MineArchiveMines
47 mines beginning with K, of 1950.
| Mine | Region | Worked | Commodities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kames Colliery Rebuilt and modernised in the 1950s, only for a match struck to light a cigarette underground to ignite gas and kill seventeen men in 1957. |
East Ayrshire | 1799 (as Kames Colliery, from 1870)–1968 | Coal, Ironstone |
| Keld Heads Mine Once regarded as the most technologically advanced lead mine in the country before falling lead prices and rising flood-pumping costs shut the whole complex. |
North Yorkshire | Mining recorded from the 12th century–Smelt mill closed c.1884; whole complex closed 1888 | Lead, Silver |
| Kellingley Colliery Once Europe's largest deep coal mine; its closure in December 2015 ended deep coal mining in Britain |
North Yorkshire | 1965–18 December 2015 | Coal |
| Kelly Mine Went bust in 1951 owing money, so nobody carted the machinery away — and that is why it is all still there |
Devon | 1797 (first recorded lease)–1951 | Micaceous Haematite |
| Kelty Colliery Its Nos. 4 and 5 shafts got a name of their own, and it is the name Kelty remembers. |
Fife | Earl of Moray's in the 1850s; Nos. 4 and 5 sinking from 1873–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Coal |
| Kemball Colliery In November 1943 it became the first pit training school in Britain — and went on training miners for another twenty-six years after it stopped producing coal. |
Staffordshire | 1876–November 1963 | Coal |
| Kemberton Colliery Struck by a fatal cage-rope failure in 1910 -- initially misresearched here as two separate disasters nine years apart, an error caught and corrected within this same research pass -- and by 1934 one of only three significant collieries still working in Shropshire. |
Shropshire | Sunk in 1864 by the Madeley Wood Company.–1967 or 1968 | Coal |
| Kemnay Quarry Kemnay's stone quite literally underpins some of Britain's most recognisable structures — the Forth Bridge and the Cenotaph among them — a level of national reach unusual for a quarry that began life supplying a small branch railway in rural Aberdeenshire. |
Aberdeenshire | 1858–large-scale dimension-stone extraction ceased c. 1959 | Granite |
| Kennox Colliery Three men from one family -- a father, his son and his nephew -- were trapped by a flood in the colliery's No. 7 mine in 1943; a thirteen-day rescue effort, watched nationally, ultimately failed. |
South Lanarkshire | Worked from at least 1910 by the Kennox Colliery Co.–Closed in 1972 as its coal reserves were exhausted. | Coal |
| Kensworth Chalk Pit Eight thousand tonnes of chalk a day leave as slurry through a 92 km pipe to Rugby, passing under the M1 four times and saving up to 400 lorry journeys. |
Bedfordshire | 1964–Still active | Chalk |
| Kettleness Alum Works A landslide swallowed the original works and village whole in 1829 — and the industry simply rebuilt on the fresh shale the collapse had exposed and kept going for another thirty years |
North Yorkshire | From around 1727–1861 | Alum |
| Ketton Quarry A quarry that supplies two trades from one face: freestone that built Cambridge colleges from the top beds, and limestone and clay for the cement works below. |
Rutland | Building stone from the 16th century; cement quarry 1929–Still active | Limestone |
| Kibblesworth Colliery A John Bowes and Partners pit whose coal left by the company’s own rope-worked railway to the staiths at Jarrow. |
County Durham | 1842–4 October 1974 | Coal, Fireclay |
| Kildonan Gold Rush Scotland's own gold rush; drew 600 prospectors to a remote Sutherland strath before the Duke of Sutherland shut it down within a year |
Highland | 1869–1870 (formal ban on prospecting) | Gold |
| Kilgetty Colliery A Pembrokeshire anthracite pit of the 1840s that closed in 1873, was reopened by a later generation in 1935, and closed again on the eve of the war. |
Pembrokeshire | c. 1843–1939 | Anthracite |
| Killan Colliery The Inspector did not believe the manager knew how close he was to the old level, and said so: the plan was wrong, and it gave him a false sense of security. |
