All mines
Recently added
- Medlyn Moor Mine 18 September 2026
- Gelligaer Colliery 18 September 2026
- Halamanning Mine 18 September 2026
- Wheal Ellen 18 September 2026
- Stafford Colliery 18 September 2026
- Balleswidden Mine 18 September 2026
Recently updated
- Llancaiach Colliery 18 September 2026
- Pendarves Mine 18 September 2026
- Burgham Mine 18 September 2026
- East Roman Gravels Mine 18 September 2026
- Shaw Beck Gill Mine 18 September 2026
- Wetshaw Mine 18 September 2026
New records across the archive: Atom feed.
Mines 1–100 of 1929, A–Z (page 1 of 20).
| Mine | Region | Worked | Commodities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aber Quarry Its neighbours supplied the stone for both Menai bridges; Aber is the only one of them left working. |
Anglesey | No reliable opening date has yet been located.–Still worked | Limestone |
| Aberaman Colliery An Aberdare valley pit that ended as the coalfield's workshop, stores and training centre |
Rhondda Cynon Taf | 1843–23 November 1962 | Coal |
| Aberbeeg Colliery Sunk about 1860 to catch the Tillery seam where a fault had dropped and thinned it. |
Blaenau Gwent | Sunk about 1860–Abandoned 19 April 1929 | Coal |
| 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 |
| Abercrave Colliery The upper Swansea Valley's last Drum anthracite drift, opened 1872 in an eighteen-foot seam and shut by the Coal Board in March 1967 with 450 jobs. |
Powys | 1872–March 1967 | Coal |
| Abercwmboi Colliery The Cap Coch pit where five men died in 1870 because the fluemen fell asleep and let the ventilating furnace burn low. |
Rhondda Cynon Taf | 1851 (working by 1828 on one account)–1962 | Coal |
| 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 | By 1500–2003 | Slate |
| Abernant Colliery Sunk to be a 2,000-man super pit working the Peacock seam from the deepest shafts in South Wales, it found the Peacock unworkable and survived for 25 years on a seam 1,200 feet up the shaft. |
Neath Port Talbot | Sunk 1954-1958–26 March 1988 | Coal |
| 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 |
| Aberthaw Limestone Quarry The Blue Lias here made a lime that set under water, and the quarry beside the works pioneered the method — crush the mixed rock, scalp out the clay — that every surviving Lias plant in Britain eventually copied. |
Vale of Glamorgan | Coastal working by the 1750s; present quarry 1913–Still active | Limestone |
| Abram Colliery A sudden outburst of gas in a seam only three years opened killed 48 men, over half of them under thirty. |
Greater Manchester | c. 1870–1933 | 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 |
| Acomb Colliery A Tyne valley pit that fed 41 coke ovens in the 1880s, reopened in 1909 and closed in 1952; its site is now a mine-water wetland. |
Northumberland | By the 1840s; new colliery opened 1909–29 August 1952 | 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 |
| Aislaby Quarry Blockstone cut here in the eighteenth century came back from the Whitby pier in 1964. |
North Yorkshire | By the 11th century–Still worked | Sandstone |
| Aitken Colliery A Fife Coal Company pit that employed around 1,300 men for sixty years and was still growing its workforce a decade before it shut. |
Fife | 1899–March 1963 | Coal |
| Aitkenhead Colliery Six of its seven recorded deaths were falls of roof or coal at the face, one of them put down plainly by the inspector to want of sprags. |
Glasgow | Returned from 1894; working by 1874–Returned to 1915; siding closed 1918 | Coal |
| Albert Colliery Fed the Penydarren Ironworks, the site of Richard Trevithick's pioneering 1804 steam locomotive run. |
Merthyr Tydfil | Working by 1901–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Coal |
| 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 |
| Aldridge Colliery Two pits, seventeen hundred people, coal and ironstone and brick in one company, and a liquidation chosen over a merger. |
Staffordshire | Company registered 13 February 1874–Liquidation 1930; sidings removed 1937 | Coal, Ironstone |
| 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 |
| Alexandra Quarry A remote Nantlle Valley slate quarry on Moel Tryfan that only became viable once a branch of the North Wales Narrow Gauge Railway reached it. |
Gwynedd | Lease obtained 1861; Alexandra Slate Company Ltd formed 1863–Closed 1914 (WWI); worked on reduced scale to 1939 | Slate |
| Alfreton Colliery Pioneered the conveyor-mounted double-ended trepanner, and was power-loading three quarters of its coal by the time its reserves ran out. |
Derbyshire | 1886–February 1968 | Coal |
| 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 |
| Allerton Bywater Colliery The last deep mine in the Leeds area, and the third colliery in a village that had been working coal since the fifteenth century; it took 1,060 jobs and millions of tonnes of abandoned coal down with it in 1992. |
West Yorkshire | 1875–1992 | Coal |
| 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 |
| Alloa Colliery Coal to Canada and timber back, in the ships of a partner's own line; the pits are returned separately only after 1915. |
Clackmannanshire | By 1894, possibly much earlier–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Coal, Fireclay |
| 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 |
| Alport Smelt Mill Its four-hundred-page treatment in an 1870 metallurgy textbook -- as a model of contemporary best practice -- makes it one of the best-documented Victorian lead smelters anywhere in England. |
Derbyshire | In use from 1845–Closed in 1874 or 1875 | Lead |
| Altofts Colliery A London coal factor's son cut the first sod on his twenty-first birthday, and the pit's manager went on to design his own coal-cutting machine. |
West Yorkshire | 1851–7 October 1966 | Coal |
| 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 closure date has yet been located. | Silica 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 |
