Mines

Region

Commodity

77 mines beginning with D, of 1950.

Mine	Region	Worked	Commodities
Dale Head Copper Mine An eighteenth-century copper mine high among Dale Head Crags above the Newlands valley, with its hand-dressing floor left untouched since abandonment.	Cumbria	c. 1700–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Copper
Dalmellington Iron Works Once ran 14 blast furnaces producing 120,000 tons of pig iron a year from local ore and coal	East Ayrshire	1847–1921	Iron, Coal
Dalzell's Moor Row Mine An ironworks digging its own ore: the Maryport Hematite Iron Company worked this mine to feed its own furnaces.	Cumbria	In the returns from 1882–31 March 1926	Iron
Danescombe Mine A Tamar valley copper mine that turned to arsenic, and whose crusher house is now a holiday let	Cornwall	Working before 1837–After 1900	Copper, Arsenic
Dark Hill Colliery David Mushet took the Dark Hill gale in 1841 to feed the experimental ironworks next door where his son Robert would later invent tungsten steel — the coal was never the point.	Gloucestershire	By 1813–c. 1914	Coal
Darnley Lime Works Limestone leased here in 1610 and coal worked by 1615, with quarries, kilns and tramways running until the 1950s on ground now a country park.	Glasgow	By 1610–c. 1959	Limestone, Fireclay
Darran Colliery A pit thought safe enough for naked lights for forty years, until an explosion killed twenty-seven — five of them men who had gone in to fetch the others out.	Caerphilly	1868–1919	Coal
Daw Mill Colliery Once Britain's biggest coal producer; closed after the worst underground fire in the UK in 30 years	Warwickshire	1956 (sinking); 1959 (shaft completed)–2013	Coal
Dawdon Colliery Escaped the mass-casualty underground disasters that struck its neighbours at Seaham and Easington — but not the Luftwaffe, which killed 12 people in the colliery village in a single night in August 1940.	County Durham	Sinking from March 1900; production from 5 October 1907–25 July 1991	Coal
De Lank Quarries If a Victorian structure had to stand against the open Atlantic — Eddystone, Bishop Rock — the granite was likely cut here.	Cornwall	19th century or earlier–Still active	Granite
Deaf Hill Colliery Ninety years of one colliery's output returns, showing the coal trade change around a pit that never moved.	County Durham	1877–1967	Coal
Dean and Chapter Colliery The colliery's own streets were named after the great engineers of the industrial age — George Stephenson, Michael Faraday — for a community that dug the coal those very engineers' furnaces and engines depended on.	County Durham	Opened 1904–15 January 1966	Coal
Deep Navigation Colliery David Davies sent his own people abroad to study how continental European miners washed up after a shift — the result, opened in 1913, was the first pithead baths built anywhere in South Wales.	Merthyr Tydfil	Sinking from October 1873–29 March 1991	Coal
Deer Hills Baryte Mine A late, short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to extend the Caldbeck Fells' baryte-mining boom onto new ground beyond the exhausted Potts Gill workings.	Cumbria	Trialled from 1961 by McKechnie Bros of Widnes.–Abandoned soon after 1961	Barite
Deeside and Moelfferna Quarries In 1885 it sent Guinness a slate cistern fifty feet long, thought to be one of the largest stone tanks ever built.	Denbighshire	Deeside 1870, Moelfferna 1876–1947	Slate
Delabole Slate Quarry Seven hundred years of continuous working in a single hole, once claimed as the deepest man-made pit on earth	Cornwall	from Working recorded from at least the mid-1200s	Slate
Denaby Main Colliery Called "the worst village in England" by a magazine in 1899, and the pit whose owners evicted 750 tenant families during the Bag Muck Strike three years later.	South Yorkshire	1863–1968	Coal
Denend Colliery Two shafts at the head of Carden Den, worked independently of the two collieries either side of them, and gone before the Fife boom that swallowed the district.	Fife	Probably 1860s–1895	Coal
Denner Hill Quarries Quarrymen found this exceptionally hard building stone by probing the ground with metal rods called 'snipers' — a trade that stretches from 18th-century stone-cutters' leases to a last mason still working it in 1950.	Buckinghamshire	Principally worked 19th and early 20th centuries–c. 1950 (last recorded working of the stone)	Sarsen Stone
Derry Colliery, Coalisland Coal from a townland on the edge of Coalisland, raised by a horse gin in the 1830s and shipped by lighter to Belfast — and, in the end, the last coal mine in Ulster.	County Tyrone	By 1834–1970	Coal, Fireclay
