Mines

Region

Commodity

93 mines beginning with L, of 1950.

Mine	Region	Worked	Commodities
Lady Annabella Mine Named for Annabella Bruce, born in June 2020 to Ian and Diana Bruce of UK Mining Ventures -- the same operator already documented on this archive's Rogerley Mine record -- the mine works three named veins for collector-grade fluorite from a former cement quarry.	County Durham	Early 1960s (as a cement quarry)–Still active	Fluorspar
Lady Victoria Colliery Scotland's largest surviving steam winding engine spent nearly 90 years hauling men and coal up and down Lady Victoria's shaft — and can still be seen turning today, in the museum the colliery itself became.	Midlothian	Sunk from 1890 by the Lothian Coal Company; in production from 1894–1981	Coal
Lady Windsor Colliery Named after a baroness, sunk for £95,875 in twenty months, and among the first pits in Wales to give its men pithead baths — which the village could use for threepence.	Rhondda Cynon Taf	1884–85 (first coal 1886)–February 1988	Coal
Ladyshore Colliery A manager's refusal to swap candles for safety lamps went all the way to the House of Lords — and lost, ending the use of open flames underground in English coal mines for good.	Greater Manchester	1830s–June 1949	Coal
Ladywash Mine Ladywash's two working lives, two centuries apart, were driven by entirely different industries at each end — Georgian and Victorian lead demand at the start, and 20th-century steelmaking's need for fluorspar flux at the end.	Derbyshire	sough begun 1714; mine started 1740; reworked from 1936/1950s–1979	Lead, Fluorspar
Ladywell Mine Its 1875 beam winding and pumping engine house survives as one of the Stiperstones orefield's most attractive ruins, now a Grade II listed building and Scheduled Monument.	Shropshire	1830s–c. 1882	Lead
Lag Bank Quarry Thirteen men in 1927, sixty-seven in 1935, and by 1945 nearly all of them working at the surface rather than in the rock.	Cumbria	Returned from 1927–Returned to 1945; no closure date located	Slate
Landshipping Colliery Forty drowned in minutes when the Daucleddau broke into workings driven a quarter of a mile out beneath it — the worst loss of life in Pembrokeshire mining.	Pembrokeshire	1788–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Coal
Langbaurgh Whinstone Mine A stone working that was mostly underground: thirty of its fifty-three men were below ground in 1910, following a wall of volcanic rock eighty feet wide.	North Yorkshire	In the returns from 1882–Still returning igneous rock in 1950	Whinstone
Langley Barony Mine Lead, barytes and whinstone from one sett on the estate a Jacobite earl forfeited in 1715.	Northumberland	Leased 1868–1893	Lead, Barite, Whinstone
Langness Mine Copper worked at the southernmost tip of the Isle of Man, where the ore outcrops in the cliffs.	Isle of Man	Worked in the 19th century–Recorded as standing in 1902	Copper
Langwith Colliery Two thousand men on one seam at its height, and its shafts were kept pumping after closure to keep the water out of the pit next door.	Derbyshire	Sinking from 1876; coal struck 1878–1978	Coal
Lassodie Colliery Eleven pits, 1,400 people, a school of 250 — and when the pits shut in 1931 the families were given fourteen days to leave their homes.	Fife	1859–May 1931	Coal
Lathkill Dale Mine A Peak District lead mine known for Bateman's House, a manager's dwelling built directly over a 12m-deep shaft that once held an experimental water-powered engine.	Derbyshire	Sough driven 1741-42–Large-scale working ceased 1841-42; Dakeyne engine removed by 1842	Lead
Lead Mines Clough The type locality for witherite, discovered as worthless waste in the spoil and initially used as rat poison, before a 2022 study established that Anglezarke — not Alston Moor, Cumbria, as long recorded — was the mineral's real point of discovery.	Lancashire	Evidence of lead extraction c.680-1000 AD; mining resumed 1692–1837 (mines sealed 1930)	Lead, Barite, Witherite
Lead Workings in High Tor Recreation Ground Turned into public showcaves in 1865 and given their evocative names then, Roman Cave and Fern Cave are lead mine opencuts with no genuine Roman-period working evidence at all.	Derbyshire	Documented from the 16th century–Worked until at least the 18th century	Lead
Leadhills "God's Treasure House" — historic lead-mining village	South Lanarkshire	1239–1938	Lead, Silver, Gold
