MineArchiveAll mines
Mines 1–100 of 621, A–Z (page 1 of 7).
| Mine | Region | Worked | Commodities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aberllefenni Slate Quarry Reputed to be the longest continually worked slate mine anywhere in the world, closing only in 2003 after roughly five centuries of intermittent-to-continuous production. |
Gwynedd | Slates from the site are recorded roofing Plas Aberllefenni as early as 1500; organised commercial quarrying from around 1810–2003 | Slate |
| Ackton Hall Colliery Soldiers firing on a crowd at a Yorkshire colliery in 1893 killed two men and helped build the case for a new political party to represent working people in Parliament. |
West Yorkshire | Sunk from 1873–1985 | Coal |
| Addiewell Oil Works Built by James 'Paraffin' Young as the biggest oil works in the world in its day; anchors West Lothian's claim to be the birthplace of the global shale-oil industry, and its foundation stone was laid by the explorer David Livingstone. |
West Lothian | 1866–Refinery closed c.1921; candleworks c.1923; crude oil works continued to c.1956 | Oil Shale |
| Adelaide Mine A Cheshire rock-salt mine known for underground banquets in its 'Crystal Ballroom' chamber, flooded for good by a sudden 1928 water inrush. |
Cheshire | 1850–13 March 1928 (flooded) | Salt |
| Agecroft Colliery The 4 January 1859 shaft disaster was caused by nothing more exotic than a slipped leather signal band, after which the engineman — with no other way to know the cage's position — trusted to the sound of a bell alone. |
Greater Manchester | No.1 and No.2 shafts sunk 1844; No.3 and No.4 sunk 1894-1900; No.5 sunk late 1950s–March 1991 | Coal |
| Ailsa Craig Ailsa Craig's granite reaches a genuinely global audience in a way almost no other British quarry can claim: it is the source rock for the great majority of the world's curling stones, used at essentially every Winter Olympics since 1924. |
South Ayrshire | quarrying for curling stones from the 1850s; large-scale roadstone quarrying from 1907–roadstone quarry unprofitable and short-lived; curling-stone quarrying continues on an occasional basis today | Granite |
| Albion Colliery A colliery whose 1894 explosion killed 290 men and boys, the second-worst death toll of any British colliery disaster. |
Rhondda Cynon Taf | sunk 1884; opened August 1887–September 1966 | Coal |
| Alderley Edge Mines Roman and Bronze Age copper workings on a National Trust escarpment, including a 1995 Roman coin hoard find |
Cheshire | Bronze Age–1926 | Copper, Lead, Cobalt |
| Allenheads Mines Once the most productive lead mine in the North Pennines, yielding a seventh of the UK's lead output |
Northumberland | 1684–1896 | Lead, Fluorspar |
| Alport Mines A 1931 account by an Alport resident born in 1847 recorded that flue-cleaning workers ate only soft foods on the job, since anything handled directly risked carrying arsenic and lead residue from their hands to their mouths — a small, telling detail of just how contaminated the work really was. |
Derbyshire | 17th century–mid-1800s (mining); 1890s (smelting) | Lead |
| Alum Bay Sand and Copperas Workings Named for a mineral that was never there — Britain has no natural alum, and every attempt to make it here failed |
Isle of Wight | Alum attempted from 1561; sand and pyrite worked from the 16th century–Extraction now prohibited under SSSI designation | Silver Sand, Pyrite |
| Alva Silver Mine (Silver Glen) Few British mines come with a genuine buried-treasure story attached: forty tons of silver ore hidden in barrels, smelted ingots concealed under floorboards, and a mine deliberately filled in to hide it all from the government after a failed rebellion — documented history rather than embellished folklore. |
Clackmannanshire | 1712–1716 (main bonanza); cobalt worked intermittently later | Silver, Cobalt |
| Amberley Chalk Pits Its 1948 tunnel played a Californian gold mine in a James Bond film, and the locomotives still wear the paint |
West Sussex | 1840s–1960s | Chalk, Limestone |