Derrynoose Lead Mine One of at least 57 recorded shafts and adits once worked across the little-known South Armagh-Monaghan lead mining district -- a whole 19th-century industry now reduced, at Derrynoose itself, to 13 shafts and a spoil heap on a modern contamination survey.	County Armagh	Worked during the early-to-mid 19th century.–Abandoned by 1842	Lead
Desborough Ironstone Quarries Northamptonshire ironstone workings linked by tramway to the county's ironworks.	Northamptonshire	1859–closed in phases; final Rothwell Hill working closed by the late 1960s	Iron
Desford Colliery The most southerly deep pit of the Leicestershire coalfield, where an undermanager built the first hydraulic powered roof support out of a fire hydrant and three prototypes.	Leicestershire	1900 (coal from 1902)–10 February 1984	Coal
Devon Colliery Its 1864 Cornish pumping engine drew five tons of water a minute, and its beam engine house is one of only two left standing in Scotland.	Clackmannanshire	18th century–1960	Coal
Devon Great Consols Once the largest copper mine in Europe and a major world arsenic source	Devon	1844–1903	Copper, Tin, Arsenic, Tungsten
Devon United Mine A dump in a wood on the Tavy gave Britain its first recorded specimen of parkerite, a rare nickel bismuth sulphide, in 2004.	Devon	Copper from about 1820; East Wheal Friendship before 1835–1923	Copper, Arsenic, Tin, Tungsten
Diana Maria Mine A mine opened in 2017 to produce nothing but fluorite crystals for collectors	County Durham	2017 (opencast); 2018 (underground)–Still active	Fluorspar
Digby Colliery The Digby Colliery Company's original 1866 pit at Giltbrook, a small coal-and-bricks concern whose 1928 explosion inquest found men cutting coal without a flame lamp.	Nottinghamshire	1866–Between 1934 and 1939	Coal
Diglake Colliery Seventy-two of the 77 men drowned here in 1895 are still in the workings, sealed in after three skeletons were found in 1932-33.	Staffordshire	1870 (earlier pit 1733 to c. 1850)–June 1905	Coal
Dimple Mine A Matlock Bank lead mine that Farey recorded in 1809 as running the only mine steam-engine then working in Derbyshire.	Derbyshire	Working by 1807-09–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Lead
Dinas Isha Colliery Worked by the Ely Rhondda Colliery Company for three decades, employing over 100 men at its early-1900s peak.	Rhondda Cynon Taf	1874–25 November 1911	Coal
Ding Dong Mine Local legend held Ding Dong to be older than any Cornish mine but Dolcoath — supposedly worked since before the time of Christ — a claim that can be neither proven nor disproven, since the mine's documented history, though it stretches back to the reign of James I, simply doesn't reach far enough to settle the question either way.	Cornwall	documented from early 17th century; possibly prehistoric–1877 (main working); 1912-1915 and 1928 reopening attempts	Tin, Copper
Dinnington Colliery A church memorial in Dinnington names 74 men lost to this one colliery over its working life — though even that figure, researchers say, may not be the whole story.	South Yorkshire	Sinking started 1902; Barnsley seam reached summer 1904–1992	Coal
Dinorwig Slate Quarry Dinorwig's 1909-10 safety record was serious enough to reach the House of Commons and to be cited in a national Royal Commission inquiry into North Wales slate quarrying — a rare case of a single quarry's own casualty figures driving genuinely national safety scrutiny.	Gwynedd	1787–1969	Slate
Diphwys Casson Quarry Known as the 'mam-chwarel' (mother quarry) of the entire Ffestiniog slate district.	Gwynedd	1760s (Methusalem Jones)–1925 (sources differ)	Slate
Dirtlow Rake Mine One of the South Pennines Orefield's important lead lodes near Castleton, documented almost continuously via the surviving Castleton Barmaster Books.	Derbyshire	at least 17th century–20th century	Copper, Lead, Silver, Zinc, Barite, Fluorspar
Dirty Red Soil Mine Even its own name reads like a piece of miners' shorthand -- 'dirty' most likely describing the poorer, more heavily contaminated ore this working produced compared to its cleaner-sounding neighbour, Great Red Soil.	Derbyshire	to 19th century	Lead
Doc Mine Outside its entrance lie genuine Bronze Age remains, while underground the mine itself is mostly a product of the 19th century -- a rare case at Alderley Edge of surface and subsurface evidence separated by millennia standing side by side.	Cheshire	Mainly 19th century; Bronze Age activity nearby–Part of the workings open at the 1878 Abandonment Plan	Copper
