MineArchiveMines
171 mines beginning with W, of 1950.
| Mine | Region | Worked | Commodities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Waen Nantyglo Colliery A single level in a company that ran six of them along the same outcrop: when it closed in 1923 its men simply walked to the next one. |
Blaenau Gwent | By 1896; a slant about 1904–1923 | Coal |
| Wagstaff Colliery Worked the Six-Feet seam near its outcrop, its 1914 closure independently confirmed by two separate NMRS accounts. |
Merthyr Tydfil | No reliable opening date has yet been located.–June 1914 | Coal |
| Walker Colliery Opened in 1762 with eight horses on the winding gear, it had steam winding within seven years and a James Watt pumping engine by 1796. |
Tyne and Wear | 1762–1920 | Coal |
| Wallsend Colliery The Tyneside colliery whose High Main coal made 'Wallsend' a byword for quality, and which lost 102 men and boys in a single explosion in 1835. |
Tyne and Wear | 1778–1935 | Coal |
| Wallyford Colliery An East Lothian pit that grew sevenfold in sixteen years and shrank as fast. |
East Lothian | 1855–1930 | Coal, Fireclay |
| Walsall Wood Colliery The men who sank Walsall Wood Colliery had never run a mine before in their lives -- yet inside three years they had driven the deepest shaft anywhere on the Cannock Chase coalfield. |
Staffordshire | 1874–1964 | Coal |
| Walton Colliery A Wakefield pit that took two centuries to establish and fifteen years to reclaim into a nature reserve |
West Yorkshire | 1890 (shafts sunk)–3 December 1979 | Coal |
| Wanlockhead Scotland's highest village; mining museum on site |
Dumfries and Galloway | 13th century–1934 | Lead, Copper, Silver, Zinc, Gold |
| Wapping Mine A former 18th/19th-century lead mine and 1950s fluorspar mine at Matlock Bath, forming one end of the same ore deposit as the neighbouring Cumberland Cavern. |
Derbyshire | Working by the 1750s (lead)–No further working recorded after 1956 | Lead, Fluorspar |
| Warren Moor Mine A short-lived Kildale ironstone mine whose unused 1856-57 chimney -- built before mining even began -- is the only one of its kind left in the UK. |
North Yorkshire | 1866–1874 | Iron |
| Warren Vale Colliery Twenty-four of the dead in 1851 were boys of sixteen or younger, killed when a roof fall drove gas onto their candles. |
South Yorkshire | 1840s (production from late 1850)–21 March 1943 | Coal |
| Warsop Main Colliery Sunk to follow the Top Hard seam and given a village of its own; one of the most productive pits in the country in 1935, and losing £200,000 a week by 1989. |
Nottinghamshire | 1898–25 August 1989 | Coal |
| Washington Glebe Colliery The first shaft in Great Britain sunk by freezing the ground, through 120 feet of quicksand. |
Tyne and Wear | 1904–4 August 1972 | Coal |
| Watcombe Clay Pits Torquay clay pits that founded the Watcombe terracotta pottery industry from 1869. |
Devon | c. 1865–1962 (pottery closure) | Brick Clay |
| Water House Mine It raised lead and umber together — metal and pigment out of the same small mine. |
Northumberland | In the returns from 1882–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Lead, Umber |
| Waterfall Mine Ten years or twenty, depending which record you believe — one company, one seam, and a closing date in 1901 that both sources do agree on. |
North Yorkshire | 1880 or 1892–1901 | Ironstone |
| Watergrove Mine Its 1794-95 engine house was the site of one of the earliest Newcomen atmospheric engines in the Peak District, later archaeologically excavated by the Peak District Mines Historical Society -- and its 1836-46 replacement engine involved the same engineer, William Wyatt, later responsible for the ill-fated pumping engine at the archive's own High Rake Mine. |
Derbyshire | A sough-driving venture was underway by 1746–The mine's final Annual General Meeting was held in February 1872. | Lead |
| Waterland Colliery A Carluke colliery returned in the official 1880 list of collieries at work under William Hamilton and Co. |
South Lanarkshire | No reliable opening date has yet been located.–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Coal |
| Waterside Colliery Not a single shaft in its own right, but the operational hub -- washery, locomotive shed and railway network -- serving a whole district of numbered Dalmellington Iron Company coal and ironstone pits, today preserved as a heritage railway. |
East Ayrshire | 1848–1986 | Coal, Iron |
| Wath Main Colliery The country park built on Wath Main's own reclaimed ground didn't even last as long as many of the miners who once worked there had spent underground — sold for housing barely a decade after it opened. |
South Yorkshire | sinking began 1873; reached the Barnsley seam 1876–amalgamated with Manvers Main 1 January 1986; closed 25 March 1988 | — |
| Wearmouth Colliery The deepest mine in the world when it opened in 1835; its site is now Sunderland's Stadium of Light |
Tyne and Wear | 1826-1834 (sinking)–1993 | Coal |
| Wednesbury Oak Colliery A Black Country colliery worked to feed its own ironworks, coal and ironstone together. |
West Midlands | Working by 1894; ironworks alongside from 1820–1908-1909 | Coal, Ironstone |
| Weetslade Colliery Five men died in a 1951 firedamp explosion whose recovery took nineteen months, stalled by flooding and an unprecedented build-up of hydrogen from submerged shuttle-car batteries. |
Tyne and Wear | 1903–10 September 1966 | Coal |
| Weigfach Colliery Two collieries of the same name at Fforestfach — the old one sold up in 1856, the new one struck rich in 1870 and killed eighteen in 1877. |
Swansea | Early 1840s–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Coal |