| Alvecote Colliery A Tamworth pit whose miners stayed outside the union and worked through the 1912 strike, and whose subsidence drowned the fields beside the Anker into a nature reserve. |
Warwickshire | 1875–1942 (coal winding); shafts abandoned 1965 | Coal |
| Alveley Colliery Sunk on the far bank to meet workings that had already crossed under the Severn; its coal came back over the river by rope tramway, then by aerial ropeway. |
Shropshire | 1935 (production 1938)–31 January 1969 | Coal |
| 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 |
| Amington Colliery A Tamworth pit whose own miners voted themselves a wage cut and a longer week in 1921 to keep it open, and which then worked bord and stall with no underground machinery until the war. |
Staffordshire | 1862–1951 (coal winding); shafts abandoned 1965 | Coal, Fireclay |
| Ammanford Colliery Where the 1925 Anthracite Strike began — over the seniority rule — and which its new owners then closed in reprisal. |
Carmarthenshire | 1890–10 September 1976 | Anthracite |
| 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 |
| Annandale Colliery Reopened in 1934 not for its coal but for its clay, to keep a brickworks in bricks that were shipped to Ireland. |
East Ayrshire | 1857–1928; reopened 1934 | Coal, Fireclay |
| 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 |
| Anson Colliery A Cheshire pit closed in 1926 to pay for electrifying its neighbours; now an engine museum. |
Cheshire | 1890–1926 | 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 |
| Arbourseats Veins and Nay Green Mine A 1630 dispute over 'Backdale Side Rake' may be the earliest record of mining in Tansley Dale -- if, as suspected, Backdale was an old name for the dale itself. |
Derbyshire | Possibly 1630; firmly documented from 1732–Chiefly worked 1830s-1850s | Lead |
| 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 |
| Arkwright Colliery A 1938 Staveley drift mine whose abandoned workings gassed the pit village after closure, so that the whole of Arkwright Town was rebuilt across the road. |
Derbyshire | 1938–April 1988 | Coal |
| 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 |
| Arthur Colliery One of the string of pits the Lochgelly company worked across this corner of Fife, and one of the first of them to go. |
Fife | By 1905 in the official returns–Shut down by 1933 | Coal |
| 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 |
| Ashton's Field Colliery A Bridgewater colliery whose leftover take kept Brackley going for another thirty-five years after its own coal winding stopped. |
Greater Manchester | 1860s–Late 1920s (coal winding); pumping station to at least 1954 | Coal, Cannel Coal |
| 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 |
| Auchinraith Colliery A firedamp explosion killed six in 1930; a year later a notice at the pithead gave three hundred and fifty men one shift's warning that the pit was shutting. |
South Lanarkshire | 1872 (drawing coal by 1875)–16 August 1931 | Coal |
| Auchinreoch Colliery Four of the five deaths recorded here were haulage accidents, and the fifth was a girl of nineteen caught by the blades of a dross conveyor at the screens. |
East Dunbartonshire | Sinking in 1900–Idle by 1937; no closure date located | 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 |
| Auldhouseburn Colliery Nineteen men were cut off in the steep rise workings when the pit holed into flooded old workings in 1898; sixteen came out alive after a night underground. |
East Ayrshire | By 1873, probably from c. 1871–1911 | Coal |
| Avenue Colliery Clay Cross's Blackshale pit of 1881, whose name and whose tar lagoons long outlived it. |
Derbyshire | 1881 (Old Avenue 1857)–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Coal |
| Awsworth Colliery Coal, iron and brick in one company in the Erewash valley, under the viaduct that still stands. |
Nottinghamshire | 1857–1896 | Coal |
| Aysdalegate Mine Three years of production and a 268-foot shaft that is now a small roundabout; the ironstone it left was taken later from Spa Wood, with pillars kept standing to hold up the houses overhead. |
North Yorkshire | Held from 1863; production 1877–Production ended 1880 | Ironstone |
| Baads Colliery The oil company's coal mine: Baads No. 42 fed the Pumpherston retorts from 1908 and died with the shale industry in 1962, four hundred men hearing of it at a meeting. |
West Lothian | About 1908–1962 | Coal |
| 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 |
| Bagworth Colliery The last coal mine in Leicestershire, and the one whose subsidence brought down the village church — a medieval tower and all — in 1968. |
Leicestershire | 1828–February 1991 | Coal |
| Balgonie Colliery A Fife pit named for its owner's initials, worked for coal, clay and oil shale together, whose own bricks are built into a bridge beside the site. |
Fife | Sinking 1883–1885–1960 | Coal, Brick Clay, Mudstone |
| 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 |
| Balleswidden Mine Once St Just's biggest mine, it suffered a collapse in 1847 so large that its effects at surface resembled a minor earthquake, though no one was hurt. |
Cornwall | 1507 (earliest record)–1873 or 1875 | Tin, Copper |
| Ballidon Quarry A working limestone quarry that has taken the head of a dale, beside a deserted medieval village and its lone Anglo-Norman church. |
Derbyshire | Post-medieval–Still active | Limestone |
| 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 |
| Bamfurlong Colliery A four-pit Wigan colliery whose new shafts had to be tubbed with cast iron against quicksand, and where sixteen men and boys suffocated after a paraffin lamp set an engine house alight. |
Greater Manchester | By 1861–1936 | Coal, Cannel 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 |
| Bank Wood Quarry Three men, three years and 153 tons of slate in total — then the 1905 list returns it with nobody employed and the one word abandoned. |
Cumbria | 1902–Abandoned by 1905 | Slate |