Mines

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100 mines beginning with F, of 3568.

MineRegionWorkedCommodities
Faggergill Mine
Its closure marked the end of roughly 800 years of lead mining in Arkengarthdale following miners' strikes against strict new working hours imposed in 1870.
North Yorkshire By 1521–1914 Lead
Fairbottom Colliery
Probably the world's second-oldest surviving steam engine drained these pits, stood derelict as a local curiosity for ninety years, and was bought by Henry Ford in 1929 and shipped to Michigan.
Greater Manchester By 1760–1834 (pumping engine) Coal
Fairhill Colliery
A Hamilton pit of nearly four hundred men that wound down to sixty-five in ten years and was abandoned in 1906.
South Lanarkshire By 1894–1906 Coal
Fairholm Colliery
A Larkhall pit that went through five owners in thirty-five years, ending under United Collieries.
South Lanarkshire 1873–1908 Coal
Fairlie Colliery
An 1842 missionary's portrait of a colliery village hired by the fortnight, emptied and refilled twice in five years.
East Ayrshire by 1834 Coal
Fairy Cave Quarry
A Mendip quarry that broke into some 4.5 kilometres of cave passage before planning ran out.
Somerset 1920s–1977 Limestone
Fairykirk Quarry
Named from a cliff the Ordnance Survey was told was a resort of fairies, and now climbed for sport.
Fife from Working by the mid-19th century Whinstone
Fallahill Colliery
Four pits at Fauldhouse for fifteen years, and an underground fire that killed four men in 1902.
West Lothian 1890–1905 Coal
Fallowfield Mine
Went bust on lead, then made its name on the mineral it had been tipping as waste
Northumberland From 1611–1911 Witherite, Lead, Barite
Far Green Colliery
Known to its men as the Big Pit: an engineman answered a question through the engine-house window in 1859 and wound sixteen men and boys over the pulley.
Staffordshire by 1859 Coal
Farme Colliery
Three Newcomen engines still at work in 1879, one of them the only rotative Newcomen left in Europe.
South Lanarkshire Early 1800s–17 July 1931 Coal
Farnacres Colliery
A pit drowned in its first months when the shaft broke into forgotten old workings.
Tyne and Wear from 1840 Coal, Fireclay
Farrington Colliery
A Somerset pit that worked for nearly two centuries, from the 1730s to 1923.
Somerset About 1738–1923 Coal
Faskine Colliery
On an estate whose coal and ironstone, an 1880s gazetteer says, were worked earlier than any others in the great Clydesdale mineral field.
North Lanarkshire By 1835–after 1933 Coal, Ironstone
Fatfield Colliery
An early Wear colliery whose 1708 explosion, blowing three people out of the shaft, was reported to the Royal Society.
Tyne and Wear from 1700s Coal
Faucet Rake
Incorporates Oxlow Cavern, considered Britain's deepest cave when it was discovered.
Derbyshire At least 1680–mid-19th century Lead
Fauld
Fauld went from an unremarkable Staffordshire gypsum mine to the site of Britain's largest ever explosion almost by accident of geography — chosen for its rural obscurity, the same isolation that made it a good bomb store also meant a single mistake there could do more damage than almost anywhere else in the country without immediately being noticed.
Staffordshire From the 19th century–Still active Gypsum
Fauldhead Colliery
The largest pit of the isolated Sanquhar and Kirkconnel coalfield, whose closure in 1968 put six hundred men out of work in a valley with little else.
Dumfries and Galloway 1896–1968 Coal, Brick Clay
Fauldhouse Colliery
William Dixon's cluster of numbered ironstone and coal pits around Fauldhouse, feeding the Govan ironworks until the ironstone ran out in 1891.
West Lothian By 1855–c. 1896 Coal, Ironstone
Fawdon Colliery
The colliery behind the first railway whose wagons could grip and release a moving rope.
Tyne and Wear from 1810 Coal
Fawler Ironstone Mine
One of the few Oxfordshire ironstone workings driven underground in galleries rather than simply quarried at outcrop — a pony driver's own testimony in 1886 records 'a large amount had been got' by then.