| Welbeck Colliery The colliery's own workforce transferred to Daw Mill near Coventry when Welbeck closed — a 140-mile daily commute for some, until Daw Mill itself closed after a serious fire just three years later. |
Nottinghamshire | Shafts sunk 1912; production from 1915–Last coal 11 May 2010 | Coal |
| Weldon Stone Quarries In 1275 the quarryman Edward Geoffrey was paid 8s 2d for cutting 700 freestones here for Rockingham Castle — and the same beds are still being worked. |
Northamptonshire | Medieval, probably Roman–Still active (small scale) | Limestone |
| Wellesley Colliery Scotland's first pithead baths, and in 1938 the largest coal washery in Europe |
Fife | 1883-85 (as Denbeath); renamed Wellesley 1905–July 1967 | Coal |
| Wellingborough Ironstone Quarries A brickmaker who took up iron ore as a sideline in 1874, found it paid better than bricks, and had built his own blast furnace at the end of the tramway within ten years. |
Northamptonshire | 1874–1966 | Ironstone, Limestone |
| Wellington Pit Built to look like a castle so it wouldn't spoil the view from Lord Lonsdale's grounds — and sealed in 1910 with 136 men still underground |
Cumbria | 1840–1933 | Coal |
| Wellsways Colliery Twelve dropped 756 feet in 1839 when the rope broke; the inquest found it had been cut. |
Somerset | Working by 1839; sinking date not established–Last return 1896; closure date not established | Coal |
| Wembley Ironstone Quarry Ore from this pit fed the same Teesside furnaces that produced the steel for the Sydney Harbour Bridge -- a very long supply chain from a Northamptonshire hillside. |
Northamptonshire | 1924–early 1940s | Iron |
| Wentworth Silkstone Colliery A drift mine that kept driving into fresh seams for sixty-seven years until the Whinmoor ran out. |
South Yorkshire | Shafts 1856; drift mine opened June 1911–Summer 1978 | Coal |
| Wenvoe Iron Mine Glamorgan's only iron mine of any consequence outside the Llanharry belt — forgotten until a limestone quarry broke into its workings in 1979. |
Vale of Glamorgan | Working by 1859–Last recorded working 1919 | Iron |
| Wenvoe Quarry Its stone built Barry Docks; a fall of it killed three men in a single August afternoon in 1889. |
Vale of Glamorgan | 1880s, on smaller workings mapped in 1878–79–2023 (an earlier phase ended by 1915) | Limestone |
| Werfa Colliery John Nixon's first pit above Aberdare, which sent the first boat-load of Aberdare steam coal to Cardiff and raised it by water balance. |
Rhondda Cynon Taf | c. 1835 (level); pit sunk by 1846–1908 or March 1909 | Coal |
| Wern Colliery, Cwmafan Opened in 1811; four men died together when a naked candle ignited firedamp here in December 1844. |
Neath Port Talbot | 1811–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Coal |
| Wernbwll Colliery Opened in 1893 near Penclawdd on the north Gower coast, later working the Penlan and Penclawdd drifts with about 150 men. |
Swansea | 1893–September 1937 | Coal |
| Wernos Colliery Closed in 1965 while still getting more profitable, not less — its workers were simply moved on to Cynheidre instead. |
Carmarthenshire | By 1865 (early working); 1908 (formal opening)–6 November 1965 | Coal |
| West Cannock Colliery A single company sank five separate pits here over 45 years, and the very last of them -- No. 5 -- ended up outliving the first four combined by a wider margin than the gap between when they'd all opened. |
Staffordshire | 1869–1982 | Coal |
| West Chiverton Mine One of Cornwall's two greatest 19th-century lead mines, producing around 45,800 tons of lead ore and over 1.24 million ounces of silver between 1859 and 1886, with an unusually fine surviving engine house at Batter's Shaft. |
Cornwall | 1846 (as Ventongimps Mine); reopened 1856 as West Chiverton–1886 (underground working ceased 1882) | Lead, Zinc, Copper, Silver |
| West Mine Its cavernous, cathedral-like entrance stope -- with galleries high in the roof and passages opening onto sheer drops -- made it the most notorious of all the Alderley Edge mines for accidents, some of them fatal. |
Cheshire | Possibly pre-1857; main working from 1857–Finally abandoned in 1923 | Copper |
| West Moor Colliery The pit where George Stephenson was engine-wright: he built Blücher in 1814 in the workshop behind his cottage here, and the sundial he and his son made in 1816 is still over the door. |
Tyne and Wear | Before 1806; possibly 1761–Closed by 1900 | Coal |
| West Pitcorthie Shale Mines The easternmost working of true oil shale in Scotland — and the source of the first cargo of iron ore ever shipped out of Anstruther harbour. |
Fife | 1866–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Oil Shale, Ironstone |
| West Rigg Opencast A rare surface exposure of the North Pennine Orefield's Slitt Vein: 19th-century ironstone quarrying was worked around the vein rather than through it, leaving it standing today as a vertical 'rib' running down the centre of the quarry. |
County Durham | uncertain (fluorite/galena); late 19th century (ironstone)–uncertain (SSSI designation 1968) | Iron, Lead |
| West Stanley Colliery A deputy led thirty-four men through the dark, lost seven at the shaft, and sang the rest through the wait — twenty-six came out alive |
County Durham | 1832–1936 | Coal |
| West Stonesdale Mine Its engine house held a genuinely rare hydraulic engine -- powered by water pressure rather than steam -- doing triple duty on winding, pumping and ventilation, at a time when such engines were still a novelty in the north of England. |
North Yorkshire | Built from 1850 to access the western end of the Blakethwaite vein.–Abandoned in 1861 after the vein proved barren | Lead |
