THE other day I came across possibly convincing evidence of a major lost opportunity in the North York Moors.

The evidence rests in the 1953 annual report of the Whitby Naturalists’ Club.

Discovered in a box of booklets in an antiquarian bookshop in Helmsley, it consists of just two folded, stapled sheets, one staple missing, the other rusty with age. But its closely-typed contents offer rather more than the usual AGM fare of officers elected, the treasurer’s report and a matter-of-fact summary of the year’s activities.

In what was his swansong, the report’s author, the retiring secretary, Percy Burnett, recorded the field trips in the fine style that had evidently long been his hallmark.

For the club chairman, Col H. C. Pewsey, remarked that Mr Burnett “had been the main driving force and inspiration of the club for nearly a generation.”

He expressed the club’s indebtedness for Mr Burnett’s “leadership, keenness and enthusiasm.”

His qualities were displayed in a report of an outing along John Cross Rigg. The journey, he said, had taken the party “where multi-rutted track, time-eroded tumuli and ancient earthwork dumbly speak of those who once travelled the way we trod.”

A visit to the tiny church at Upleatham, a claimant to the title ‘England’s smallest church’ (though it is merely the chancel of a larger church), inspired similar sentiments: “That little old shored up remnant of a church standing alone among the green fields, the last memento of a village long since abandoned, what a waif it seemed.”

Even reports of winter talks benefited by Mr Burnett’s colourful touch. Thus Mr H.

Waddington’s “lantern lecture” on “the Earth and its place in the Universe”

opened up “a new and majestically starry track for the club to follow.” Back on earth, Mr Burnett confirmed, “the fragrance of Miss Wilkinson’s ‘Garden of Herbs’ lingers with us.”

But Mr Burnett reserved his very best effort for an account not of a talk, or even an outing, but what he called an “adventure deep down within the Duchy of Lancaster lands on Goathland Moor.” In the plainer words another secretary might have used, the club visited the district’s former Sil Howe whinstone mine.

In operation from 1899 to 1950 the mine extracted roadstone from the volcanic dyke, or sill, that outcrops across northern England, from Goathland to near Carlisle. Its most dramatic feature is Teesdale’s High Force waterfall, generally considered England’s finest, which crashes 78ft over the sill. But the Sil Howe mine might be a man-made wonder to rival High Force – at least if the impression it made on Mr Burnett and his fellow Whitby Naturalists is accurately conveyed.

Recalling the visit as “one of the never-to-be-forgotten days,” Mr Burnett’s report reads: “Those of us who went that day will recollect with joy the single-file march into the – at first – low-roofed tunnel; the thrill of leaving behind the paling light of day; the stumbling, splashing procession; the drip, drip, drip from the unseen roof; the fantastic eerie shadows cast around by three dozen or so swinging lamps when the tunnel opened out to a cathedrallike cavern; the mysterious uncanny atmosphere of a great subterranean underground, where once ponies drew clattering trams along a narrow railway.”

All this led to a climax, grandly described: “The gorgeous colourings will always be remembered. Colourings that merely wanted the flash of a lantern to reveal all their hidden scintillating beauty. Also remembered will be the glistening bejewelled walls, the upward climbing stalagmites, the long pendulous tapering stalactites, the riotous colourings – rich orange, wet blood red, shining silver shot with pinky marble, royal purples and old golds.

What an Alice in Wonderland excursion. What a day it was. Thank you Mr Harker.”

Phew. Take a breather. Did Mr Burnett on this occasion go OTT? Well, just five years ago, a more restrained account of the mine was given by caver Peter Ryder. A founder-member of a North- East caving club, the delightfully- named Moldywarps Speliological Group, Peter described Sil Howe in his book Memoirs of a Moldywarp as “probably the most spectacular mine in the North York Moors.”

He noted not only its “vast caverns,” which had impressed the Whitby Naturalists, but another striking feature – an exit reached by “a straightforward walk towards an eye of daylight.”

Coupled with the route from the entrance, which passes through the caverns, this provided “probably the easiest mile-long [underground] through trip in the country.”

Small wonder, then, that the tourism potential of the closed mine was spotted by someone who should know.

In 1979 entrepreneur Dave Wilson, who ran the famous Blaenau Festiniog slate quarry in Snowdonia as a tourist attraction, proposed opening the Sil Howe mine to the public.

A narrow-gauge railway would take visitors into the workings. “The beauty created by floodlighting would be a tremendous spectacle,”

said Mr Wilson. But Goathland was immediately up in arms. A petition against the plan received almost unanimous support and the parish council declared: “The debris and trail of human trespass created by an excess of 200,000 people meandering across half a mile of open moorland is beyond belief.” Fears of traffic congestion and danger to moor sheep were also raised.

Despite acknowledging that the tourist mine could provide “an enjoyable and instructive visit,” the national park officer, Derek Statham, recommended refusal on the grounds that “conserving the countryside must come first.” Though one park authority member, I Johnson, conceded that the plan was “an imaginative one that would create tremendous tourist interest”, the committee unanimously threw out the scheme.