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Yes, I can't imagine what it must have been like. I read some of the articles in the papers from around 1855 on what it was like to just travel to the gold fields and working and 'living' there must have been infinitely harder.

Ah, that was one of my theories. Thanks mbasko.

OK, thanks everyone. Here is my next question and this time I took the phone so I could take photos. I have seen a lot of these trenches that basically seem to run along contour lines of a hill above a gully. Sometime there is one a few meters above the bottom of the gully and I have seen...

Dignit, that's how I pictured it. I looked up the old 'Diggings' reports in the Mount Alexander Mail (available at the National Library Trove) and even tiny locations had 1,000 diggers in 1854 and numbers fluctuated from week to week.

Sorry, don't have photos. I don't normally take the phone. Test hole = relatively square digging 0.5-1m either side and anywhere from 30cm to maybe 80cm deep Littered = about 200 of those test holes along a gully around 150m long and ranging 10-20m wide with holes 2-3m apart either direction...

Thanks Northeast, yes, have read through both of these before I started and again after I have been out a few times. Really good advice.

The piles I saw were rough and angular. Makes sense they would put them aside as not worth carting.

170 years of rain seems to have little effect on the clay around here :| The tailings around other shafts nearby are a mix of clay and rocks, so those piles of just rocks seemed odd to me.

I have come across those piles of rocks as well and wondered where the rest of the dirt was! I must admit that I have only tried once detecting around old mine shafts, the amount of metal junk is quite astonishing and I spent nearly an hour digging out an old tramway about 80cm down, which I put...

Thanks moeee, makes sense. I was thinking along the same lines, why would they stop digging if they found gold?

I have recently started prospecting, did the course at Coiltek and bought a GPX 4500. Despite the crap weather I have been out prospecting in Castlemaine Diggings NHP a couple of times each week and I think I am starting to get an idea of what the old time miners were doing. What I would like to...