| West Tolgus Mine A Redruth copper mine that changed its name four times across a century and a half of opening, failing and reopening, before water finished it in 1884. |
Cornwall | By the 1720s–February 1884 | Copper |
| Westbury Ironstone Quarry A Wiltshire ironstone quarry whose flooded pits are still known locally as 'the mineholes', now protected as a geological Site of Special Scientific Interest. |
Wiltshire | Ore discovered 1840s–1933 | Iron |
| Westcott Mine Its 1750s partners were a surgeon, a brazier and an apothecary from Shrewsbury, and a century later a Cornish engine was put up to find copper that was never there. |
Shropshire | 1753–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Copper, Barite |
| Westminster Colliery A Moss valley colliery reached over the ridge by two rope-worked inclines and a tunnel, wound up in 1922 and closed in 1925. |
Wrexham | By 1860–February 1925 | Coal |
| Westoe Colliery South Shields's last working colliery, whose outdoor toilet inspired the famous 1972 painting 'The Westoe Netty' and whose workers' brass band was the first colliery band to win the British Open. |
County Durham | 1909 (producing colliery from 1940)–May 1993 | Coal |
| Westthorpe Colliery One of the last new north Derbyshire sinkings, by a family firm that housed its men. |
Derbyshire | Sinking from 1923; shaft completed 1924–1984 | Coal |
| Wet Earth Colliery Wet Earth Colliery gave James Brindley his start: the young millwright who solved this pit's flooding problem in the 1750s went on, within a decade, to become the driving engineering force behind the Bridgewater Canal and the birth of Britain's canal network. |
Greater Manchester | 1740s; formal working from 1751–1928 | Coal |
| Wetshaw Mine Named for a cluster of workings on Reeth High Moor -- Wetshaw Level, Wetshaw High Whim and the Black Whim shaft -- whose surviving trackways were specifically studied by local archaeologists using satellite and aerial imagery to establish how ore was once moved across the site. |
North Yorkshire | No reliable opening date has yet been located.–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Lead |
| Wharncliffe Silkstone Colliery Restarting the ventilation fan with a faulty coal-cutter running cost twelve lives and a verdict of 'very negligent' management. |
South Yorkshire | 1854–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Coal |
| Wharncliffe Wood Ganister Mines A rock nobody outside Yorkshire had heard of that, once someone worked out furnaces loved it, became a whole local industry's namesake. |
South Yorkshire | 1860s–Around the end of the Second World War | Ganister |
| Wharncliffe Woodmoor Colliery A single spark from an uncovered loader motor was the likeliest cause of South Yorkshire's worst modern mining disaster. |
South Yorkshire | 1871–1965 or 1966 | Coal |
| Whatley Quarry Deliberately planned to be invisible from every public road, and cut so deep into the Mendip plateau that its stone reaches London by train because the south east has none of its own. |
Somerset | 1939–Still active | Limestone |
| Whaw Mine The hillsides around the hamlet are still scarred by hushes -- artificial floods released to strip away topsoil and expose the ore beneath -- while a Roman lead 'pig' stamped with the Emperor Hadrian's name has been found locally, alongside a 1285 record of the Lord's mine in the dale turning a profit of £4. |
North Yorkshire | Lead was worked in Arkengarthdale from at least medieval times–uncertain; Arkengarthdale's mines as a whole closed by 1912. | Lead |
| Wheal Agar An Illogan copper and tin mine where a corroded capstan rope broke under a cage of thirteen men in 1883, killing twelve of them. |
Cornwall | By 1883–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Copper, Tin, Arsenic |
| Wheal Alfred Once one of Cornwall's richest copper producers, raising some 175,000 tons of copper ore between 1801 and 1864 -- today remembered by geologists chiefly for its fine mimetite and pyromorphite mineral specimens, as a Site of Special Scientific Interest and Geological Conservation Review site. |
Cornwall | by 1801–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Copper, Tin |
| Wheal Andrew Also recorded under the name Friendship Mines -- a coincidental name shared with, but entirely unrelated to, the well-known Wheal Friendship already documented on this archive at Mary Tavy in Devon, a common mine name reused independently in both counties. |
Cornwall | After 1780–Closed around 1870 as part of Clifford Amalgamated Mines | Copper |
| Wheal Baddon Rich enough in lead and silver in the mid-19th century to give its name to the hamlet of Wheal Baddon that still stands over the site. |
Cornwall | 1842–1872 | Lead, Tin, Silver, Zinc |
| Wheal Basset (Basset Mines) The stone used to build Lyle's Shaft's grand 1879-80 pumping engine house came from demolishing four older, worn-out engine houses on the same sett — one generation of Cornish engineering quite literally built from the bones of the last. |
Cornwall | worked from 1815 (as separate setts); Basset Mines company formed 1896–1918 | Tin, Copper |
| Wheal Bellan A St Just tin mine whose 1914 mill ran on electricity from gas made on site, and whose dressing floors still survive in the Cot valley. |
Cornwall | By 1717–1919 (abandonment plan); mill dismantled 1947 | Tin |
| Wheal Betsy The only standing engine house left on Dartmoor, saved from Army demolition plans in 1954 |
Devon | 1740–1877 | Lead, Copper, Arsenic, Silver, Zinc |
| Wheal Buller Wheal Buller's 1856 dividend record captures just how quickly Cornish mining fortunes could turn — the same mine that paid out more than any other in the county that year had, within two decades, run out of ground worth working at all. |
