Cambridge IELTS 10 Academic Listening Test 4 (Questions 11-15) (Online Test)

Welcome to Manham Port, where a thousand years of history are brought to life. All the family can enjoy a day out at Manham: visit our copper mine, see models of the machinery it used, have your photo taken in nineteenth-century costume, experience at first hand how people lived at different stages throughout history, and especially how children studied, worked and played.

The port of Manham is located in beautiful and peaceful countryside, on a bend in the great River Avon, and developed here because it’s the highest navigable point of the Avon – boats can go no higher up this river – and proved a handy place to load and unload cargo to and from the sea, which is over 23 miles away. A small port was already established here when, about 900 years ago, tin was discovered nearby, though it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution, when a tremendous need for metals of all kinds developed, that Manham expanded to become one of the busiest ports in the country. And because it was already so busy, prospectors began to look for other minerals, and by the end of the nineteenth century, lead, copper, manganese and arsenic were added to the cargos leaving Manham.

In the early days, the ores had been smelted – or processed – in the same area they were mined. But, as demand grew, the smelting process required huge factory furnaces or fires to melt the metal from the rock and there was not enough coal in the local area, so the rocks containing minerals had to be shipped long distances.

Sadly, in the twentieth century, the great port of Manham declined, and thousands of workers were forced to emigrate out of the area. The building at the port fell into disrepair, and the place became almost forgotten. But then, the Manham Trust was formed to conserve the historical resources of the area. It organised scores of local volunteers to remove undergrowth to find the original outlines of the installations. It then brought in paid professionals to match installations with maps of the original port complex and to set about reconstructing it. Today you can see the results of this ambitious programme of restoration. The intention, and we believe this will be realised before the end of the year, is to return Manham Port to the condition it reached at its peak as ‘the greatest copper port in the country’.