| Ancaster Stone Quarries Worked since Roman times, this cream oolitic limestone has dressed buildings from Windsor Castle to York railway station and is still quarried today. |
Lincolnshire | worked since at least the Roman period–still working | Limestone |
| Argyll Colliery, Machrihanish A colliery so far from anywhere that it was cheaper to ship its coal to Rotterdam and Copenhagen than to cart it to Glasgow |
Argyll and Bute | Coal worked in the district before the 16th century; the modern colliery opened 29 May 1946–Ceased production 26 March 1967 | Coal |
| Ashburnham Furnace The last furnace working anywhere in a region that had made Britain's iron for two thousand years, closed not by any single disaster but simply outlasting all its rivals |
East Sussex | Working by the 16th century–Blown out finally in early 1813 | Iron |
| Askern Main Colliery The two winding engines installed here in 1912 were, at the time, the largest of their kind anywhere in Britain. |
South Yorkshire | Sinking started April 1911–20 December 1991 | Coal |
| Astley Green Colliery The last deep mine sunk in the Manchester coalfield; its headgear is the only survivor on the entire Lancashire coalfield |
Greater Manchester | 1908–1970 | Coal |
| Auchencairn Mine Worked three times for three different minerals over two centuries, and defeated by flooding every time |
Dumfries and Galloway | Probably worked for copper in the 18th century; reopened 1843 and again in the 1850s–1961 | Copper, Barite |
| Auchengeich Colliery The worst Scottish mining disaster of the 20th century, caused by a jammed belt on an unattended ventilation fan |
North Lanarkshire | 1908–1965 | Coal |
| Auchenharvie Colliery A Newcomen engine was pumping here in 1719 — seven years after the first one ever built — and its engine house is still standing |
North Ayrshire | From 1678; the Newcomen engine house dates from 1719–Early 20th century | Coal |
| Baddesley Colliery An engineer specified a brick casing around the underground boiler, the manager left it out, and thirty-two men died — the coroner's jury called it an error of judgement |
Warwickshire | Sunk from May 1850–1989 | Coal |
| Bage Mine A Derbyshire lead mine internationally known among mineralogists as the type locality of the rare lead minerals matlockite and phosgenite. |
Derbyshire | working by 1752–deep mining ceased 1907 | Lead |
| Baggeridge Colliery The last deep mine ever sunk in the Black Country — and the one whose closure ended three centuries of mining there for good |
West Midlands | First shaft sunk from 1899; production from 1912–2 March 1968 | Coal |
| Ballachulish Slate Quarries Once called the Slate Capital of Scotland; produced over half the country's domestic slate output at its peak |
Highland | 1693–1955 | Slate |
| Ballacorkish Mine Ballacorkish was already an old, exhausted, abandoned working by 1819 — and only became one of the Isle of Man's more successful 19th-century mines because a new Victorian company chose to look again at ground an earlier generation of miners had already given up on. |
Isle of Man | worked before 1819 (earlier phase, abandoned); revived 1862–1895 | Lead, Silver, Zinc, Ochre |
| Ballycastle Coal Mines Worked along dramatic sea cliffs for centuries; the last commercial coal extraction anywhere in Northern Ireland |
County Antrim | 16th century (earliest working); 1730s (organised export)–1967 (Craigfad Mine, final closure) | Coal |
| Bampfylde Mine A Devon copper mine on the River Mole with a rare surviving late-Victorian ore-processing complex, including the remains of at least five waterwheel pits. |
Devon | Copper working documented from the medieval period (radiocarbon dated to c.1420-1530); worked intermittently thereafter–1885 (final closure under the North Devon Mining Co) | Copper, Iron, Manganese |
| Bannockburn Colliery A pit that grew a farming hamlet into a 3,000-strong mining community within thirty years, and left behind an award-winning colliery silver band. |
