 1852 “Josephine Willis”.
In 2014 he also obtained his full cave CCR certificate, and he also loves to dive, explore and document the many old mine sites in Belgium.
Stefan writes articles for several international (Tec) diving magazines, and wrote 4 books.
In 2020, Stefan became member of the Explorers Club in New York.
