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Mines 1–100 of 1929, A–Z (page 1 of 20).

MineRegionWorkedCommodities
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

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