Stirling | 1894–1953 (drift mine to 1963) | Coal |
| Barnack Quarries One of Britain's more unlikely nature reserves — its wildflower-carpeted hummocks are entirely the spoil of a medieval quarry that built two cathedrals, before Peterborough Abbey's monks eventually sold off nearly everything worth digging. |
Cambridgeshire | Roman period, worked intensively from the medieval period–c. 1500 (stone exhausted) | Limestone |
| Barnburgh Main Colliery Eighteen men were trapped when the floor itself rose up toward the roof in 1942 — four died, and it took six days to recover the last two bodies. |
South Yorkshire | Sinking started 1911; Barnsley seam reached 1914–16 June 1989 | Coal |
| Barony Colliery Only two headgears of this exact steel-frame design were ever built in Britain — and this is the only one still standing |
East Ayrshire | Sunk from 1907; coal reached 1912–1989 | Coal |
| Barrington Chalk Pit The cement works here grew out of one of the era's most notorious banking frauds — Farrow's Bank inflated its unfinished, barely-funded Dreadnought Cement venture to a paper value of £780,000 before the bank collapsed in 1920. |
Cambridgeshire | Site acquired 1914; first kiln in production July 1927–10 November 2008 | Chalk |
| Beaufort Iron Works The village of Beaufort is called Cendl in Welsh — a Welsh spelling of Kendall, the name of the brothers who built the ironworks it grew around |
Blaenau Gwent | 1779–Between 1873 and 1877 | Iron, Coal, Limestone |
| Beauport Park Roman Iron Mine A slag heap of over 100,000 tons found here in 1862, alongside a remarkably preserved Roman bath house later excavated by Time Team, marks what is thought to have been the third-largest ironworks in the entire Roman Empire. |
East Sussex | 1st century AD–3rd century AD | Iron |
| Beckermet Mine Beckermet's own closure in 1980 wasn't quite the end of Cumbrian haematite mining — that distinction belongs to the Florence Mine it had absorbed, which reopened independently afterwards and went on to become the last haematite mine working anywhere in Europe. |
Cumbria | opened 1903 (iron working in the district since the 12th century)–3 October 1980 (combined with Florence Mine from 1969) | Iron |
| Bedford United Mine Bedford United's five original setts — Wheal Marquis, Wheal Tavistock, Delves Kitchen, Ding Dong and South Bedford — were each too small to be worth working alone, but combined into a mine substantial enough to become Devon's third-biggest copper producer. |
Devon | 1841–1890 (main working); arsenic to 1920s | Copper, Tin, Arsenic, Tungsten |
| Bedlay Colliery The purpose-built mining village of Annathill grew up entirely around this one colliery, its three Miners' Rows, shops, butcher and pub all raised alongside the pit itself in 1905. |
North Lanarkshire | Sunk in 1905 by William Baird and Company to supply coking coal to the Gartsherrie Iron Works.–Closed 11 December 1981; filled in and demolished the following year. | Coal |
| Beer Quarry Caves Britain's oldest continuously worked industrial site, mined by the Romans for prized building stone |
Devon | 1st century AD–1920s | Freestone |
| Benallt Mine Requisitioned in 1941 because German submarines had cut off the manganese imports British steelmaking depended on |
Gwynedd | 1886–December 1945 | Manganese |
| Bentley Colliery The rescue of injured miners after the 1931 explosion, which involved carrying casualties two miles underground to the shaft, brought eight Edward Medals — an unusually high number for a single disaster. |
South Yorkshire | Proving borehole 1895; sinking from 1904-06; coaling from 1908–December 1993 | Coal |
| Bere Alston Silver-Lead Mines Royal silver mines on the Tamar, so productive that in 1296 they supplied 15% of all silver reaching the London mint |
Devon | 1292–16th century | Silver, Lead |
| Bersham Colliery One of North Wales's last two working collieries alongside Point of Ayr; survived two fatal 19th/20th-century explosions |
Wrexham | 1864 (sinking, as Glan-yr-afon); 1874 (main coal production)–1986 | Coal |