Dockra Ironstone Pit Barrmill's ironstone pit of 1896, twenty-two fathoms to the Dalry clayband, whose ore went by tramway to the Glengarnock furnaces and whose bing ended up in a naval munitions depot.	North Ayrshire	1896–1918 (or 1921)	Coal, Ironstone
Dog Delf Colliery Ninety-four acres of thin irregular seam at Moseley Green that bankrupted at least one of its owners: "I expended £76 in surface equipment," Hodgkinson told the gaveller, eighteen months before he went under.	Gloucestershire	1872–1899 (gale forfeited)	Coal
Dolaucothi Gold Mines Only confirmed Roman gold mine in Britain; National Trust site	Carmarthenshire	c. 70 AD–1938	Gold
Dolcoath Mine Once the world's deepest tin mine, and Cornwall's biggest producer of black tin	Cornwall	1720s–1920	Tin, Copper, Arsenic, Silver
Dolfrwynog Mine Copper here was taken out of a peat bog as well as out of rock: the adjoining Turf Copper Mine, where copper-rich peat was cut, burnt and its ashes smelted, is unique in the British Isles.	Gwynedd	Working by 1824; renewed after 1851–Ceased in or by 1874; Buddlepit records work to 1919	Copper, Gold
Dolgoch Quarry Named after the Nant Dolgoch stream -- 'dol goch' means 'red meadow' in Welsh -- the quarry worked the same two slate veins as the much larger Bryn Eglwys Quarry barely a mile and a half away, and was twice revived by Bryn Eglwys's own idle workers during that quarry's later troubles.	Gwynedd	Discovered in January 1868 by local prospector W. W. Jones–April 1884	Slate
Donibristle Colliery A Fife pit whose workings ran under a square mile of moss, until the moss came in.	Fife	No reliable opening date has yet been located.–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Coal
Donisthorpe Colliery Britain’s Best Pit in 1951 and one of the last two collieries in the country still winding by steam when it shut in 1990 — with twenty-two new faces standing ready underground and only one of them started.	Leicestershire	1871–12 April 1990	Coal
Dorothea Quarry The last new Cornish beam engine ever built, bought by a Welsh slate quarry to keep a vertical vein dry	Gwynedd	1820s–1970	Slate
Double Arches Pit Opened in 1916 because the war cut off Belgian foundry sand — and it got its railway in 1919 because the quarry companies were banned from carting the sand by road.	Bedfordshire	1916–1985	Silica Sand
Douglas Castle Colliery The Earl of Home's own decision to let coal be mined beside his family's castle, to give the district work during the Depression, is the direct reason that castle no longer stands.	South Lanarkshire	by the 1910s–1950s (precise date unrecorded)	Coal
Douglas Head Mine Two men and one owner who was also his own agent, on a headland the island had been quarrying since before it mined anything.	Isle of Man	Working by 1902–Stopped 1902	Lead
Doulting Quarry Two metres of oolite sitting straight on Carboniferous limestone with millions of years of missing rock between them — and the stone of Wells Cathedral’s west front.	Somerset	Producing building stone in Roman times–Still active	Limestone
Doura Colliery Doura coal went to Holyrood and Edinburgh Castle in Mary Queen of Scots’ time, and the name was a household word in Ayrshire for the quality of it.	North Ayrshire	By the 16th century–Early 20th century	Coal, Fireclay
Dovegang Mine Dovegang's real historical significance lies underground and out of sight: the Longhead Sough, driven here in the 1630s by the same Dutch engineer who later drained the Fens, was the very first of the drainage soughs that went on to define Derbyshire lead mining for the next two centuries.	Derbyshire	already 'ancient' by 1652–gradually exhausted through the 19th century	Lead
Doward Iron Mines Mined so long ago that the Wye tourists of the 18th century, who described everything else in the gorge, did not know there had been mines here.	Herefordshire	Ancient; possibly Roman, certainly long before the 18th century–Last recorded working 1917	Iron, Ochre
Dowgang Mine The hush that carries its name was already working in 1773, and nobody knows when it began.	Cumbria	Hushing by 1773; in the returns from 1882–Standing by 1902	Lead, Zinc
Dowlais Ironworks The world's largest iron producer by the 1840s under the Guest family, and one of the few Welsh ironworks to keep making steel until 1987.	Merthyr Tydfil	19 September 1759–1987 (steel production ended)	Iron, Coal
Dowlow Works One of three great limestone quarries sharing Sterndale Moor, still working after 125 years.	Derbyshire	1899–Still active	Limestone
Dowpot Syke and Guttergill Mine Two Alston Moor lead groves named in Greenwich Hospital estate papers of the 1730s, still listed together as one mine in 1888.	Cumbria	By 1735, possibly earlier–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Lead