Cornwall | worked from 1819–1875 (main); failed reworking 1928-1930 | Copper, Tin |
| Wheal Busy The first Boulton and Watt engine in Cornwall pumped here — and the mine outlived its copper by half a century on arsenic nobody had wanted |
Cornwall | 16th century (earliest working); 1720s (copper production)–1924 | Copper, Tin, Arsenic |
| Wheal Clifford Struck the United Mines group's notorious 'Hot Lode', where water at around 100 degrees Fahrenheit poured continually over the miners working it, cutting productivity so badly that men could barely manage an hour's work in a day. |
Cornwall | By 1835–Merged into Clifford Amalgamated Mines in 1861 | Copper, Tin |
| Wheal Coates Iconic ruined engine house on the St Agnes cliffs |
Cornwall | 1802–1914 | Tin, Copper |
| Wheal Cock The 1895 collapse of an underground dam here flooded the mine's richer ground faster than its engines could pump it clear. |
Cornwall | Reopened 1778; amalgamated into Botallack Mine after 1841–1914 (reopened 1906 after 1894–95 flooding) | Tin, Copper |
| Wheal Cupboard The third and final of the three founding mines of United Mines -- alongside the already-published Ale and Cakes Mine and Poldory -- whose combined workings, once rebuilt by the engineer John Taylor in the 1820s, struck what was at the time the richest copper lode in the world. |
Cornwall | Working before 1780–Closed around 1870 as part of Clifford Amalgamated Mines | Copper |
| Wheal Damsel One of a trio of Damsel-named setts worked together through the 19th century; the mine's name now survives only as a residential road built over part of the old ground. |
Cornwall | 1795–1872 | Copper |
| Wheal Drea Its own long-flooded old workings were the ones neighbouring miners broke into on 10 January 1893, causing the already-published Wheal Owles flooding disaster that killed nineteen men and a boy. |
Cornwall | 1790s; merged into Wheal Owles c. 1859–Worked as part of Wheal Owles until 1884 | Tin, Copper |
| Wheal Edward Wheal Edward's real claim to fame came long after it stopped being a copper and tin mine: pitchblende from its lodes was sent to Marie Curie, and in the late 1950s the Atomic Energy Authority came back to extract genuine uranium ore from the same cliff lode. |
Cornwall | worked from 1821 (first returns); reopened 1863–1893 | Copper, Tin, Uranium |
| Wheal Eliza An unsuccessful Exmoor copper and iron trial remembered today less for its ore than for the notorious 1858 murder whose victim was found in its flooded shaft. |
Somerset | From 1845 (as a copper venture); examined for iron 1856-57–1858 | Copper, Iron |
| Wheal Ellen The only Cornish engine house with a castellated chimney, built in 1866 for a copper mine's reopening whose engine never arrived. |
Cornwall | c. 1826–1862 (reworking tried 1866 and 1907) | Copper, Lead, Zinc |
| Wheal Fanny One of the five original setts -- alongside Wheal Maria, Wheal Anna Maria, Wheal Josiah and Wheal Emma -- that together made up the already-published Devon Great Consols, once the world's largest producer of arsenic. |
Devon | 1845–Closed with the rest of Devon Great Consols in 1903 | Arsenic, Copper |
| Wheal Fortune Part of the disused mine is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, designated in 1991 for its geological interest, and a Geological Conservation Review site of national importance: its opencast exposes two distinct generations of tin mineralisation in one location, an unusually clear and instructive example for studying granite-related hydrothermal tin deposits in southwest England. |
Cornwall | 1855–1912 | Tin, Copper, Arsenic, Tungsten, Zinc |
| Wheal Frementor A worked-out vertical tin deposit here left a 'gunnis' -- an open void some 4 metres wide, 70 metres deep and 200 metres long -- now fenced off as a striking, if hazardous, feature of the site. |
Devon | opencast, date uncertain; underground working resumed c.1915–1930 | Tin, Tungsten |
| Wheal Friendly A small St Agnes mine said in 1896 to be about to be wound up, which lasted into the 1920s by working with Wheal Kitty and Polberro as one concern. |
Cornwall | c. 1860–By 1930 | Tin, Copper |
| Wheal Friendship Wheal Friendship is remembered less for its copper, which most Devon mines also produced, than for the young manager it made: John Taylor left Mary Tavy to become one of the most sought-after mining engineers in Britain, called in wherever a mine's owners needed the water-power and drainage expertise he first developed here. |
Devon | late 18th century–1925 (surface tribute working to the 1950s) | Copper, Tin, Arsenic, Lead |
| Wheal Gorland A Cornish copper mine whose lasting fame rests on its oxidised upper workings, the type locality for five secondary copper minerals including liroconite and cornwallite. |
Cornwall | 1792–1864 (main working); brief reopening 1906-1909 | Copper, Tin, Arsenic, Tungsten |
| Wheal Grambler The only mine engine house left standing in the parish of St Day, and a compact example of Cornwall's amalgamation era: three small, separately worked setts merged in 1834 into St Aubyn United Mines, which then worked on quietly for another sixty years. |
Cornwall | By 1792, as East Wheal Sparnon–1893, as St Aubyn United Mines | Copper, Tin, Fluorspar |
| Wheal Grenville Wheal Grenville spent its first six years losing money badly enough to be sold off — and then went on to become one of the Camborne district's most consistently profitable tin mines for the next four decades, a turnaround owed entirely to going deeper and finding the Great Flat Lode's tin beneath the copper that had first disappointed everyone. |
Cornwall | 1820s (initial working); productive from 1850s; formal lease 1845–1920 | Tin, Copper |