| Betteshanger Colliery The biggest of Kent's four collieries and the last pit in England's most militant coalfield to close |
Kent | 1924 (sinking); 1927 (first coal)–1989 | Coal |
| Betws Colliery Betws' 1994 management buyout, which kept the pit working for a further nine years after British Coal gave up on it, echoes the story of worker ownership that saved Tower Colliery in the same era — proof that a mine written off as uneconomic by its nationalised owner could still find a viable second life under different management. |
Carmarthenshire | development from 1974; Betws New Drift began production 1978 (predecessor Ammanford Colliery closed 1976)–June 2003 | Coal |
| Bevercotes Colliery Built to be worked by one man at a console instead of a team underground — and defeated within a few metres by roof conditions no automation could read |
Nottinghamshire | Sunk from the late 1950s; production from July 1965–7 May 1993 | Coal |
| Bickershaw Colliery A Victoria Cross holder, decorated for running a message through sustained machine-gun fire in 1918, died at Bickershaw in 1940 in the most ordinary of mining accidents — carbon monoxide poisoning, no different from what killed men here with no medals at all. |
Greater Manchester | First shaft sunk c.1830; Nos. 1 and 2 shafts from 1872; deepened 1877–13 March 1992 | Coal |
| Big Pit Now Wales's National Coal Museum, with underground tours led by former miners |
Torfaen | 1880–1980 | Coal, Iron |
| Bigrigg Mine Its documented history reaches back to the mid-12th century, when the mine known as 'Acknirby', just south of the village, was willed to a Cistercian monastery -- possibly the earliest documented iron mine anywhere in West Cumbria. |
Cumbria | Iron mining recorded in the Bigrigg area since at least the medieval period; the nearby Acknirby mine, possibly the earliest documented iron mine in West Cumbria, was willed to Holme Cultram monastery in the mid-12th century.–Iron mining in the wider Bigrigg/Moor Row district had ended by 1932. | Iron |
| Billingham Anhydrite Mine Thirty-three million tons taken out to make fertiliser — and then sealed and abandoned when the works switched to natural gas |
Stockton-on-Tees | Shaft sunk from September 1926; production from November 1927–Production ceased 1971; shaft capped 1978 | Anhydrite |
| Bilston Glen Colliery A pit built in the 1950s for a century of coal, closed thirty-seven years later with its memorial the most solid thing left. |
Midlothian | Sunk from 1952; production from 1963–1989 | Coal |
| Blackcraig Lead Mines Discovered by a soldier building a military road, worked in three separate bursts a century apart |
Dumfries and Galloway | 1763–1917 | Lead, Zinc |
| Blackdene Mine A Weardale lead and fluorspar mine worked since at least the fifteenth century, prized today by collectors for its fine purple fluorite. |
County Durham | worked by the early 15th century; fluorspar mining from early 20th century–1987 | Fluorspar, Lead |
| Blackhall Colliery The beach that made Blackhall famous on screen was, in reality, an industrial waste tip — the film shows it exactly as the colliery's own conveyor had left it. |
County Durham | Sunk from 1909; coal drawing began 1914–16 April 1981 | Coal |
| Blaen y Cwm Quarry A Blaenau Ffestiniog slate quarry served by the Rhiwbach Tramway to the Ffestiniog Railway. |
Gwynedd | trial workings c. 1818–8 May 1914 | Slate |
| Blaenavon Ironworks A pioneering Welsh ironworks, the first anywhere to use a steam-powered blowing engine in 1789, now a museum at the heart of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. |
Torfaen | 1788-89 (leased 1788, furnaces blown in 1789)–Iron production ceased 1904; steel manufacture in the wider works continued until 1938 | Iron, Coal |
| Blaenserchan Colliery This colliery kept producing coal for sixteen years after it stopped winding anything to its own surface, its output instead routed entirely underground through a neighbouring pit. |
