MineArchiveAll mines
Mines 1–100 of 1174, A–Z (page 1 of 12).
| Mine | Region | Worked | Commodities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abercorris Slate Quarry Its 1880s operator, the Abercorris Slate and Slab Company Limited, collapsed into the landmark 1887 court case Levy v Abercorris Slate and Slab Co, still cited today in English company law on the nature of a debenture. |
Gwynedd | Quarrying began on Craig-y-Fachddu Farm land in the mid-1840s.–Commercial slate extraction ended in the early 1950s. | Slate |
| Abercwmeiddaw Slate Quarry A pair of curious 'binocular' tunnels, bored side by side into the hillside in 1864, survive as the visible legacy of one of the world's first mechanical tunnel-boring machines -- a working prototype too hard to steer, abandoned after cutting barely 30 metres of rock. |
Gwynedd | Quarrying probably began in the 1840s.–Worked until 1938. | Slate |
| Abercynon Colliery Eighteen men died sinking it, and after ninety-two years of working it shut in 1988 with an estimated twenty-five years of coal still in the ground. |
Rhondda Cynon Taf | July 1896–1988 | Coal |
| Aberdaunant Mine One of a chain of workings along the 6km Van lode, sold in 1868 to the same London company that ran the much larger, richer Van Mine nearby. |
Powys | 1800–late 1870s | Lead, Copper |
| Abergorki Colliery The colliery that made Treorchy: opened as a level in Cwm Orci in 1859 by a former Bute Merthyr manager, and by 1908 employing 2,278 men in a town the Bute estate had laid out around it. |
Rhondda Cynon Taf | 1859–1938 | Coal |
| 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 1500–2003 | Slate |
| Aberpergwm Colliery A Vale of Neath anthracite colliery, still one of the last deep anthracite mines working in Wales. |
Neath Port Talbot | 1811–1985 (reopened 1996) | Coal |
| 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 | Oil Shale |
| Addis Hill Colliery A free miner’s gale near Cinderford, worked in four separate bursts across ninety years by five owners, and surrendered to the Crown in 1935 having outlived the colliery it had been swallowed by. |
Gloucestershire | By 1841–1935 | Coal |
| 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 |
| Afton Colliery Afton takes its name from the River Afton, the same stream Robert Burns made famous in 'Sweet Afton' decades before the colliery itself was ever sunk. |
East Ayrshire | 1871–1948 | Coal |
| 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–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 | 1850s (curling stones)–ongoing (curling stones); 1907 (roadstone, short-lived) | 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 |
| Ale and Cakes Mine One of the three founding mines of United Mines, whose combined workings, once rebuilt by the engineer John Taylor in the 1820s, struck what was at the time the richest copper lode in the world. |
Cornwall | by 1780–c. 1870 | Copper, Tin |
| All Profit Colliery Named by its free miners for what they hoped to get out of it, and granted in 1842 on a plot fixed by a bridge and a turnpike road — 370 tons in its best recorded year. |
Gloucestershire | 1842–After 1880 | Coal |
| 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 |
| Allington Quarry Twenty million tonnes of Kentish ragstone came out of it; what made it a protected site was the ice-age fissures the quarrying exposed. |
Kent | By the 1790s–2001 | Limestone |
| 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 | 1561–No reliable date for the end of extraction has been located. | 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 |
| Annesley Colliery The last pit in the Leen Valley, working for 135 years and ending deep mining in the Ashfield district when it stopped in January 2000 — its village listed as a conservation area the year before it closed. |
Nottinghamshire | 1867–January 2000 | Coal |
| Ansley Hall Colliery Worked out after nine years, saved by inclined headings, and kept alive for another seventy — until its owner bought the whole Ansley Hall estate rather than let a rival sink a pit on top of him. |
Warwickshire | 1874–1959 | Coal |
| Apedale Colliery Two of North Staffordshire's worst mining disasters happened here, seven years apart — and the pit that killed 32 men and boys is now where visitors go underground for a guided tour. |
Staffordshire | By 1855, possibly earlier–1998 | Coal |
| Applethwaite Fell Slate Works Green slate off the fell above Windermere, worked by a builder and slate merchant from the town below. |
Cumbria | Working by 1888–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Slate |