| Wheal Grey Mine A Tregonning Hill tin mine recorded in 1715, whose surviving engine house pumped a china clay pit with an engine first built for Polgooth. |
Cornwall | By 1715–1873 (tin); sources differ | Tin, China Clay |
| Wheal Harmony Formed in 1816-17 from the amalgamation of Treleigh Wood Mine with several smaller workings near Redruth, exploiting the eastern extension of the Wheal Tolgus main lode. |
Cornwall | mining recorded from at least the 1760s–1879 (as Treleigh Wood Mine) | Copper, Tin, Tungsten |
| Wheal Hermon A map dated 1560 already shows this mine as an established working called 'Hermeno' -- meaning tin was already being pulled out of the Cot Valley here before Elizabeth I had even been crowned. |
Cornwall | 1560–1816 | Tin |
| Wheal Jane Site of the major 1992 mine-water pollution incident |
Cornwall | 1861–1991 | Tin, Copper, Arsenic, Lead, Silver, Zinc |
| Wheal Jennings The only mine in an otherwise copper-dominated parish worked purely for tin, and the only one still being tried on any scale as late as the early 20th century. |
Cornwall | Worked by at least the 19th century–Reworked unsuccessfully at the start of the 20th century | Tin |
| Wheal Jewell The large 'S'-shaped reservoir that now dominates the site was built directly over the mine's old gerts (open-cast workings) in 1936, destroying most of the surviving remains, to serve as a header tank for the Mary Tavy hydroelectric scheme. |
Devon | Comprises workings on Kingsett Down dating to the late 18th century–Mining ceased around 1924, with only limited reworking in the 1930s | Tin, Arsenic |
| Wheal Kine Diamond tin -- ore pure enough to go straight to the smelter with no dressing at all -- was rare enough that Polberro's version of it became the thing the whole sett was known for. |
Cornwall | 1837–1895 | Tin, Copper |
| Wheal Kitty The 65-inch engine that ended its days at Wheal Kitty in 1910 was already secondhand when it arrived — built in 1852 and first used at another mine entirely, it worked on at St Agnes for two more decades as the last beam engine the district would ever see. |
Cornwall | documented from 1758; consistently worked from 1834–1930 | Tin, Copper, Iron |
| Wheal Lovell The Wendron tin mine managed in the early 1840s by Lydia Taylor, the only woman known to have run a mine in Cornwall. |
Cornwall | By 1840–1875 (abandonment plan) | Tin |
| Wheal Maid Wheal Maid's two very different lives — a profitable Georgian copper mine, then a late-20th-century tailings dump — have left it as one of the most scientifically studied contaminated mine sites in Britain, a real-world laboratory for how sulfidic mine waste weathers once nobody is managing it any more. |
Cornwall | 1782–1870s (mine); site used as a tailings dam 1970s-1980s | Copper, Tin, Arsenic |
| Wheal Martyn China Clay Works Cornwall's china clay industry once supplied half the world's kaolin; this site is now a working Victorian clay-works museum |
Cornwall | 1820s–1931 (pits); 1969 (pan kiln use ended) | China Clay |
| Wheal Mary Ann A Menheniot silver-lead mine whose 1845 founding was settled by a Chancery suit before it raised any ore, later worked to 250 fathoms under Captain Peter Clymo. |
Cornwall | 1845–c. 1875 | Lead, Silver, Fluorspar |
| Wheal Metal Home to the only large surviving engine house of the historic Wheal Vor mining group, once a tenth of Cornwall's entire tin output, moved there stone by stone from Wheal Vor's own Trelawney's Shaft. |
Cornwall | 15th century–1877 | Tin, Arsenic |
| Wheal Owles Site of Cornwall's second-worst mining disaster after Levant — the 1893 flooding from the abandoned Wheal Drea, which killed twenty men and boys — and later a BBC Poldark filming location. |
Cornwall | c. 1830–1893 | Tin, Copper |
| Wheal Peevor Wheal Peevor's three engine houses, standing together exactly as they served three different jobs, make it one of the clearest places in Cornwall to see at a glance how a single mine's pumping, hauling and ore-crushing operations actually fitted together on the surface. |
Cornwall | sett granted c. 1701; worked from the mid-18th century–1889 (main); revivals 1911–18, 1938, 1950s | Tin, Copper, Tungsten |
| Wheal Pell By 1750 this ground was producing more tin than the local packhorses could actually carry away -- a genuine bottleneck of success rather than the usual mining-district story of scarcity. |
Cornwall | 1750–1895 | Tin |
| Wheal Prosper Wheal Prosper's engine house, framed against Mount's Bay from Rinsey Head, is one of the most photographed mining ruins on the Cornish coast — a striking survival from a mine that, ironically given its name, never actually turned a profit. |
Cornwall | circa 1860–1866 | Copper, Tin |
| Wheal Pye Even in its final act, decades after most of Cornwall's tin industry had already given up, someone still thought this ground was worth one more try -- Polberro Tin Ltd's 1937-41 revival came fully 87 years after the mine's earliest documented working life. |
Cornwall | No reliable opening date has yet been located.–1895 | Tin |
| Wheal Remfry A china clay pit whose 1960s expansion led its owner to demolish an entire nearby village, Retew, and rehouse its residents. |
Cornwall | By the 1960s (exact opening date not established)–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | China Clay |
| Wheal Squire Raised over 20,000 tons of copper ore in less than four decades of working, as one of several mines absorbed into the United Mines group that John Taylor rebuilt into profitability in the 1820s. |
Cornwall | 1816–Closed around 1870 | Copper |
| Wheal Sterran The 1927 reopening found exactly the kind of fine tin ore that should have justified further work -- and was abandoned anyway, one of Cornish mining's small unfinished stories. |