Torfaen | Sunk 1890–28 August 1985 | Coal |
| Blakethwaite Mine Blakethwaite transferred its smelting operations to Surrender Mill in 1878 — the same Surrender Mill already recorded on this site, meaning two of Swaledale's best-known smelt-mill ruins were, for a few years at least, run as parts of the very same company's operation. |
North Yorkshire | 1819 (mine); 1821 (smelt mill)–1878 (smelting); worked intermittently after | Lead |
| Blantyre Colliery The site of Scotland's worst-ever mining disaster: an 1877 explosion that killed 207 men and boys, followed by two further fatal explosions and accidents at the same colliery group over the next two years (see Disasters, below). |
South Lanarkshire | William Dixon's pits at High Blantyre were sunk during the 19th century.–Coal production ended in August 1957 after the partial collapse of No. 1 pit's shaft. | Coal |
| Blue John Cavern Blue John is so rare that only about fifteen veins of it are known to have ever existed anywhere on Earth — and eight of them are inside this one cavern. |
Derbyshire | from Documented from at least 1766; possibly worked earlier | Fluorspar |
| Bog Mine The Somme Tunnel takes its name not from any accident underground but from the war raging in France at the time it was dug — driven in 1917 purely to give unemployed miners paid work, a home-front answer to a battle its own workforce could hear about only from the newspapers. |
Shropshire | 1730s–1924 | Lead, Zinc, Barite |
| Bogside Colliery Bogside's own miners set national production records in the 1960s — a pit at the very top of its game, undone two decades later not by exhausted coal but by flood damage sustained in one of Britain's most bitter industrial disputes. |
Fife | opened 1957-59 (sources differ on the exact year)–1985-86 (sources differ on the exact year) | Coal |
| Bold Colliery Bold outlasted the 1984-85 strike itself, only for the National Coal Board to close it anyway seven months later — a pit that had survived floods, a fatal shaft accident and 110 years of continuous working, brought down by a balance sheet rather than the ground beneath it. |
Merseyside | 1875–1985 | Coal |
| Bonawe Iron Furnace The longest-lived charcoal-fired blast furnace in Scotland and now the most complete surviving charcoal ironworks in Britain. |
Argyll and Bute | 1753–1874-76 | Iron |
| Bonsall Leys Mines A scheduled monument whose ten parallel lead rakes are thought to be nationally unparalleled in their complexity -- Bonsall Leys packs more intensive small-scale post-medieval lead working into one site than almost anywhere else in the country. |
Derbyshire | Worked from the 1540s, when the site was known as Whitelow mines, though the extraction pattern suggests still older, probably medieval origins.–Lead working continued into the 19th century; a later phase of fluorspar recovery, evidenced by two surviving rusted cranes, followed once lead working ended. | Lead, Barite, Fluorspar |
| Botallack Mine Clifftop engine houses with workings extending under the sea |
Cornwall | 1500s–1895 | Tin, Lead, Cobalt, Copper, Arsenic, Silver |
| Bothwell Castle Colliery The government itself took direct control of this colliery in 1943, unsatisfied with its wartime output — a rare instance of the state stepping directly into day-to-day management rather than just regulating from outside. |
South Lanarkshire | Nos. 3 and 4 shafts sunk 1889–1959 (upper coal working ended; retained afterward as a pumping station) | Coal |
| Boulby Alum Quarries Fed by barrels of urine shipped from London, because the process needed ammonia and there was no cheaper source in the country |
North Yorkshire | 1650s–1871 | Alum |
| Boulby Mine Britain's deepest mine at 1.1km down; also hosts the UK's only deep underground physics laboratory |
North Yorkshire | from 1970s | Potash, Salt |
| Bowhill Colliery Known locally as 'the Josephine' after the chairman's daughter who opened it in 1895 — a name that outlived the coal company itself by seventy years. |
