Holyfield Mine

Overview

Holyfield appears in the 1888 List of Mines at Alston under the Holyfield Mining Company with the single word 'Exploring' where the other entries record a mineral. The ground was not new: the Holyfield Sun Vein at Nattrass had been surveyed, sectioned and engraved as a mine plan by Dickinson and Sopwith in 1828, sixty years before that return.

History

The 1888 List of Mines under the Metalliferous Mines Act enters Holyfield at Alston, owned by the Holyfield Mining Co. of Alston, with the remark 'Exploring'. That is the whole of what the return says: a company, a place, and the state of not yet having found anything worth returning. What makes the entry worth keeping is the ground it refers to. The Holyfield Sun Vein at Nattrass, on the Cumberland side of Alston Moor, had been mapped in detail long before: a mine plan and section of the vein, drawn at about 37 inches to the mile, was engraved by J. Dickinson and Thomas Sopwith in 1828 and survives in Carlisle Library. Sopwith was the North Pennines' great mine surveyor, and a vein he had drawn was not unknown ground. A company was still exploring it sixty years later, which says something about how thoroughly Alston Moor had been picked over by the 1880s and how little was left to find.

Geology

Alston Moor is the northern block of the North Pennine orefield, where lead occurs in near-vertical veins cutting the Carboniferous limestones, sandstones and shales, richest where a vein crosses a competent bed. The Holyfield veins at Nattrass are part of that system — the gazetteer records the Holyfield Sun Vein by name from the 1828 survey. Nothing read for this record establishes what the 1888 company was following or what it found.

Geological setting: Veins and Lodes (historical documentary reference)

Workings

Not established. A venture returned as exploring had by definition not reached production, and nothing read describes its shafts or levels; what survives from the earlier working is the 1828 plan and section of the Sun Vein rather than a description of the ground.

Closure

No closure date has been established, and it is not established that the 1888 venture ever became a producing mine.

What remains

Not established. No dated site report or photograph of this working has been found.

Not established. Nothing read for this record describes what survives at Nattrass.

Related mines

• Morallee Fell Mine — Two ventures returned in the same 1888 statutory lists as exploring rather than producing — Holyfield on Alston Moor, Morallee Fell across the Tyne at Haydon Bridge — and kept here for the same reason: the archive holds many mines that succeeded and few of the ventures that never got that far.

Nearby mines

• Nent Force Level — 1.8 km NW
• Nentsberry Haggs Mine — 2.1 km NE
• Blagill Mine — 2.5 km N
• Whitesike Mine — 3.0 km SE
• Bentyfield Mine — 3.3 km SE

Straight-line distance, within 15 km. Show on the map.

Recorded claims

Individual factual claims, each attached to the source(s) that support it below. Where sources disagree, both are kept.

• The 1888 List of Mines records Holyfield at Alston, owned by the Holyfield Mining Co. of Alston, with the remark 'Exploring'. ¹
• The Old Cumbria Gazetteer records the Holyfield Sun Vein Lead Mine at Nattrass, Alston Moor (NY 734 447), citing a hand-coloured engraved mine plan and section at about 37 inches to the mile by J. Dickinson and T. Sopwith, 1828, held at Carlisle Library. ²

Sources

1. (primary) 1888 List of Mines under the Metalliferous Mines Act: Lead Mines (Durham District) — Mines Department, via the Durham Mining Museum
2. (secondary) Holyfield Sun Vein Lead Mine, Alston Moor (Old Cumbria Gazetteer) — Lakes Guides / Old Cumbria Gazetteer

Record created: 4 September 2026 · Last researched: 6 September 2026