Lecht Mine Scotland's largest manganese mine lasted five years, and everything that survives of it is one stone building on an empty hillside at 1,400 feet	Moray	Iron ore from 1730; reopened for manganese in 1841–1846	Manganese, Iron
Ledston Luck Colliery Named from Lady Wheler's wish at the first sod in 1909, and its 1911 winding houses held some of the first electric winders in British coal.	West Yorkshire	Sinking from 1909–October 1986	Coal
Lee Moor China Clay Works One of only two places in Britain still working china clay — and the pits leave nine tonnes of waste behind for every one they sell	Devon	from 1820s-30s	China Clay
Lees and Dove Rakes A rare drystone-lined, semi-circular bouse team, complete with the raised barrow-run that once wheeled ore to it, survives here largely intact.	Derbyshire	Documented from 1709-13; possibly earlier–Reworked into the 19th century	Lead
Leeswood Green Colliery Banning Welsh underground was one of the grievances that ended with soldiers firing on a crowd in Mold.	Flintshire	Early 19th century–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Coal, Cannel Coal
Leeswood Main Colliery A jury returned manslaughter against all three owners; the assizes found no bill and fined the manager five pounds, to be divided among the widows.	Flintshire	About 1861–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Coal, Cannel Coal
Leighton Buzzard Sand Quarries Sand from these quarries glazed the Crystal Palace in 1851 and, six decades later, filled wartime ammunition factories once Belgium's own supply was cut off.	Bedfordshire	By 1851, after centuries of small-scale working–Sand traffic moved to road transport by the late 1960s-1981	Silica Sand
Levant Mine Workings extend under the sea; site of the 1919 man-engine disaster	Cornwall	1787–1930	Tin, Arsenic, Copper
Lewis Merthyr Colliery Now the Rhondda Heritage Park, with underground tours led by former miners	Rhondda Cynon Taf	1850 (Hafod/Coed Cae pits); 1880/1890 (Bertie/Trefor shafts)–1983	Coal
Leycett Colliery Within five months in 1879-80 the same pit exploded twice, and the second time it killed the manager and his son with sixty others.	Staffordshire	By 1860–21 September 1957	Coal
Lightmoor Colliery One of the Forest of Dean's largest collieries, sunk to feed one ironmaster's own furnaces, whose roofless pumping house is now the last of its kind left standing in the Forest.	Forest of Dean	c. 1832 (gale awarded 1841)–8 June 1940	Coal
Limeylands Colliery An Ormiston pit whose workforce barely moved in forty years, and whose railway is now a cycle path through the East Lothian fields.	East Lothian	By 1915–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Coal
Linacre Wood Smelt Mill One of its 16th-century tenants, James Linacre, had already been accused in 1584 of infringing a rival's patented lead-smelting process -- suggesting a mill here may have operated even before the first lease of 1596.	Derbyshire	Documented from 1596; possibly earlier–Last documented in 1613	Lead
Linby Colliery Britain’s "Champion Pit" of the early 1960s and reckoned the most efficient mine in Europe: in 1963, 1,113 men at Linby raised over 1.3 million tons.	Nottinghamshire	1873–31 March 1988	Coal
Lindal Moor Locomotive No. 115 is still down there: not recovered, and barely searched for since the 1890s, quietly resting beneath Lindal-in-Furness in workings its own railway line's foundations had helped undermine.	Cumbria	worked on a large scale from the mid-19th century–c. 1914-1915	Iron
Lingerwood Colliery The oldest of the Newbattle collieries at Newtongrange, later providing the neighbouring Lady Victoria Colliery with its statutory second shaft.	Midlothian	1798–1967	Coal
Lings Colliery A Derbyshire pit whose abandoned workings left a two-mile lake of water for the next generation to sink through	Derbyshire	1840–1896	Coal
Linnyshaw Colliery Locals never called it by its proper name — to them it was always just Berryfield, after the field it stood in.	Greater Manchester	1850–1921 (reserves absorbed by Sandhole); pumping continued to 1936	Coal
Lintzgarth Mine Six men opening new ground beside the ruin of the smelt mill that had, a decade earlier, been the last one working in the orefield.	County Durham	Developing in 1930–Suspended June 1930	Lead
Lion Salt Works The UK's last open-pan salt works, producing salt by evaporating brine over open pans until 1986 and surviving today as a restored working museum.	Cheshire	1894 (founded by Henry Ingram Thompson)–June 1986; reopened as a museum in June 2015 after restoration	Salt