| Arcow Quarry A Ribblesdale quarry that began cutting flagstones in the 1700s and now sends roadstone out by rail from a siding reopened in 2016. |
North Yorkshire | 18th century, as Arcow Wood Quarry–Still active | Sandstone |
| 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 | 1946–1967 | Coal |
| Arkendale Mine Two hundred and forty-eight people worked here in 1883. In 1905 there were four. |
North Yorkshire | In the returns from 1882–1905 | Lead |
| Arn Gill Mine A judge infamous for sending men to their deaths in the 1680s ended up, purely by descent, giving his name -- by way of his great-great-granddaughter -- to a Yorkshire lead mine two centuries later. |
North Yorkshire | 1751–1920 | Lead |
| Asfordby Colliery The last deep coal mine sunk in England, closed after just six years when a 1997 flood compounded persistent geological problems -- described afterwards as the least successful coal mine ever conceived. |
Leicestershire | 1991–1997 | 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–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 |
| Auchincruive Colliery Its coal came from two directions at once -- cautious stoop-and-room under the streets of Prestwick, and full longwall panels run out beneath the Firth of Clyde itself. |
South Ayrshire | 1911-12–1973 | Coal |
| Auchlochan Colliery Auchlochan No. 9 went out closing the book on deep mining at Coalburn altogether -- and did it, by chance rather than design, on Friday the 13th. |
South Lanarkshire | 1890–1968 | Coal, Fireclay |
| Auckland Park Colliery Its 430 coke ovens turned the whole output into coke for Bolckow, Vaughan's own ironworks, and the waste gas from them heated the colliery's boilers. |
County Durham | 1864–1946 | Coal, Fireclay |
| Augill Mine A Stainmore lead mine whose 1843 smelt mill still stands, and whose ore proved so disappointing that the venture was short-lived. |
Cumbria | By 1843–1896 | Lead |
| Babbington Colliery The mine that took Nottinghamshire from small shallow pits into large-scale deep coal mining, worked continuously for 145 years before becoming one of the county's biggest loss-makers. |
Nottinghamshire | 1841-42–1986 | Coal |
| Backworth Colliery Nine shafts over 165 years, ending with the deepest pit in the Northumberland coalfield and one of the last steam-worked colliery railways in Britain. |
Tyne and Wear | 1818–1980 | Coal, Fireclay |
| 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 |
| Bagalow Quarry Men lowered down a sea cliff on ropes, hauled by a whim that a donkey walked round. |
Cornwall | 1834–Early 20th century | Slate, Limestone |
| 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 |
| Bagtor Mine For all its ambition -- a new 60-foot waterwheel, three shafts, fresh adits -- Bagtor's 1860s revival yielded just 15 tons of tin in its entire working life. |
Devon | 1851–1866 | Tin, Copper |
| 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 |
| Ballochmyle Colliery A small Auchinleck pit whose name is now attached to a quarry, a viaduct and a Burns poem — and almost never to the colliery. |
East Ayrshire | Working by 1880–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Coal |
| 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 | c.1420-1530 (medieval)–1885 | Copper, Iron, Manganese |
| Bank Hall Colliery Closed not because the coal ran out but because the cutter picks kept striking pyrites nodules in the coal and sparking firedamp ignitions. |
Lancashire | 1869–17 April 1971 | Coal |
| Bankend Colliery A 1910 Medical Officer of Health survey of miners' housing recorded the row of company-owned houses at Bankend in unflinching physical detail -- stone-built, no damp course, unventilated wood floors, a pail privy per house -- a rare surviving snapshot of what a Lanarkshire mining row actually offered by way of shelter. |
South Lanarkshire | uncertain (mining district from 1857)–1920s (underground); opencast later | Coal |
| 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 |
| Bardykes Colliery Sunk on the site of a former infectious disease hospital, the colliery was known locally as the 'Spittal Colliery' for that reason. |
South Lanarkshire | 1874–1962 | 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 |
| Baron's Quay Mine One of four abandoned Northwich rock salt mines covered by a 2004-2007 stabilisation programme. |
Cheshire | to 19th century | Salt |
| 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 |
| Bathville Colliery Bought for £10,000 in 1859 by a Glasgow coalmaster who put a brickworks on it within months — because the fireclay coming up with the coal was worth as much as the coal. |
West Lothian | By 1859–After 1902 | Coal, Fireclay |
