KGF Part I – A TOWN WITH FOUNDATIONS OF GOLD... KGF - Kolar Gold Fields...This town has a lot of intrigue and some amount of mysticism. The mysticism is my perception. Perhaps the mystic is owed to the strong mining history it has and which once was bustling with activity but now the disturbing silence has an eerie feel to me. I had the opportunity to take a quick holiday to this town with John my BIL who is from KGF…his father was part of the BGML (Bharat Gold Mines Limited) and worked as a foreman. John was narrating some of the stories and the glorious past of this town and I could actually see tears in his eyes as we walk past some of the ruins of the mines and the dilapidated state that the mines are in. In fact, if we were to trace back the history of gold mining in KGF I would rather quote Wikipedia which says…“The tradition of mining gold at Kolar started at least as early as the first millennium BC with linkages to the Indus Valley civilization. Golden objects found in Harappa and Mohenjodaro have been traced to KGF through an impurities-analysis assay, as the impurities include 11% silver concentration, found only in KGF ore. Pliny, a Roman historian who passed in this area in 77 C.E. wrote about gold and silver mines. The Champion reef at the Kolar gold fields was mined to a depth of 50 meters during the Gupta period in the fifth century A.D. Subsequently, the metal continued to be mined during the Chola period in the 9th and 10th century AD, the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565, and later by Tipu Sultan, the leader of Mysore state. The scale of the operations grew at each stage by the digging of small to large pits. Renewed interest in the Kolar gold fields occurred towards the beginning of the nineteenth century. The ancient gold workings, other workings which may have been 200 to 600 years old and the workings of Tipu Sultan were all located by Captain Warren in 1802. However, large-scale mining only came in the 1850s under the British firm John Taylor & Company which did much of the prospecting and mining with more skilled manpower and sophisticated machinery.” Captured here are some pics which I found interesting. Each of the pics have their own captions so here is a small walk into the past which makes quite an interesting read.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 05:04:14 +0000