Little Brookhead Mine An unusually intact small lead mine complex at Eyam, preserving its capped shaft, horse-gin circle and dressing floors as surface earthworks.	Derbyshire	Post-medieval (1540-1900)–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Lead
Little Garth Mine Worked by hand into caverns 70 ft high, and shown to Victorian visitors for the colours of its flooded chambers.	Cardiff	Early 19th century in earnest, from 1805–1884; brief reworkings 1926–1937	Iron, Ochre
Littleburn Colliery Advertised in The Times in 1931 with sixty-four coke ovens, a byproduct plant, its own power station and four hundred and eight workmen's houses — and no buyer.	County Durham	Bored 1840; sunk from 20 April 1870–December 1950	Coal, Fireclay
Littleton Colliery The last deep mine in Staffordshire, its 1993 closure after a controversially overturned reprieve ending centuries of deep mining on the Cannock Chase Coalfield.	Staffordshire	No.1 shaft sunk from 1877; No.2 shaft completed 1899–3 December 1993	Coal
Llanbradach Colliery A Rhymney Valley steam-coal pit whose 1901 explosion inquest turned on how many casks of water had been used to damp the roadway before a shot was fired.	Caerphilly	1893–1961	Coal
Llanbradach Quarry A disused Pennant sandstone quarry north of Caerphilly holding the only upper Westphalian permineralised flora known in western or central Europe.	Caerphilly	By 1905, possibly earlier–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Sandstone
Llancaiach Colliery One of Thomas Powell's earliest South Wales ventures, open for 76 years and given its own dedicated branch railway thirty years into its working life.	Caerphilly	1811–1887	Coal
Llandebie Colliery The first colliery swallowed by Amalgamated Anthracite, which within seven years was the largest anthracite company in the world.	Carmarthenshire	First slant driven 1904–20 December 1958	Anthracite
Llanerch Colliery 176 men and boys killed by a naked light in 1890, two months after the management decided the pit was well enough ventilated to keep using open lamps.	Torfaen	c. 1830–1947	Coal
Llanfair Lead and Silver Mine Once reckoned the richest silver mine in Cardiganshire; little now survives beyond a leat.	Ceredigion	c. 1760–1862	Lead, Silver
Llanharry Iron Mine The last iron mine in Wales — in the country that had once made more iron than anywhere on earth	Rhondda Cynon Taf	Early 1900s–1975 or 1976	Iron
Llanhilleth Colliery A small house-coal pit of the 1850s turned into an 1,800-strong steam colliery by one company.	Blaenau Gwent	1850s–1969	Coal
Llanymynech Hill Mines and Quarries The Romans fortified the hill to protect the copper mine, and eighteenth-century visitors to the cave were still turning up skeletons with coins of Antoninus beside them	Powys	Copper worked from the later Bronze Age–Copper abandoned around 200 AD	Copper, Limestone
Llay Main Colliery Seven years to sink, a thousand yards deep, the largest colliery in Wales and the deepest pit in Britain — and an industrial estate over the top of it now.	Wrexham	1914 (sinking); 1921 (completed)–1966	Coal
Llechwedd Slate Caverns Nearly ruined within its first years until unpaid workers found the great 'Old Merioneth Vein'; now a major slate heritage attraction	Gwynedd	1846–1970s (working quarry); reopened 1972 as a visitor attraction	Slate
Lletty Shenkin Colliery Fifty-two men and boys died here in one afternoon in 1849 — only about five of them burned, the rest suffocated by the afterdamp where they sat.	Rhondda Cynon Taf	1843–1922	Coal
Lloyds Mines Ironbridge Home to one of the earliest steam engines in Shropshire -- installed at Smiths Gin Pit in 1726 -- and later a landslip-prone riverside community whose houses and pits alike have mostly since slid into the Severn Gorge.	Shropshire	14th century–Industry here had died out completely by the early 20th century.	Coal, Iron, Fireclay
Lluest Colliery Nineteen killed in a seam that was in places only twenty-two inches thick — and the colliery stopped producing three years later.	Bridgend	By 1880–1902	Coal
Llwydgoed Quarry One of at least 37 quarries once at work in the Nantlle Valley, a west-Wales slate district whose deep, valley-floor slate beds forced quarrymen to dig pits rather than work open hillside galleries, as their counterparts did further east at Penrhyn and Dinorwic.	Gwynedd	No reliable opening date has yet been located.–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Slate