Cornwall | early 20th century–1927 | Tin |
| Wheal Towan Its copper made Ralph Allen Daniell 'guinea a minute' Daniell, and in 1785 it had the first steam engine erected underground. |
Cornwall | By 1756 (as Wheal Sound)–1837 (abandonment plan) | Copper, Tin |
| Wheal Trewavas Wheal Trewavas is one of only a small number of Cornish mines whose workings genuinely extended out beneath the sea rather than merely running close to the shoreline — a fact underlined by the manner of its closure, when the sea broke through into a tunnel being prepared for the miners' own annual dinner. |
Cornwall | by 1834–1846 | Copper |
| Wheal Union Amalgamated at least four earlier mines under one name yet was never once profitable across three separate working attempts spanning 34 years. |
Cornwall | 1848–1882 | Copper, Tin |
| Wheal Unity Wood In 1897 its underground workings were leased to the Truro School of Mines specifically for the training of students -- an unusually direct link between a working Cornish mine and formal mining education. |
Cornwall | Producing large tonnages of copper ore by 1815.–Mining ceased permanently in 1927 | Copper, Tin |
| Wheal Uny Wheal Uny's paired engine houses, standing at right angles to each other above Redruth, are counted among the finest surviving groups of their kind anywhere in Cornwall — a rare case of both a mine's pumping and winding engine houses surviving together, built as a matched set. |
Cornwall | worked from c. 1800–1893 | Copper, Tin |
| Wheal Vor Wheal Vor's tin wasn't what finally beat it: the mine closed in 1848 with rich ground still unworked, brought down instead by twenty years of its own owners fighting each other in court over who owned the rights to it. |
Cornwall | underground working from the 15th century–1911 (last major working); abandoned by 1967 | Tin, Copper |
| Wheatley Hill Colliery Six months after it opened, a heading broke into its neighbour's flooded workings — and the coroner's jury named three officials for manslaughter. |
County Durham | 1869–3 May 1968 | Coal |
| Wheels Rake Wheelhouse Shaft Cavers spent years digging through the collapsed Shining Sough here before breaking through into the neighbouring Broadmeadow Mine's own workings. |
Derbyshire | Shining Sough started 1756–Wheelhouse working stopped c.1851 | Lead |
| Wheldale Colliery Wheldale went out as it had operated for over a century: the last colliery in Yorkshire still using pit ponies in 1972, and ten years later the last in the whole of Britain to run a steam locomotive on its own sidings. |
West Yorkshire | sunk 1868; production from 1870–October 1987 | — |
| Whitburn Colliery Its 1877 shaft was the first in British coal to be sunk by the Kind-Chaudron process — and the sea water that forced that choice eventually closed the pit. |
Tyne and Wear | May 1879–1968 | Coal |
| Whitby Jet Workings Jurassic fossil-wood gemstone mined along the coast, driven to a Victorian boom by royal mourning fashion |
North Yorkshire | 1840–1920 (last mine, Cod Hill, near Guisborough) | Jet |
| White Grit Mine White Grit's Roman pig of lead, stamped for the Emperor Hadrian, is a rare case of a British mine site with a genuinely datable ancient find rather than mere local tradition of Roman-period working. |
Shropshire | old workings recorded 1678; main periods 1830-1848–c. 1870 | Lead |
| Whitecliff Ironworks A short-lived Forest of Dean blast furnace, financially ruinous but historically significant as the site of some of David Mushet's earliest steelmaking experiments. |
Gloucestershire | Built 1798-1801, blown in 1801 or 1802–Iron production ceased by 1816, possibly as early as 1812 | Iron |
| Whitehill Colliery Whitehill's real legacy isn't Scottish: the profits and experience Archibald Hood built here funded his move to the Rhondda Valley, where he became one of the founding figures of the South Wales coal industry his Midlothian miners never worked in. |
Midlothian | worked from 1850; leased and developed by Archibald Hood from 1856–1961-62 (sources differ on the exact year) | Coal |
| Whiteside Mine One of three mines on the Grinton How Vein that fed the best-preserved lead smelting site in the Dales. |
North Yorkshire | Working by 1888–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Lead |
| Whitesike Mine Worked wholly by the London Lead Company and linked by tramway to the neighbouring Bentyfield mine; the two mines are protected together as a single Scheduled Monument. |
Cumbria | Lead had been worked on Alston Moor since medieval times–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Lead |
| Whiteworks Mine The bleak moorland around Whiteworks, next to Foxtor Mire, is widely thought to have inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's Grimpen Mire in The Hound of the Baskervilles. |
Devon | 1180–1914 | Tin |
| Whitrigg Colliery The Lady of the Dales: three shafts, two surface mines and its own power station. |
West Lothian | Sinking and production from about 1900–1972 | Coal |
| Whittle Colliery A drift mine that swallowed its neighbour: Shilbottle’s men walked to Whittle when their own pit shut. |
Northumberland | 1920–March 1987 | Coal |
| Whitwick Colliery The colliery that gave its name to the town of Coalville, and the site of Leicestershire's worst-ever mining disaster: a 1898 gob fire that killed 35 men and boys. |
Leicestershire | 1822 (sinking); coal raised from 1828–3 July 1986 | Coal |
| Whitwood Colliery A Normanton colliery whose owners shared their profits, and whose village Voysey designed. |
West Yorkshire | Shafts sunk 1871-1878; coal reached December 1876–About 1970 | Coal |
