MineArchiveAll mines
Mines 1–100 of 364, A–Z (page 1 of 4).
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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); revived mid-19th century–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 | 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Big Pit Now Wales's National Coal Museum, with underground tours led by former miners |
Torfaen | 1880–1980 | Coal, 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Botallack Mine Clifftop engine houses with workings extending under the sea |
Cornwall | 1500s–1895 | Tin, Lead, Cobalt, Copper, Arsenic, Silver |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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); resumed into the 20th century–early 20th century (exact date unrecorded) | 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 Lead, zinc and silver mine near Talybont, worked mainly 1889-1923, peak workforce around 300. |
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 | 1889–1986 | 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 Galver Mine For all its Victorian investment — seventy miners, a shaft sunk to 130 fathoms, two purpose-built engine houses — Carn Galver's total recorded output across its working life came to just 150 tons of black tin, a genuinely modest return for the scale of effort put into it. |
Cornwall | worked early 19th century (three main periods: to 1840; 1851-1869; 1871-1875)–1875 | Tin |
| Carrock Fell Mine The only mine outside Cornwall and Devon to have produced wolfram at scale |
Cumbria | 1854–1981 | Tungsten, Copper, Arsenic, Lead |
| Castle-an-Dinas Wolfram Mine One of only two mines in Britain ever worked for tungsten and nothing else, dug straight through the middle of an Iron Age hillfort |
Cornwall | 1917–1957 | Tungsten |
| Cavanacaw Gold Mine Northern Ireland's only working gold mine; operated by Galantas Gold on ground first explored by Rio Tinto in the 1980s |
County Tyrone | from 1995 (planning permission); late 1990s (opencast working began) | Gold |
| CB Mine CB Yard's powder house was deliberately built well away from the rest of the works — a small, hexagonal building whose isolation is itself the clearest surviving evidence of just how seriously Georgian mine operators took the risk of a gunpowder store going up. |
North Yorkshire | Bathurst family acquired mineral rights 1654–1883 (CB Mining Company); smaller operations elsewhere in the dale continued to 1912 | Lead |
| Cefn Coch Gold Mine The fourth-richest of the historic Dolgellau gold belt mines |
Gwynedd | 1843–1914 | Gold |
| Cefn Coed Colliery Seven years to sink and three earlier failures — for the deepest anthracite mine in the world |
Neath Port Talbot | Sinking begun 1921; completed 1928–20 April 1968 | Coal |
| Charterhouse Roman Mines One of Roman Britain's earliest and most strategically important mining sites, worked to pay Roman soldiers |
Somerset | 49 AD–1878 | Lead, Silver |
| Chatterley Whitfield Colliery Scheduled monument; one of Britain's best-preserved deep coal mines |
Staffordshire | 1750–1976 | Coal |
| Chellaston Alabaster Mines For a century, small carved figures made from this one Derbyshire village's stone were traded as far as Iceland and Croatia — until a single Act of Parliament in 1550 wiped out the market almost overnight. |
Derbyshire | early 14th century–1978 | Gypsum |
| Chewton Mineries Chewton and St Cuthbert's, worked by two entirely different lordly families under two separate customary 'liberties', sat close enough together on the same hillside that their operations repeatedly ended up fighting each other over water — neighbours by geology, rivals by law. |
Somerset | 1541 (first documented); probably earlier–1883 | Lead |
| Chilmark Quarries A stone quarry became one of Britain's biggest wartime bomb stores — and the only such RAF depot to come through the war unscathed |
Wiltshire | Worked from medieval times, reputedly from Roman times–Quarrying ceased c.2007; reopened 2019 | Limestone |
| Chislehurst Caves Twenty-two miles of chalk and flint mine that spent the Blitz as an underground town of 15,000 people |
Kent | at least the 13th century–1830s-40s | Chalk, Flint |
| Chislet Colliery Started by a German company in the weeks before war broke out with Germany, and finished off by the end of steam trains. |
Kent | Sinking from May 1914; coal reached 1919–1969 | Coal |
| Clashach Quarry Desert dunes turned to stone, cut on the Moray coast and shipped to the Museum of Scotland, a New York memorial and the Sagrada Familia |
Moray | from Early 1800s | Freestone |
| Clearwell Caves Worked continuously by Forest of Dean 'Free Miners' under an ancient birthright dating back centuries; still Britain's only working ochre mine |