Drakewalls Mine Worked from a medieval open cutting to deep stopes, it was among Cornwall's richest tin mines in the 1860s, and the scene of an 1866 union strike broken by troops.	Cornwall	Medieval (tin streaming); open workings by c. 1540–c. 1910; 3 men employed in 1918	Tin, Copper, Arsenic, Tungsten
Driggith Mine Caldbeck Fells lead/copper mine, most substantially worked from the 1820s, reopened for barytes in 1926.	Cumbria	17th or 18th century–1940s	Copper, Lead, Silver, Zinc, Barite
Droitwich Salt Wells Its brine ran roughly 25 per cent salt by volume — saltier than the Dead Sea — which is exactly why it could rise straight out of the ground on its own	Worcestershire	Salt production from around 600 BC–1922	Salt
Drws-y-Coed Copper Mine Drws-y-Coed drew its workforce from across Britain's copper-mining world at once — Cornish miners recorded from 1761, Scots working alongside them, and, in the 1830s, an entire wave of miners and 'copper ladies' relocating from Anglesey's declining Parys Mountain.	Gwynedd	Medieval (recorded 1284)–1903	Copper
Dry Rigg Quarry A Dales gritstone quarry whose stone is too skid-resistant to do without, and too far from a railway to be uncontroversial	North Yorkshire	1938 (present workings); Combs Quarry from the 18th century–Still active	Sandstone
Dubs Quarry Closed because of how hard it was to get the slate down, not because the slate ran out; its tramway outlived it by thirty years.	Cumbria	By 1870, possibly earlier–1927 or 1932 (sources differ)	Slate
Dudley Colliery In 1873 a reporter found 170 hewers raising 450 tons a day and a village that reckoned itself the champion bowling village of the North.	Tyne and Wear	Sinking from 19 April 1854; coal from 1856–1977	Coal
Duffryn Colliery, Brynmawr A pit-and-slant mine producing 14,000 tons of coal a year at its 1930 peak, before vanishing from the record by 1935.	Blaenau Gwent	1921–By 1935 (recorded as closed already by 1929–30)	Coal
Duffryn Rhondda Colliery The Afan Valley's biggest steam-coal pit, its No.2 shaft deepened to 1,504 yards in 1962, four years before the NCB closed it as unworkable by machine.	Neath Port Talbot	Levels by 1899; shafts sunk from June 1903–November 1966	Coal
Duke Wood Colliery A pit sunk by fancy-woollen manufacturers to fuel their own mills, whose shaft still ventilates the last working mine in the village more than 160 years later.	West Yorkshire	c. 1862–1863–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Coal
Dulcote Quarry The Mendip quarry where Foster Yeoman began, now a food factory in a hole in the hill	Somerset	Mid-19th century; serious working from c. 1890–Worked out; redeveloped from 2016	Limestone
Dunaskin Ironworks Eight blast furnaces once ran here day and night before closing in 1921 — the surviving works later reopened, briefly, as one of Scotland's best-preserved Victorian ironworks heritage sites.	South Ayrshire	Founded 1840s; first iron made September 1848–Blast furnaces closed 1921; brickworks closed 1976	Iron
Dunkerton Colliery The last, largest and deepest colliery sunk in the Somerset coalfield, built to beat the county's difficult ground by sheer scale, and down to a return of three people by 1933.	Somerset	1904–1925 or 1933 (sources differ)	Coal
Dunnikier Colliery When the Panny stopped in 1927 it took Kirkcaldy's coal industry with it, and nothing replaced it until Seafield was sunk on the shore.	Fife	Panny No. 1 sinking about 1880; Lena sunk 1873–1927	Coal
Dunraven Colliery For a few years in the 1890s this colliery was quite literally owned by an earl -- the same Earl of Dunraven the pit itself was named after.	Rhondda Cynon Taf	1865–1959	Coal
Duntanlich Mine The UK's only economically viable barite deposit currently in production, developed specifically to guarantee a domestic supply of drilling-fluid weighting agent to the North Sea oil and gas industry once the older Foss Mine ran down.	Perth and Kinross	from Planning approved 2016; construction completed December 2020	Barite
Durie Colliery The Fife Coal Company's pit at Sillerhole, Leven, whose workers' rows named the district and whose den of coal and ochre pits is now a public park.	Fife	1855–After 1903	Coal
Dyffryn Main Colliery The Bryncoch pits north of Neath, sunk to a record 200 yards before 1810, flooded out twice and reborn as the Main Company's Duffryn Main.	Neath Port Talbot	1806-1810 (Bryncoch pit); No. 1 sunk 1892–1929	Coal
Dylife Remote and extensive upland lead workings	Powys	1640–1901	Lead, Copper, Silver, Zinc