| Whitworth Colliery Sunk to 1,520 feet 8 inches but never found a workable coal seam, defeated by water and cost overruns before it could work at all. |
Neath Port Talbot | 1907–1911 | Coal |
| Wick Ochre Mines Ochre found while looking for iron, dug from shallow trenches and adits, and ground in a converted iron mill into the reds that painted a generation of buildings. |
South Gloucestershire | 1892–1970 | Ochre |
| William Gill Colliery A moorland coal pit whose horse-gin circle, coal stores and coke oven still stand around an open shaft on Stonesdale Moor. |
North Yorkshire | By 1804–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Coal |
| William Pit Seven separate accidents at this one pit killed five or more men apiece — the last of them, in 1947, killed a hundred and four |
Cumbria | Sunk from May 1804; first coal drawn 1805–Ceased production 31 December 1954 | Coal |
| Williamthorpe Colliery Sunk through a two-mile basin of floodwater behind nineteen-foot iron tubbing, and still pumping the district dry half a century after it closed. |
Derbyshire | 1905 (sinking from 1901)–28 March 1970 | Coal |
| Willington Colliery Half a million pounds of capital, and nearly as much again, went into it in the first few years — and it was still raising whinstone and clay alongside the coal seventy years later. |
County Durham | 1840–1932 | Coal, Fireclay |
| Wills Founder Mine In 1976, members of the North Staffordshire Mining Club discovered a hydraulic pumping engine 360 feet down the shaft -- a type designed by Richard Trevithick in Cornwall around 1790, and one of the oldest surviving engines of its kind anywhere in the world. |
Derbyshire | No reliable opening date has yet been located.–uncertain; the shaft was disused by 1976 | Lead |
| Wilsontown Ironworks Scotland's second coke-fired ironworks, the site where raw pit coal was first proven to fuel a Scottish blast furnace and where the 'spiral tuyere' was developed. |
South Lanarkshire | 1779–1842 | Iron, Coal |
| Wimblebury Colliery A Cannock Chase pit whose village had so many chapels it was called the Holy City. |
Staffordshire | Working by 1894; earlier date not established–Still returning 813 people in 1947; closure date not established | Coal, Ironstone |
| Windlestone Colliery A Ferryhill-district pit the railways made possible, idle in the 1880s and gone by 1924 |
County Durham | 1876; shaft completed October 1877–1924 | Coal |
| Windsor Colliery Connected underground to Universal Colliery at Senghenydd for ventilation from the very year Windsor opened — over a decade before Universal's own workings became the site of the worst mining disaster in British history. |
Caerphilly | 1895 (sunk); 1902 (first coal)–6 November 1986 | Coal |
| Wingate Grange Colliery The manager admitted he had never believed in coal-dust explosions until one killed 26 of his men. |
County Durham | 1839–26 October 1962 | Coal |
| Winsford Rock Salt Mine Europe's largest operating salt mine, and the successor to Northwich's collapse-prone 19th-century workings |
Cheshire | 1844–Still active | Salt |
| Winspit A Purbeck stone quarry whose wartime defence works and underground galleries have since made it a recurring filming location for Doctor Who, Blake's 7 and Star Wars. |
Dorset | 1719–1953 (surface working ceased c. 1940) | Freestone |
| Winster Mines At its 18th-century peak, this lead-mining village may briefly have been the fourth largest town in Derbyshire — a status it owed entirely to lead, and lost entirely once the mines flooded out. |
Derbyshire | by the 17th century–1938 | Lead |
| Winster Pitts and Drummer's Venture Though worked as two entirely separate concerns by neighbouring parishes, the mines shared one underground adit -- gated precisely on the parish boundary that divided them. |
Derbyshire | Worked from the mid-17th century–Working ceased by the mid-19th century | Lead |
| Winterings Mine Several separate bale-smelting sites survive on Winterings Edge, Winterings High Scar and Winterings Gill, identified by their grey and black slag -- the black, vitreous slag at one site indicating a more sophisticated smelting method than elsewhere in the group, and thought to date somewhat later than nearby comparable sites. |
North Yorkshire | before late 16th century (bale-hill smelting evidence)–uncertain; the last Swaledale and Arkengarthdale mines closed by 1912. | Lead |
| Wistow Mine It won coal but never raised any: everything went ten kilometres underground to Gascoigne Wood — and the same roof that should have caved instead sagged, and let the aquifer in. |
North Yorkshire | June 1983–13 May 2004 | Coal |
| Witton Park Colliery One pit opened in 1819 and within a century and a half nearly a hundred more had been sunk within five miles of it — and the ironworks it fed was the first in the north-east of England. |
County Durham | June 1819–April 1925 | Coal |
| Wolfcleugh Mine Named among the richest mines in Weardale, on evidence that does not survive the arithmetic. |
County Durham | Worked by the Beaumonts from 1818–Abandoned 1912; further attempt 1946 | Lead, Fluorspar |
| Wollaton Colliery The deep pit of 1873 on the Willoughby estate where, two and a half centuries earlier, Britain's first documented railway carried coal to Wollaton Lane End. |
Nottinghamshire | 1873-74–Between 1963 and 1966 | Coal |
| Wolstanton Colliery For a time, this was the deepest hole miners anywhere in western Europe went to work down every day — 1,140 yards, achieved not by sinking one heroic shaft but by quietly merging three separate collieries into one underground system. |
Staffordshire | 1920–1986 | Coal |
| Wood Level Colliery By report the very last colliery at work anywhere in the Pembrokeshire coalfield, outliving every other pit in a district worked since the late medieval period. |
