Firstly a reminder of the riddle:
You will find this bounty playground near a sunburnt babe.
From local pioneer to South Wales winner,
take the trip then discover the man
who beat a Prince and name the dark stuff.
"You will find this bounty playground near a sunburnt babe."
Since my family fairly regularly visit Cornwall for summer holidays etc when we saw "sunburnt babe" part of the clue Redruth immediately sprang to mind.
After digging out a bunch of those local attraction leaflets that we always bringing back from holiday we quickly discovered that the "bounty playground" was probably a place called Cornish Goldsmiths, which is based just outside of Redruth. We figured this was most likely the location as it's found within a small complex called Treasure Park which fitted very nicely with the clue and other pyramids had been found in jewlers before.
"From local pioneer to South Wales winner"
The only "pioneer" (or inventor in this case) that I knew that came from Cornwall was Richard Trevithick. Who just happend to have been born in Illogan which is about 1 mile away from both Redruth and Cornish Goldsmiths. Having read the wiki page on him it turns out that Trevithick moved to South Wales to build an automatic hammer for Pen-y-Darren iron works near Merthyr Tydfil.
"take the trip"
The owner of that ironworks, Samuel Homfray was so impressed that he made a bet with another guy that one of Trevithick's locomotives could haul 10 tons of iron along the Merthyr Tidfil line from Penydarren to Abercynon.
"the man who beat a Prince"
So at this point we're at Abercynon and looking for "the man who beat a Prince", this is where I came to one of those dead ends everyone keeps going on about. Anyway... I eventually find this guy called Guto Nyth Brân (or Griffith Morgan) who was a runner. The guy became a bit of a local legend and nobody wanted to race him until some guy called Prince came along and challened him. Guto won the race but a celebratory slap on the back from his manager/partner killed him... bummer. Anyway, there happens to be a statue of Guto in a place called Mountain Ash, which many sites list as being in the area of Abercynon!! Woohoo!!
"name the dark stuff"
Unfortunately this is where I got stuck for many many months
I figured that the black stuff was some sort of ore and so I spent a loooonnnngggg time reasearching ALL of the local ores and minerals mined in that area. Turns out that although I was sort of on the right track, I was still kinda at the wrong end of the stick... or in this case, the wrong side of the atlantic!!! As it turns out this is where you need to take the leap of faith, its also where the power of Google was very much against me!
For a long time I had been searching for some kind of relation to mountain ash and some ore. Turns out that if you type "Ash Mountain" into google rather that "Mountain Ash" (as I had been doing fo sooo long) then you come up with a completely different set of results!!! How annoying is that
The top hit was a wiki page (looks promising!!) for a place called Ash Mountain in British Columbia, Canada!! The wiki page is pretty small, not a lot of info there at all, but having been searching through sooo many different types of ore etc previoulsy, one word immediately caught my eye and stuck out.... hyaloclastite!!! The base of Ash Mountain is made of pillow lava and "hyaloclastite" which is formed from volcanic eruptions under water. Apparently it's some kind of rock that is rich in black volcanic glass, hence "the dark stuff"!
So after many months of head scratching, and one very early morning 500 mile round "trip" to Cornwall on a Monday morning... here's me (very tired) with my gold coin (finally!!)
The chap on the left is the pyramid keeper, Darren... really nice guy & very enthisiastic about the adventure!
Sorry if some of the history etc was a bit boring but it was all part of the hunt and I wouldn't have learnt any of it without the adventure... so thank you Puzz, Ade and the rest of SW for helping me fill my brain with so much interesting (but probably useless) information
Also, if your ever in the area around Treasure Park/Cornish Goldsmiths then I recommend at least a quick visit there.
They've got some really cool stuff including the delorean from the Back to the Future films, a million pounds in fivers and gold bars
Now work can really start on the Birmingham pyramid.... lol
Chris
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