Swansea | First drift opened 1899–1925 | Coal |
| Killhope Lead Mine Preserved site with a working waterwheel; now a museum |
County Durham | 1818–1910 | Lead, Zinc |
| Killifreth Mine A Chacewater mine worked in turn for copper, tin and arsenic, whose Hawke's Shaft chimney is the tallest surviving mine chimney in Cornwall. |
Cornwall | 1826–1897 (with a 1911-14 arsenic reworking and a failed 1927 reopening) | Tin, Copper, Arsenic |
| Killoch Colliery Designed by the same architect, Egon Riss, responsible for Rothes Colliery in Fife — one succeeded where the other became one of the NCB's most notorious failures, though geological trouble caught up with Killoch too in the end. |
East Ayrshire | Sinking of twin shafts from December 1952; production from 1960–1987 | Coal |
| Kilmersdon Colliery By the time Kilmersdon closed in 1973, its 1877 gravity incline — hauled by nothing more than the weight of loaded wagons descending — was the last one still working industrially anywhere in the country. |
Somerset | February 1875 (coal working in the area documented from 1437)–August 1973 | Coal |
| Kilnhurst Colliery Its coal stopped being wound at its own shafts in the 1950s once it was connected underground to the neighbouring Manvers Main Colliery -- yet it kept working underground for another three decades. |
South Yorkshire | 1858 (as Thrybergh Hall Colliery)–1989 | Coal |
| Kilrenny Oil Works An Edinburgh lamp-maker's oil works at the far eastern end of the Scottish shale industry, whose product was advertised as 'white non-explosive oil'. |
Fife | 1866–Damaged by explosion 1873; disused to at least 1878 | Oil Shale |
| Kilroot Salt Mine An island whose only rock salt mine exists purely because a Triassic sea, evaporating and refilling over and over, happened to do so here. |
County Antrim | 1965–Still active | Salt |
| Kilton Mine A Cleveland ironstone mine whose sinking cost several lives before it opened in 1875, working until 1963 as one of the last of the district's ironstone mines to close. |
North Yorkshire | 1875 (sinking from 1873)–2 February 1963 | Iron |
| Kimmeridge Oil Shale Workings One band of oil shale a metre thick, turned on Iron Age lathes, burned in Sir William Clavell's Jacobean alum and glass furnaces and mined for Victorian shale oil — and never once worked at a profit. |
Dorset | c. 400 BC–c. 1890 | Oil Shale, Limestone, Alum |
| King Edward Mine (South Condurrow) King Edward Mine's real distinction isn't how much tin it produced but what it was built to teach: for over a century it gave generations of Camborne School of Mines students hands-on experience of a fully equipped, fully working Cornish mine, rather than just a classroom account of one. |
Cornwall | South Condurrow reopened 1844–South Condurrow closed 1896 | Tin, Copper |
| Kinglassie Colliery A pit that fought severe flooding from the day sinking began, and lost four men to two separate roof falls a generation apart. |
Fife | 1908–1966 | Coal |
| Kings Dyke and Must Farm Clay Pits An accidental by-product of digging for more clay at Must Farm was one of the best-preserved Bronze Age settlements ever excavated in Britain |
Cambridgeshire | 1920s–Clay extraction ended 1995; the district's pits still worked | Brick Clay |
| Kingsbury Colliery Turned a farming village into a mining one almost overnight — and gave its name to a purpose-built neighbouring settlement, Piccadilly, that still remembers its miners with a permanently lit lamp. |
Warwickshire | 1897–1968 | Coal |
| Kingseat Colliery The Halbeath coalmasters' Kingseat pits of the 1860s, reborn as the Dean Colliery in 1902 and drowned out in November 1945; an eleven-year-old coal cleaner is among its named dead. |
Fife | No. 1 pit c. 1866; Nos 2 and 3 by 1873; Dean Colliery from c. 1902–Old pits 1910; Dean Colliery flooded and abandoned December 1945 | Coal, Fireclay, Ironstone |
| Kingshill No. 3 Colliery No. 3 was meant to speed up a shaft-sinking industry that had barely paused for nationalisation itself — the National Coal Board's very first major sinking in Scotland, built to solve a haulage bottleneck at an already twenty-year-old neighbouring pit. |