Pembrokeshire | uncertain (part of the wider Kilgetty complex, worked from 1775)–1950 | Coal |
| Wood Mine Its entrance was finally blasted shut in 1964 by 'Blaster' Bates, a demolition expert of some note -- brought in after decades of unbarred entrances and dumped rubble had failed to keep people out. |
Cheshire | Worked 1857 to 1877, mainly in the 1860s–Closed 1877; entrance finally sealed in 1964 | Copper, Lead |
| Woodhead Mine Woodhead was a genuine one-man operation on an industrial scale: Colonel Cathcart didn't just finance the mine, he built an entire village around it, complete with a school and library, for a workforce of over 300 people. |
Dumfries and Galloway | 1838–1873 | Lead, Silver |
| Woodhorn Colliery The pit is now the county archive: eight hundred years of Northumberland records kept in the buildings its winding engines stood in. |
Northumberland | Sinking from 1894–1981 | Coal |
| Woodhouse Colliery A proposed coking-coal mine that would have been the UK's first new deep coal mine in thirty years, fought through a decade of planning and legal battles before being withdrawn in 2025 without a shovel turned. |
Cumbria | Never opened (withdrawn 2025)–Withdrawn 31 March 2025 | Coal |
| Woodilee Colliery A Lenzie pit that turned from steam coal to coking coal and quintupled in size. |
East Dunbartonshire | 1890–1930 | Coal, Ironstone |
| Woodsmith Mine A mine under construction to work the world's largest known polyhalite deposit through what will be the deepest shafts in Europe, still years from production after a decade of delays and a change of owner. |
North Yorkshire | from Under construction since 2017 (not yet in production) | Polyhalite |
| Woolley Colliery Arthur Scargill, the miners' leader who came to define British industrial politics in the 1980s, started out here as an ordinary young miner in 1953, at a pit by most accounts far from militant. |
South Yorkshire | Established 1869–1987 | Coal |
| Woolmet Colliery The tower house that gave the estate its name didn't survive the colliery that replaced it: undermined by Woolmet's own workings, Woolmet House came down in 1954, decades before the pit itself closed. |
Midlothian | 1898 or 1904 (sources differ)–1966 | Coal |
| Workington Colliery The sea came in through pillars that had been robbed under it, after the danger had been put in writing to the owner and ignored. |
Cumbria | No reliable opening date has yet been located.–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Coal |
| Worsley Navigable Levels An underground canal system built directly into the coalface, so that narrow boats called starvationers could load coal underground and float it straight out to the Bridgewater Canal. |
Lancashire | 1759 (levels); coal known from 1376–1887 (coal traffic); drainage use to 1968 | Coal |
| Wren's Nest Limestone Mines Reached by nearly 3km of canal tunnel; still explored today by boat through the Dudley Canal Trust's underground tours |
West Midlands | 1780s (Castle Hill); c. 1805 (Wren's Nest tunnel)–1920 (mining); 1925 (quarrying) | Limestone |
| Writhlington Colliery Waste rock dumped at the pit head turned out, decades after the colliery closed, to hold the oldest damselfly fossil ever found anywhere in the world. |
Somerset | Working by 1829–September 1973 | Coal |
| Wroxton and Adderbury Ironstone Workings Opened not by ordinary industrial demand but on the direct instruction of the wartime Ministry of Munitions, which needed more British iron ore than the existing fields could supply |
Oxfordshire | Adderbury workings from 1859; Wroxton quarry from 1917–1967 | Iron |
| Wrysgan Quarry A workforce that once produced 3,000 tons of slate a year in 1904 had shrunk to just eleven men by the mid-1940s, still working the same underground levels for a fraction of the output — the quarry didn't fail suddenly, it simply wound down to almost nothing before finally stopping. |
Gwynedd | 1830s–1946 | Slate |
| Wyken Colliery Its subsidence made Wyken Slough, still the largest body of water in Coventry. |
West Midlands | 1854–1915 | Coal |
| Wylam Colliery The colliery where Puffing Billy and Wylam Dilly, the world's oldest surviving steam locomotives, were built to haul coal, and where George Stephenson was born and grew up. |
Northumberland | By the 1700s–By 1888 | Coal |
| Wyllie Colliery A whole village built and named for a colliery that only worked for 42 years. |
Caerphilly | 1926–1968 | Coal |
| Wyndham Western Colliery Wyndham introduced South Wales's first miners' canteen offering a full hot meal service in 1942, and, in 1930, a system recording the colliery manager's own voice to warn men of hazards as their cage descended — modest, human-scaled innovations from a colliery whose Western half began with five men dying in a sinking explosion sixty years earlier. |
Bridgend | 1865 (Wyndham); 1873–75 (Western)–January 1984 | Coal |
| Wynnstay Colliery Struck by three separate fatal explosions in a single decade -- 1863, 1868 and 1873 -- killing thirty men and boys between them. |
Wrexham | Opened in 1856, the property of the New British Iron Company.–Closed in 1927. | Coal |
| Wyrley No. 3 Colliery Harrison's 'Sinking' at Great Wyrley, opened 1896 and 621 strong in 1923, whose coal ran by cable tramway to the Grove's washery after the 1930 disaster and which absorbed the Grove in 1952. |
Staffordshire | 1896–June 1963 (merged with Mid Cannock) | Coal |
| Wythburn Mine Its top level, at about 2,300 feet on Helvellyn, may be the highest mineral working in England, and its miners' graves are in Wythburn churchyard below. |
Cumbria | 1839–1880 | Lead |