MineArchiveAll mines
Mines 1–100 of 471, A–Z (page 1 of 5).
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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); 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 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 | fluorite, Lead |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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); 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Carnon Mine A Cornish tin mine worked from cast-iron cylinder shafts sunk into an artificial island in a tidal creek, closed after only six years despite turning a profit. |
Cornwall | 1824–1830 | Tin, Gold |
| Carrock Fell Mine The only mine outside Cornwall and Devon to have produced wolfram at scale |
Cumbria | 1854–1981 | Tungsten, Copper, Arsenic, Lead |
| Castell Carn Dochan Mine A small Welsh gold mine named for the ruined thirteenth-century castle on the crag above it, the most easterly mine of the Merioneth gold-mining district. |
Gwynedd | 1862-63–1904 or 1905 | Gold, Silver |
| 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 |
| Castlecaldwell Feldspar Mine The feldspar and kaolin dug here directly supplied the founding of Belleek Pottery, still Ireland's best-known ceramics maker. |
County Fermanagh | Deposits identified 1853; mining developed through the 1850s-60s–1940s (last feldspar working) | Feldspar, China Clay |
| 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 |
| Cilgwyn Quarry Reputed to be the oldest slate quarry in Wales, worked since the twelfth century for its distinctive bright red and purple slates. |
Gwynedd | worked from the 12th century–1956 | Slate |
| 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 |