Little Brookhead Mine

Overview

Little Brookhead Mine is a small, unusually intact lead mine complex on a steep slope at Eyam in the Derbyshire Peak District, preserving a capped shaft, a gin circle, and terraced working and dressing floors from its post-medieval working life.

History

Lead mining has a continuous history in the Eyam district going back to at least the Roman period, and Little Brookhead was one among many small workings scattered across the district's veins during the post-medieval centuries. William Wood's 1903 history of Eyam lists 'Brookhead' among the district's most productive and celebrated mines without giving further particulars of this specific working, consistent with a small mine that left no detailed documentary record of its own. What survives instead is the physical evidence on the ground: a professional archaeological survey (Barnatt, 2004) recorded Little Brookhead as an intact small mine complex on a steep shale/gritstone slope, comprising an upper terraced working floor with a capped shaft and a gin circle -- the ring-shaped track worked by a horse turning a winding drum -- a rectangular adjacent area that may mark the site of a wooden coe (a miner's storage hut) with a possible washing pit beside it, a lower terraced area used for ore dressing, and a gully with a pit at one end that may have been used for buddling (washing crushed ore to separate it by density). A large, partially-robbed spoil hillock below the workings contains finely crushed processed material along with shale spoil from the original shaft-sinking.

Workings

Ore was raised via a single shaft, worked with a horse gin (the gin circle survives as an earthwork), with separate terraced areas for working and for dressing the ore -- crushing and buddling to wash out the waste rock.

What remains

An intact small mine complex, with a capped shaft, the earthwork of its gin circle, terraced working and dressing floors, and a large processed-spoil hillock all surviving on the surface. It carries no statutory heritage protection.

Capped shaft, gin circle earthwork, terraced working floor, possible coe site and washing pit, lower dressing floor, a gully associated with buddling, and a large spoil hillock.

Recorded claims

Individual factual claims, each attached to the source(s) that support it below. Where sources disagree, both are kept.

• A professional archaeological survey (Barnatt, 2004, 'An Inventory of Regionally & Nationally Important Lead Mining Sites in the Peak District', vol. 2, site no. 36) recorded the site as an intact small mine complex with a capped shaft, gin circle, working and dressing floors, and a spoil hillock, centred on grid reference SK 2225 7666. ¹
• William Wood's 1903 history of Eyam lists 'Brookhead' among the district's most productive and celebrated mines, though without giving specific particulars of this individual working. ²

Photographs & further reading

Sources

1. (primary) Little Brookhead Mine (Monument MDR13956) — Derbyshire Historic Environment Record
2. (secondary) The History and Antiquities of Eyam -- The Lead Mines — William Wood (1903)

Record created: 1 September 2026 · Last researched: 1 September 2026