Oxfordshire 1850s–by 1884 Iron
Featherstone Main Colliery
The pit that made Featherstone a mining town, closed for good in 1935 when its men struck over deductions for the dirt in their coal.
West Yorkshire 1868–1935 Coal
Fee Donald Mine
One of five distinct lead mines in the historic Strontian mining district -- Corrantee, Middleshop, Fee Donald, Bellsgrove and Whitesmith -- and, per Historic Environment Scotland's own scheduling, one of only two well-preserved lead workings surviving from that district today.
Highland 1727–1871 Lead
Felinfran Colliery
To ventilate its Graigola workings it pumped out a pit abandoned forty years earlier and ran its return air through the old shaft bottom under a nickel refinery's yard.
Swansea 1931-32–13 December 1965 Coal
Felixstowe and Trimley Coprolite Diggings
Farm labourers dug up what a Cambridge professor took for fossil dung, and it became the world's first artificial chemical fertiliser — most of it was not fossil dung
Suffolk 1842–by 1880s Coprolite
Felkington Colliery
One of north Northumberland's larger pits, working the Bulman seam at 19 fathoms near Duddo until 1906.
Northumberland By 1874–1906 Coal
Felling Colliery
The Tyneside pit whose 1812 explosion killed 92 and set in train the invention of the miners' safety lamp
Tyne and Wear 1779–1931 Coal
Fence Colliery
A small colliery at Fence, near Rotherham, South Yorkshire, sunk in the 1840s alongside the Rother Valley.
South Yorkshire 1840s–1904 (pumping station to 1957) Coal
Fenton Park Colliery
The colliery the Potteries dug for itself — leased in 1790 to a company of potters that came to include Spode, Wolfe and Minton, and the most notable pit in Fenton by 1840.
Staffordshire 1728–c. 1879–c. 1879 Coal, Ironstone
Fergushill Colliery
Not one colliery but a numbered field of small Ayrshire pits, the numbers running past thirty as each patch was worked out and the next sunk.
North Ayrshire by 1855 Coal
Ferndale Collieries
Two explosions within two years of each other killed 231 men and boys between them — a toll that, combined, ranks among the worst suffered by any single South Wales colliery.
Rhondda Cynon Taf From 1857 (sinking)–1959-1960 Coal
Ferneybeds Colliery
A Widdrington pit that lasted only fourteen years but employed 278 people at its height in 1914.
Northumberland 1910–1924 Coal
Fernhill Colliery
For its last decade, Fernhill wasn't really a separate mine at all in working terms — its own shafts fed straight across the Rhigos mountain into Tower Colliery, which did the actual job of bringing the coal out.
Rhondda Cynon Taf 1869-71–1978 Coal
Fernhurst Furnace (North Park Furnace)
Recorded as 'ruined' in 1664, then brought back to life a century later purely to cast cannon for two wars, before finally closing for good in the 1770s
West Sussex 1614–1776 or 1777 Iron
Ferniegair Colliery
A Hamilton pit where an electric coal-cutter's cable fired gas in 1909 and the widows took the owners to court.
South Lanarkshire c. 1850–February 1947 Coal
Ferrymoor Colliery
Grimethorpe's shallow second pit, a 72-yard drift that ended its life as part of the most productive mine in Britain — and was shut anyway.
South Yorkshire 1915–16–1988 Coal
Ffaldau Colliery
Sunk in 1876 and worked for 109 years; when the Coal Board closed it in 1985 it cut the cage ropes and poured 200,000 tonnes of hardcore down the shaft.
Bridgend 1876–November 1985 Coal
Ffaldydre Colliery
It was closed in 1963 not for lack of coal but because the neighbouring Glyncastle pit could not keep its men, so Ffaldydre's miners were moved there.
Neath Port Talbot By 1837–28 September 1963 (or April 1965) Coal
Fforchaman Colliery
Brown's Pit at Cwmaman, sunk to the Aberdare Four-Feet and closed seam by seam in 1965.
Rhondda Cynon Taf 1850s (sinking)–25 September 1965 Coal
Fforchneol Colliery
A shopkeeper's colliery that killed one of its owners during the sinking, ruined the other, and lost its overman in a drunken Christmas Day winding.