Llwyngwern Quarry Its mill sat above the pit, so the incline had to be powered to lift rock uphill to be worked.	Powys	By 1828–1941	Slate
Llywernog Mine Llywernog's first recorded lessee, in 1749, was Lewis Morris — one of 18th-century Wales's most significant literary figures, better remembered today for his poetry and antiquarian scholarship than for the lead mine he briefly held the lease on.	Ceredigion	1742 (vein discovered); worked from 1770s–1891 (lead); 1911 (zinc revival)	Lead, Silver, Zinc
Loanhead (Ramsay) Colliery Closed two years after the Bilston Glen 'super pit' opened a mile away	Midlothian	c.1850–1965 (abandoned 1966)	Coal, Iron
Loch Cuithir Diatomite Works A remote Skye industry extracting fossil diatom shells by tramway for use in match-making, filtering, toothpaste — and, via Nobel Industries, as the absorbent base for dynamite.	Highland	Extraction began 1886/1890–1915 (first phase); briefly revived 1950-1961	Diatomite
Lochaline Mine A patch of England's white cliffs, geologically speaking, stranded 500 miles away on a Scottish sea loch — and the only underground sand mine left in Europe.	Highland	1940–Closed 2008; reopened 2012, still active	Silica Sand
Lochgelly Colliery Worked from at least the 1770s, when fifteen people raised ten tons a day; blaes was still coming up with the coal in 1915.	Fife	By 1770s, possibly earlier–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Coal
Lodge Syke Mine A London Lead Company mine driven from Hudeshope until it met the workings coming the other way from Eggleston.	County Durham	Working under the London Lead Company by 1888–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Lead
Lofthouse Colliery Seven men died because nobody read the old plans — and there are 119 catalogued plans for this colliery in the national mine-plans record	West Yorkshire	Shafts sunk 1873-1877–1981	Coal
Loftus Mine One of the few Cleveland ironstone mines whose actual underground workings, rather than just surface remains, can still be visited.	North Yorkshire	1859–1958	Iron
Loganlea Colliery The pit is gone and the village is still there, which is the opposite of what usually happened.	West Lothian	About 1890–1959	Coal
Logaulas Mine An ancient lead-silver mine in the Cambrian Mountains mining district around Pont-rhyd-y-groes, once a bustling mining village now much reduced from its 19th-century peak.	Ceredigion	Working recorded from at least the mid-18th century–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Lead, Silver
Loggerheads Loggerheads' transformation is about as complete as a mining site can undergo: a working lead and zinc district that once needed its own purpose-built miners' settlement is now valued instead for its conservation status, walked by visitors who are mostly there for the scenery rather than the industrial history beneath it.	Denbighshire	worked from at least the 18th century–19th century (exact closure date unclear); site now a country park	Lead, Zinc
Long Meg Mine Gypsum, then anhydrite: five million tonnes out of the Eden valley, and its own branch off the Settle–Carlisle.	Cumbria	1880, working from 1885–January 1976	Gypsum, Anhydrite
Long Rake Spar Mine Fluorspar (with lead) mine near Youlgreave, opened 1867, underground working continued to 1981.	Derbyshire	1867–1981 (underground)	Lead, Fluorspar, Calcite
Long Sough Entrance Water it still drains today once helped power Richard Arkwright's pioneering 18th-century cotton mill downstream -- a lead-drainage tunnel doing double duty for the early Industrial Revolution.	Derbyshire	Cromford Sough begun 1673; Long Sough extension follows–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Lead
Long Work Copper Mine Elizabethan copper trenches reopened in 1919, three and a half centuries on, by a level driven 70 feet beneath them, which found the vein no richer than the Elizabethans had left it.	Cumbria	c. 1565–1922	Copper
Longacres Mine Its headgear burned down in the first year of sinking, it spent seventeen years raising no stone at all while its shafts served North Skelton, and Dorman Long reopened it for ironstone in 1933 anyway.	North Yorkshire	Leased 1865; shafts sunk 1873-75–1954	Ironstone
Longannet Colliery The end of deep coal mining in Scotland, brought about not by exhaustion of reserves or economics but by a single sudden inrush of water.	Fife	1969–2002 (flooding); formally closed 2002	Coal