South Lanarkshire | sunk 1946-51 (first major NCB sinking in Scotland)–1974 (winding); abandoned 1975 | Coal |
| Kinlet Colliery Built where there was no road, so the lease provided a railway instead; basalt ruined the only seam that paid, and the workings undermined a viaduct. |
Shropshire | Production from the late 1890s–September 1937 | Coal |
| Kinneil Colliery For seventeen years you could walk from the Lothians to Fife underneath the Firth of Forth — and the tunnel opened before the bridge did |
Falkirk | 1892 (Furnace Yard Pit)–1982 | Coal |
| Kinsley Drift A 1970s drift on the dead Hemsworth pit yard, built to be short-lived and closed as uneconomic in 1986 a year after the strike its village rioted in. |
West Yorkshire | 1978–July 1986 | Coal |
| Kiplingcotes Chalk Pit Dug in the 1800s to build the railway embankments that ran past it, and now an SSSI for the chalk grassland that grew back on the spoil. |
East Riding of Yorkshire | 1800s–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Chalk |
| Kirkby Colliery Four million pounds went into it in six years and it closed anyway, and its member of parliament spent the debate arguing about what the men would do next. |
Nottinghamshire | Sinking 1890-1915–1968 | Coal |
| Kirkby Slate Quarries England's largest slate quarry -- a single vast pit rather than a network of galleries. |
Cumbria | By the 16th century–Still active | Slate |
| Kirkby Thore Gypsum Mines What began as small workings for whitening doorsteps has grown, through a slow chain of takeovers, into the largest plasterboard works in the world |
Cumbria | from Alabaster worked from around 1790; gypsum mining from 1890 | Gypsum |
| Kirkleatham Ironstone Mine A mine that worked two pockets of stone the ice had left behind, failed, and left a village behind it. |
North Yorkshire | 1872–Abandoned 31 December 1886 | Ironstone |
| Kirkmeadow Mine Its exploring cavers never found documentary proof of the shaft's name, working instead from a field name, 'Kirkmeadow', that may or may not match the old workings below it. |
Derbyshire | No reliable opening date has yet been located.–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Lead |
| Kirkstone Slate Quarry Explorers who visited soon after its 2012 closure found abandoned blasting explosives still on site — on a route walked by thousands of Lake District visitors every year |
Cumbria | Long-worked; the modern company formed 1949–2012 | Slate |
| Kit Hill Mine Tin and wolfram workings beneath a Cornish landmark hill, topped by an 1858 ornamental engine-house chimney still among the county's best-known mining silhouettes. |
Cornwall | Surface tin working from the 15th-16th centuries–1884 (main working ceased) | Tin, Copper, Arsenic, Tungsten |
| Kiveton Park Colliery Turned a farming village of 300 into a mining town of 1,400 in ten years — and of all its buildings only the 1870s office and its gothic clock tower survive. |
South Yorkshire | 1866–1994 | Coal |
| Knockshinnoch Castle Colliery Knockshinnoch's own name is remembered today almost entirely for a single night in 1950 — yet the colliery itself recovered from that disaster and kept working for another eighteen years afterward, reaching its highest ever workforce in 1956. |
East Ayrshire | shaft sunk 1942–1968 (closed); abandoned 1969 | Coal |
| Knockterra Colliery Bairds' small Cumnock pit at Knockterra, 1877 to 1910, kept by one manager for twenty years and remembered mainly through its death list. |
East Ayrshire | By 1877–1910 | Coal |
| Knotlow Mine Lead mine hand-worked in solid limestone, active from at least 1702 into the later 19th century; two surviving gin circles and engine house remains. |
Derbyshire | at least 1702–later 19th century | Lead |
| Knowes Colliery Closed by the Minister of Fuel and Power in April 1946 as a punishment for unofficial stoppages — 370 men put out of a pit that never reopened. |
West Lothian | 1890s–13 April 1946 | Coal |