| Beamish Colliery Two hundred and three years from the first sinking in 1763 to closure in 1966, and the pit around which the Joicey coal empire was built. |
County Durham | 1763–1966 | Coal |
| Beans and Bacon Mine A scheduled Bonsall Moor lead mine notable for preserving nearly every rock-breaking method used across the district's mining history within a single small site. |
Derbyshire | By 1740–1925 | Lead |
| Bearpark Colliery A coking-coal pit for a hundred and twelve years, whose owners renamed themselves twice after the coke rather than the coal. |
County Durham | 1872–1984 | Coal, Fireclay |
| 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 |
| Bebside Colliery A Blyth-side steam-coal pit of the 1850s, worked for the shipping trade and finished before the industry was nationalised. |
Northumberland | 1858–1926 | Coal |
| 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 |
| Beckwith Mine Its early riches were discovered by chance, when lead ore was found lodged in the spokes of a passing cart wheel -- a find so productive that it funded the founding of the Manx Northern Railway, built specifically to carry the mine's ore to Ramsey for shipping. |
Isle of Man | 1831–c. 1866 | Lead |
| Bedford Colliery A pit known in its own day as fiery: in 1886 a man drawing props saw his lamp flame turn blue, said nothing, and thirty-eight died. |
Greater Manchester | 1876–1967 | Coal |
| 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 | 1905–1981 | Coal |
| Bedlington 'D' Colliery A Bedlington colliery run successively by the Bedlington Coal Co. and the NCB until 1968. |
Northumberland | 1855–1968 | Coal |
| Bedwas Navigation Colliery The owners banned the miners' union after riots over a 20 per cent pay cut, and a breakaway union took its place at the pit for a decade. |
Caerphilly | 1912–May 1985 | Coal |
| Bedwellty Pits Twenty-seven killed in 1865, six of them boys under sixteen — reported to the country in engravings of the colliery and of the funeral. |
Blaenau Gwent | No reliable opening date has yet been located.–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Coal |
| Beech Tree Colliery Sunk in 1873, then left almost untouched for over forty years after a rival company allegedly bribed its way to the best coal underneath it — a story the colliery's own final closure, drowned by clay-borne floodwater in 1958, only adds to. |
West Midlands | 1873-74 (sunk); 1919-21 (working began)–1958 | 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 |
| Beezy Mine Shallow lead workings on the Ure-Swale watershed whose spoil is rich in zinc ore the miners never recognised, worked before 1765 and abandoned before records began. |
North Yorkshire | Before 1765–Before 1861 (still listed 1863-74) | Lead |
| Beldi Hill Mine A dispute over who actually owned the lead beneath Beldi Hill ran for over three decades and was only settled after an appeal to the House of Lords. |
Yorkshire | early 1700s–1883 | Lead |
| Belowda Mine A tin mine on a granite beacon in mid-Cornwall, its engine house, boiler house and smithy all still standing. |
Cornwall | Late 19th century–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Tin |
| 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 |
| Bentyfield Mine Worked jointly by the London Lead Company and the Alston Moor Mining Company, and linked by tramway to the neighbouring Whitesike mine -- together protected as a single Scheduled Monument. |
Cumbria | 19th century–uncertain (declining by 1882) | Lead |
| 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–mid-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–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 |
| Bideford Black Mine Devon’s only worked coalfield produced a pigment rather than a fuel: the black that camouflaged tanks in the Second World War and went into Max Factor’s mascara came out of adits under Bideford. |
Devon | By the 13th century (pigment); commercial mining from the 1760s–1969 | Mineral Black, 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 | medieval–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 |
| Billingsley Colliery Four separate attempts to make coal pay at Billingsley over 130 years, and four failures — one of them ending with the promoter fleeing the country ahead of his creditors. |
Shropshire | 1794–September 1921 | Coal, Ironstone |
| Bilsthorpe Colliery Struck by three separate multiple-fatality disasters across seven decades -- a shaft-sinking piping collapse in 1927, twin firedamp explosions in 1934, and a roof collapse in 1993 -- with 77 deaths recorded at the pit in total across its working life. |
Nottinghamshire | Sinking began in July 1925 under the Stanton Ironworks Co. Ltd–Closed in 1997. | Coal |