Rhondda Cynon Taf 1869–1891 Coal
Fforchwen Colliery
A Cwmaman colliery begun in 1850 and abandoned at 60 yards, then finished forty-four years later and worked by over a thousand men by 1910.
Rhondda Cynon Taf 1850 (first sinking)–1935 Coal
Ffos-y-Fran
Britain's last major opencast coal mine, worked for over a year after its own planning permission had already expired
Merthyr Tydfil November 2006–30 November 2023 Coal
Ffrwd Colliery
A Wrexham colliery, ironworks and brickworks in one, opened to feed its own furnaces and closed for good two years after the ironmaster who built it up died.
Wrexham c. 1790s (estate pits)–1904 Coal, Fireclay, Ironstone
Field Lane Colliery, Gawthorpe
A Gawthorpe pit where an inquest found that the rope lowering the engine man down the shaft had been cut on purpose.
West Yorkshire By 1849–About 1877 Coal
Fir Tree Colliery
A small interwar colliery near Crook that passed through four owners in twenty years and ended worked together with its neighbour Woodifield.
County Durham By 1921–after 1940 Coal
Firbeck Colliery
Sixty men died at this one colliery over 43 years of work — never enough at once to count as a single disaster, but a toll that adds up all the same.
Nottinghamshire 1923-25 (sinking)–31 December 1968 Coal
Fishburn Colliery
A pit that grew sevenfold in twenty years and ended up piping its own town gas to a hospital and the national grid.
County Durham 1910–1973 Coal
Fishley Colliery
A large Black Country colliery where a fireman went into the workings in 1903 and was never seen again.
West Midlands By 1866–c. 1945 Coal
Fleets Colliery
Tranent's last pit, one of the wettest in Britain, where in 1929 George Johnstone led fifty men out of a flooding mine.
East Lothian 1866 (sinking)–1959 Coal
Flimby Colliery
Its Rattler seam was given up as unworkable for faults, and among the twenty-three deaths recorded here is a woman: Mary Hines, picker and greaser, crushed by tubs on the surface incline in 1869.
Cumbria By 1855–1909 Coal
Flinty Fell Lead Rakes
Silver-rich lead from these veins went to the royal mint at Carlisle in the 12th century; the first record of mining here is from 1130.
Cumbria Later Norman–early 19th century Lead
Flockton Collieries
The company that ran these pits gave its workers a library and allotments, and the 1841 child-labour commissioners praised it while recording girls hauling tubs underground.
West Yorkshire 1515–1894 Coal, Ironstone
Florence Colliery
The 3rd Duke of Sutherland named it after his eldest daughter, built it a private railway, and bought his own locomotives to work it.
Staffordshire 1874–1990s Coal
Florence Mine
The last deep working iron ore mine in England, kept alive at the end by its own redundant workers
Cumbria 1914–2007 Iron
Flowery Field Colliery
A Hyde pit with a steam engine at its shaft bottom, where in 1823 a lady breakfasted underground and in 1842 seventeen died.
Greater Manchester By 1842 (possibly 1822)–by 1847 Coal
Flushiemere Barytes Mine
Barytes in quantity where its neighbours had lead — unusual for this corner of the North Pennine orefield.
County Durham — Barite, Lead
Fochriw Colliery
A colliery sunk specifically to feed one company's own blast furnaces, worked through at least four serious accidents in seventy years, then shut overnight for purely economic reasons.
Caerphilly 1823 (drift)–1924 Coal
Foggintor Quarry
The quarry that supplied Nelson's Column, whose masons' strike in 1842 held up its building.
Devon c.1820–1906 Granite
Foggs Colliery
A canal-side Bolton pit where ten men died in a fire in 1877 and ten more in a falling cage thirty years later.
Greater Manchester 1820s–May 1912 Coal
Follonsby Colliery
The pit behind the red Follonsby banner of 1928, with Lenin at its centre; sunk to replace Wardley next door, it ended as Wardley No. 1 and closed in 1974.