Fife | 1895 (coal); earlier ironstone working–May 1965 | Coal, Iron |
| Box Quarry Brunel's Box Tunnel revealed by accident just how much stone lay beneath the hill it was blasted through — the resulting mine grew into the largest in the country, 600 acres of underground passages centred on a chamber simply known as the Cathedral. |
Wiltshire | Worked from at least the 17th-18th century; commercial mining expanded rapidly after 1841–1968 | Freestone |
| Bradda Head Mines Clifftop workings below Milner's Tower, with shafts sunk below sea level |
Isle of Man | Bronze Age–1904 | Copper, Lead, Silver |
| Braich Goch Quarry Braich Goch's nearly two-century working life makes it one of the longest-lived slate quarries in Wales — and its underground chambers now draw more visitors as King Arthur's Labyrinth than they ever employed quarrymen at the site's Victorian peak. |
Gwynedd | 1787–1970 | Slate |
| Bramley Fall Quarry Supplied the gritstone for Leeds Town Hall and Kirkstall Abbey and was shipped as far as the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge. |
West Yorkshire | Worked since at least the 12th century–c.1930 | Sandstone |
| Brandelhow Mine Brandelhow's real claim to fame today has little to do with what came out of the ground: the same fellside where German miners once worked silver and lead for Elizabeth I became, in 1902, the very first piece of land the National Trust ever owned. |
Cumbria | worked by the 1560s (Elizabethan); reopened on a larger scale in 1819–early 1891 | Lead, Copper, Silver, Graphite |
| Brandon Flint Mines Worked on and off for 6,000 years; its Napoleonic-era knappers held the sole British Army contract for musket gunflints |
Suffolk | c. 4000 BC (earliest working); revived post-medieval period–1930s | Flint |
| Brightling and Mountfield Gypsum Mines A borehole drilled to look for coal found four seams of gypsum instead — and the mine it started is still working 150 years later |
East Sussex | from 1876 (Mountfield); 1963 (Brightling) | Gypsum, Anhydrite |
| Britannia Copper Mine Hundreds of thousands of people walk past this mine every year on their way up Snowdon, over a causeway it built. |
Gwynedd | First recorded around 1800–1916 | Copper |
| Brodsworth Colliery Once the highest-output three-shaft colliery in Britain, paired with Woodlands, one of the finest early garden villages built for a mining community. |
South Yorkshire | sunk October 1905 - 1907–7 September 1990 | Coal |
| Brora Colliery It worked Jurassic coal, not Carboniferous — and after its liquidator shut it in 1960 the twenty-five sacked miners bought it back and ran it as a co-operative |
Highland | Coal recorded at Brora from 1529; first shaft sunk 1598–1974 | Coal |
| Brownley Hill Mine Brownley Hill gave science one of its rarer minerals: alstonite, first identified here in the 1830s and named for the wider Alston Moor district the mine itself sits within. |
Cumbria | worked from the early 1700s–1966 | Lead, Silver, Zinc |
| Broxburn Oil Works Its spent waste alone built one of the largest artificial hills in Scotland, now a scheduled monument in its own right |
West Lothian | Small-scale working from the 1860s; the Broxburn Oil Company formed 1877–26 April 1927 | Oil Shale |
| Bryn Eglwys Quarry The quarry the narrow-gauge Talyllyn Railway was built to serve -- when the quarry closed for good in 1946 the railway nearly went with it, and its 1951 rescue by volunteers is now widely regarded as the birth of the heritage railway movement. |
Gwynedd | Leased in 1844 and worked commercially from 1847 by John Pugh.–Closed permanently after a serious collapse on 26 December 1946. | Slate |
| Bryntail Lead Mine More of its buildings survive intact than at almost any other Welsh metal mine — and it stands directly below a modern reservoir dam |
Powys | Worked from the late 18th century–1884 | Lead, Barite |
| Burngrange Oil Shale Mine A relatively new Scottish shale mine |
Midlothian | 1936–1962 | Oil Shale |