Longcleugh Mine One of the network of veins worked from Nenthead's Middlecleugh Level, in a mining field once described as the most intact mining landscape in the North Pennines.	Cumbria	leases from 1751 (Longcleugh Vein)–uncertain (Nenthead field wound down 1882-1960s)	Lead
Longcliffe Quarry A quarry can outlive its own working life as a landmark: Longcliffe's real legacy is not the stone it supplied but the fact that geologists still use it to define the North Charnwood Diorite itself.	Leicestershire	to No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Diorite
Longhoughton Quarry A Northumberland whinstone quarry that cut setts for Ashington's streets, ran war-surplus locomotives on its tramway, and is now a fishing lake.	Northumberland	Early 19th century–1974	Limestone, Whinstone
Longriggs Mine, Appleby A gypsum drift mine opened in 1965 and worked entirely underground despite the 'quarry' in its usual name; linked by conveyor to the neighbouring Birkshead Mine, still working today.	Cumbria	1965–After 1984, not established	Gypsum
Longstone Edge Longstone Edge's real modern significance has little to do with the minerals it produced and everything to do with what a single sentence in a 1952 mineral permission was later argued to allow — a dispute that ended up before the Court of Appeal more than half a century after it was written.	Derbyshire	worked from at least the 18th century (lead veins)–No single closure date; working continued into the 2000s	Fluorspar, Lead, Barite
Longtor Mines Matlock lead workings on several levels of the gorge side, broken by fire before gunpowder reached the orefield	Derbyshire	Post-medieval; worked before c. 1730–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Lead, Zinc, Fluorspar
Lords Quarry One of three Langdale quarries under one company, idle in 1910 and back at work in the 1920s; the valley's slate is still worked next door.	Cumbria	By 1882, possibly much earlier–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Slate
Loughrigg Fell Slate Quarry One line in the 1888 openworks return for a green-slate quarry on a fell whose other workings became one of the Lake District's best-known caves.	Cumbria	Working by 1888–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Slate
Louisa Colliery A single match, struck to light a cigarette underground, set off an explosion that killed the only two Bevin Boys to die in the pits.	County Durham	1759–1964	Coal
Lover Gill Mine Worked from about 1730 by the Company of Mine Adventurers of England, alongside Lord Wharton's mines near Oxnop -- a company of national importance in its day, rather than a purely local concern.	North Yorkshire	Worked from about 1730 by the Company of Mine Adventurers of England–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Lead
Lovers Lane Colliery A single shot that blew out its stemming killed 27 in the year the Fletchers took Abraham Burrows into partnership.	Greater Manchester	By 1832–1898	Coal
Loveston Colliery A 1932 anthracite slant drowned in 1936 by water from workings nobody had mapped.	Pembrokeshire	1932–27 July 1937	Anthracite, Coal
Low Hall Colliery To fight the fire after the 1869 explosion the owners tapped a water company's main into the pit.	Greater Manchester	1860–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Coal
Luing Slate Quarries Villages were purpose-built here for the slate trade in the 1820s — and the last of them kept quarrying until 1965, decades after most of Scotland's other slate islands had given up	Argyll and Bute	Worked from the mid-18th century–1965	Slate
Lumpsey Mine The one shaft mine among Bell Brothers' four, with hydraulic drills at the face, and the last of them to close.	North Yorkshire	1880 or 1882 (sources differ)–No reliable closure date has yet been located.	Ironstone
Lundhill Colliery 189 of the 200 men and boys underground were killed in 1857, and the fire that followed was put out by diverting a stream into the workings.	South Yorkshire	1853–1890s	Coal
Lundy Granite Quarries Abandoned in 1868 and barely touched since — the quarry, its tramway and its hospital are all still there.	Devon	1863–1868	Granite
Lunehead Mine A lead mine that turned into a barytes mine without stopping, and kept going for another forty years.	County Durham	By 1882, possibly much earlier–1942 (discontinued)	Barite, Lead
Lynemouth Colliery Half of the Ellington Combine, which in the 1980s was reckoned the biggest undersea mine in the world.	Northumberland	1927–1994	Coal