Tyne and Wear By 1909 (sinking)–8 August 1974 Coal
Force Crag Mine
Last working metal mine in the Lake District; National Trust site
Cumbria 1839–1990 Lead, Zinc, Barite, Silver
Force Garth Quarry
Works almost the full 70-metre thickness of the Great Whin Sill, one of northern England's most distinctive geological features.
County Durham 1932–Still active Whinstone
Fordel Mains Colliery
A small Midlothian pit on Bryan's Splint, a seam named for a village miles away.
Midlothian From 1920–1940 Coal
Fordell Colliery
The wagonway built here in the 1770s to move coal to Inverkeithing, shown on Ainslie's 1775 map, was one of the earliest railways in Scotland.
Fife 1775–28 October 1950 Coal
Foredale Quarry
A Ribblesdale limestone quarry high above the dale, its stone lowered by rope-hauled incline to the kilns
North Yorkshire from 1878 Limestone
Forge Colliery, Nantyglo
One of John Lancaster's earliest pits; at least six named men died here between 1857 and 1871, including one in a gas explosion.
Blaenau Gwent By 1857, possibly earlier–1878–88 Coal
Forge Slope Colliery
A small slope whose people were folded into Big Pit, on the hillside where the basic steel process was proved the year before it opened.
Torfaen 1878–June 1931 Coal
Forrestburn Colliery
A Northumberland moorland pit that reached its thin Shilbottle seam through two limestones and over 300 feet of rock.
Northumberland By the 1860s–18 August 1923 Coal
Fortacres Colliery
A privately sunk Ayrshire pit that passed to the National Coal Board two years after nationalisation.
South Ayrshire 1924–January 1957 Coal
Forthbank Colliery
A Coal Board mine planned to last 24 years that grew to nearly a thousand men and closed after nine.
Clackmannanshire 1892 (reopened 1947)–January 1958 Coal
Fortissat Colliery
A Shotts moorland pit worked for coal and ironstone, remembered now by the remains of Scobie's Bing.
North Lanarkshire By 1875–1949 Coal
Foss Mine
Foss is described by some geologists as the largest single accumulation of barium ore anywhere in the world — a genuinely global superlative sitting on an unassuming Perthshire hillside.
Perth and Kinross 1984–2021 Barite
Foulford Colliery
A Cowdenbeath pit sunk in 1884 beside the 'Fair Helen' shaft, which closed in 1931 but washed the coal of its neighbours into the 1950s.
Fife 1884–1931 Coal
Foulshiels Colliery
Stoneyburn's own pit, whose No. 2 shaft breathed for Loganlea next door and whose 1935 baths and Bents housing scheme were United Collieries' welfare in brick.
West Lothian By 1894–1957 Coal
Fountains Fell Colliery
A colliery on a 2,000-foot Dales summit, sunk to fuel the calamine works at Malham, with a beehive coke oven still standing among its shafts.
North Yorkshire About 1807–About 1860 Coal
Fourstones Colliery
A South Tyne colliery listed for more than a century, working the Little Limestone Coal beside its own bank of lime kilns.
Northumberland 1805–April 1927 Coal
Fowey Consols
Joseph Treffry built a canal, a harbour and an aqueduct to serve these copper mines, which at their height employed around 1,800 people.
Cornwall 1813–1867 Copper, Zinc
Foxdale Mines
Once the Isle of Man's most productive mining district
Isle of Man 1724–1911 Lead, Silver, Zinc
Foxes Bridge Colliery
One of the largest collieries in the Forest of Dean, drowned in 1930 by water running in from a neighbour that had closed the year before — and refused help by the Crown, which held the royalties.
Gloucestershire 1855–10 August 1930 Coal
Foxfield Colliery
The last deep mine left standing in the Cheadle Coalfield — literally, since both of its original headgears still stand today, under active restoration by the heritage railway that now runs where its wagons once did.
Staffordshire Early 1880s (company formed 1893)–1965 Coal
Foxley Colliery
A Tollcross pit worked with power-driven coal cutters during the First World War, reached by a mineral line from Carmyle.
Glasgow By 1898–1925 Coal
Foxyards Colliery
Where the Thick Coal flattens out from vertical and was once worked in an open quarry — and where a ground bailiff told the Geological Survey it must be a different seam because a shale parting was a foot thicker.