| Burrow Farm Mine Its engine house was built from another failed mine's stone, to hold a second-hand engine from a third site — and got four years' use before the field closed for good |
Somerset | 1860 (shaft sunk)–1883 | Iron |
| Bursledon Brickworks A brickworks kept whole because a motorway cut it in half — the surviving half is the last steam brickworks in the country. |
Hampshire | 1897–1974 | Brick Clay |
| Bwlch Glas Mine The dedicated tramway built to serve this mine failed and closed years before Bwlch Glas's own real production began — its mill was later built directly on top of the abandoned trackbed. |
Ceredigion | 1880s–1923 | Lead, Silver, Zinc |
| Cadeby Main Colliery Site of a 1912 double explosion that killed 91 men, more than half of them rescuers wiped out searching for the first blast's victims |
South Yorkshire | 1889–7 November 1986 | Coal |
| Cae Coch Sulphur Mine A distinctive orange-stained sulphur mine, at one point supplying over half the UK's WWI pyrite output |
Conwy | 1607–1942 | Pyrite |
| Cambergi Quarry Its founding company raised £200,000 in public shares to build the quarry, then went bankrupt after only a few months of actual production. |
Gwynedd | The Cambergi Slate Company Limited was formed in 1873; quarrying began around 1875.–Worked on by the Griffiths family until just before 1900, when the site was already marked disused on the Ordnance Survey map. | Slate |
| Cambokeels Mine Cambokeels' incline was built during the First World War by German prisoners of war — a small, easily overlooked detail that ties a routine Pennine fluorspar mine directly into the story of the war being fought at the same time on the other side of Europe. |
County Durham | 1868 (lead, Beaumont Company); reopened 1905 for fluorspar–1989 | Fluorspar, Lead |
| Cambrian Colliery Struck by two of the worst colliery explosions in South Wales history twenty years apart, and owned by the combine whose 1910 lockout at a neighbouring pit escalated into the Tonypandy Riots. |
Rhondda Cynon Taf | No.1 shaft sunk from 1872; No.2 from 1874; No.3 1889-91; No.4 from 1912–24 September 1966 | Coal |
| Cann Quarry Slate from here paved Piccadilly and tiled Kensington, hauled out first by a purpose-built canal and then a tramway engineered with input from Brunel. |
Devon | First recorded 1671; likely worked earlier–1915 | Slate |
| Cannop Colliery Pumped 1,140 million gallons of water out of the ground in a single year — and the cost of doing that eventually closed the pit |
Gloucestershire | Shafts sunk from 1906; deep coal reached 1909–1960 | Coal |
| Caphouse Colliery Home to the National Coal Mining Museum for England; its shaft may be the oldest still in everyday use in Britain |
West Yorkshire | 1770s-1780s–1985 | Coal |
| Carclaze Pit A French scientist wrote up this pit for the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1764 — a century before anyone realised it was sitting on a fortune in china clay |
Cornwall | Tin streaming from an unknown early date; china clay from 1851–Clay extraction ceased around 2002 | China Clay, Tin |
| Cardowan Colliery Over 50 men are recorded as having died at Cardowan across its working life, yet the explosion that most directly hastened its closure — in January 1982 — killed no one at all, injuring 25 severely enough that the colliery was shut down until the cause could be established. |
North Lanarkshire | Sinking from 1924; production from 1929–1983 | Coal |
| Carmyllie Quarries To move its stone the quarry owner built the steepest railway in Scotland ever worked by a passenger train — five miles from sea level to 600 feet |
Angus | Late 18th century–20th century (railway closed 1965) | Freestone |
| Carn Brea Mine One of the largest and most productive mines of the Camborne-Redruth district before its 1896 amalgamation folded its history into the combined Tincroft story. |
Cornwall | 1832 (amalgamation of Wheal Fanny, Tregajorran, Barncoose and Wheal Druid)–1913-14 (Carn Brea section); combined Tincroft mine continued to 1921 | Copper, Tin, Arsenic, Tungsten |