Gloucestershire | from Bronze Age | Iron, Ochre |
| Cligga Head Dramatic cliff-edge WWII-era adits |
Cornwall | pre-1825–1945 | Tin, Copper, Arsenic, Tungsten, Silver |
| Clipstone Colliery Its 1953 headstocks were the tallest in Europe when built and still stand as a listed landmark today |
Nottinghamshire | 1922–2003 | Coal |
| Clogau Gold Mine The source of the gold nugget in every British royal wedding ring since 1923 |
Gwynedd | 1854–1998 | Gold, Copper |
| Coalcleugh Coalcleugh was worked out for lead by 1878, mothballed for over twenty years, and then reopened not for lead at all but for zinc — the same ground yielding a second, entirely different commodity to a different company once the first one had given up on it. |
Northumberland | 17th century–1878 (Beaumont); reworked to 1921 | Lead, Zinc, Fluorspar |
| Coalisland Collieries Both halves of the town's name come from the industry — coal from the pits, island from the canal basin dug to carry it out |
County Tyrone | First reported 1654–Largely ended by 1920; final workings to the 1960s | Coal, Fireclay |
| Cobscar Mill Cobscar's most distinctive surviving feature isn't the mill itself but its chimney — deliberately built well away from the smeltmill and connected by a long flue, a design meant to carry the poisonous lead fumes safely clear of the works below. |
North Yorkshire | built 1762–c. 1830 (main working); refurbished 1848 | Lead, Zinc |
| Combe Down Stone Mines Ten years and 400,000 cubic metres of concrete were needed just to stop a Georgian stone mine collapsing under the village built on top of it. |
Somerset | 1720s–mid-19th century | Limestone |
| Combe Martin Silver Mines Silver from here reputedly helped fund Edward III's wars with France |
Devon | 1292–1880 | Silver, Lead |
| Coniston Copper Mines Extensive Lake District workings with a popular history trail |
Cumbria | 1590s–early 20th century (residual activity to 1956) | Copper |
| Conlig and Whitespots Lead Mines Once produced a third of Ireland's lead output; closed after a Marquis bought out the leases to protect his nearby home |
County Down | 1780–1910 | Lead |
| Cononish Mine Scotland's only currently operating gold mine |
Stirling | from 1988 | Gold, Silver |
| Consolidated Mines The largest single copper producer in the world at its peak, in the district once called 'the richest square mile in the Old World' |
Cornwall | 1782–1870 | Copper, Tin, Arsenic, Zinc |
| Cook's Kitchen Mine A photograph taken around 1893 shows miners actually riding Cook's Kitchen's man engine in operation — a rare surviving image of a piece of equipment that, elsewhere, usually survives only as a ruined engine house with nothing to show what it once looked like in use. |
Cornwall | worked for copper by early 18th century; tin from mid-19th century–1913 | Copper, Tin, Arsenic |
| Coombefield Quarry A 135-million-year-old fossilised dinosaur footprint, uncovered by quarrying at Coombefield in 2002, was significant enough to make national news twice over — once for its discovery, and again in 2009 when it was stolen from the site. |
Dorset | 1890s–working life ended by 2006 | Freestone |
| Corby Ironstone Quarries Its dragline stood five feet taller than Nelson's Column and was, briefly, the largest walking excavator on Earth |
Northamptonshire | Worked on an industrial scale from 1881–Ironstone working ended in the 1970s-80s | Iron |
| Cornelly Quarries Half its output never becomes aggregate — it is ground into flux, because the stone is over 97 per cent pure |
Bridgend | from Industrial-scale working from the Industrial Revolution | Limestone |
| Cortonwood Colliery The pit where the 1984-85 strike started — now a retail park with a memorial in the car park's shadow. |
South Yorkshire | 1873–25 October 1985 | Coal |
| Craig-y-Mwyn Mine Craig-y-Mwyn's £20,000-a-year Georgian heyday sits alongside evidence that people may have been working the same hillside for lead since Roman times — a span of well over a thousand years of intermittent extraction from one mountainside. |
Powys | 1692–19th century (exact final date unrecorded) | Lead |
| Croesor Quarry Croesor and its neighbour Parc quietly made British industrial history in the 1890s: the electric locomotives Kellow introduced there were the first ever used underground in a British slate quarry, years before electric haulage became common practice anywhere else in the industry. |
Gwynedd | 1846 (small-scale); companies formed by 1861–1930 | Slate |
| Cwm Elan Mine Cwm Elan's origin story is a small irony of mining history: the lead vein that eventually supported a £30,000 Victorian mining company was found not by a prospector but by a farm labourer digging an ordinary drainage ditch. |
Powys | 1796 (vein discovered); main working from 1871–September 1877 | Lead, Zinc |