West Midlands By 1855–after 1880 Coal, Fireclay
Framlington Colliery
A small landsale colliery that sold its coal over the weighbridge to whoever came for it, and passed through six owners in seventy years.
Northumberland By 1860–31 December 1931 Coal
Framwellgate Moor Colliery
A colliery sunk on piles through 120 feet of quicksand, and the reason two villages exist.
County Durham 1841–1924 Coal
Frances Colliery
An undersea Fife colliery that closed after underground fires broke out during the 1984 strike, becoming a symbol of the coalfield's collapse; its preserved 1943 headframe is recorded as the last complete example of its type of traditional Scottish winding gear.
Fife 1874 (sinking)–3 February 1985 Coal
Frank Mills Mine
The toxicity of Frank Mills' own waste has, in its way, preserved a piece of the mine's history: more than a century on, its spoil heaps remain too contaminated with lead and arsenic for anything to grow on them.
Devon 1847–1880 Lead, Silver, Barite, Fluorspar, Iron
Frankfield Colliery
A ten-year Glasgow colliery whose manager and oversman were caught by an explosion while checking the idle pit during the 1921 strike.
Glasgow 1915–1925 Coal, Fireclay
Frankland Colliery
The Earl of Durham's riverside pit below Framwellgate Moor, where Finchale's monks had dug coal in 1350.
County Durham 1840–March 1934 Coal
Frankland Fold Mine
A named 18th-century working within the historic Grassington Moor lead field, once revitalised by the Duke of Devonshire's mining engineer John Taylor.
North Yorkshire 1735–1853 Lead
Frazer's Hush Mine
The mine takes its name from a centuries-old hushing site — men flooding and breaching a dam to strip the hillside bare by hand — that was already ancient history by the time 20th-century drilling turned the same ground into a modern fluorspar mine.
County Durham early 1970s–1999 Fluorspar, Lead
Fremington Edge Quarry
Chert mined underground above Swaledale and sent to the Potteries to grind flint into china.
North Yorkshire By 1905–1950 Chert
Frickley Colliery
Frickley miners were among the very last in the country to go back to work after the 1984-85 strike ended — refusing to cross a picket line of their own union brothers from Kent.
South Yorkshire 23 April 1903 (sinking)–26 November 1993 Coal
Frizington Iron Mines
Frizington's iron ore was so prized for its purity that miners nicknamed it 'the Rolls Royce of ores'.
Cumbria 19th century–by late 1970s Iron, Barite
Frodingham Ironstone Mines
A 25-per-cent ore that built a steel town — and was abandoned not when it ran out but when better ore could be unloaded at Immingham
Lincolnshire 1859–1981 (underground working) Iron
Froggatt Wood Smelt Mill
No document anywhere records this smelt mill's existence -- a 1799 estate map omits it entirely -- yet it survives as one of only a few standing 16th/17th-century examples left in England.
Derbyshire from 16th Lead
Fron-Boeth and Pant Mawr Quarry
Its access tramway included a roughly 500-yard tunnel through the ridge between Cwm Croesor and Cwm Maesgwyn -- one of the only tunnels in North Wales built purely to carry a tramway rather than as part of a mine, and among the longest cut anywhere for horse-drawn traffic.
Gwynedd Around 1850–1918 Slate
Frongoch Mine
Major Victorian Welsh lead producer
Ceredigion 1792–1910 Lead, Zinc
Frosterley Marble Quarries
Produced the fossil-rich black 'marble' used to decorate Durham Cathedral's Chapel of the Nine Altars.
County Durham worked from at least 1183–by the 20th century Limestone, Fluorspar
Fryston Colliery
Sunk in the grounds of a demolished country house, it washed its neighbours’ coal as well as its own — and when it shut in 1985 Wheldale had to build a washer.
West Yorkshire 1870s–1985 Coal
Furzebrook and Norden Ball Clay Pits
The Blue Pool's colour, now a tourist draw, is a direct physical trace of the clay that was once dug there. Not all of the workings were so gentle: Creech Barrow, one of the group's mines, reached around 800 feet underground.
Dorset Worked from the 18th century–1999 (last underground working) Ball Clay

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