Logaulas Mine

Overview

The largest and most ancient of the Lisburne lead and silver mines centred on Pont-rhyd-y-groes, worked since at least the mid-18th century in a Cambrian Mountains district whose mining boom built the village around it and whose eventual closure — like so many of its Ceredigion neighbours — left the settlement much reduced.

History

Logaulas — also recorded historically as Lisburne Mine or Logylas Mine — is described by the mining historian D.E. Bick as the largest and most ancient of the group of mines worked around Pont-rhyd-y-groes, functioning from at least the mid-18th century as part of the wider Lisburne Lead and Silver Mines complex in the parish of Ysbyty Ystwyth. The surrounding district, in the upland Cambrian Mountains between the Ystwyth and Rheidol valleys, had been worked for lead and silver on and off since Roman times, but it was the 18th and 19th-century boom in mining across this stretch of mid Wales — of which Logaulas and its neighbours were part — that transformed Pont-rhyd-y-groes and nearby villages from scattered upland farms into genuine mining communities, complete with chapels, a counting house and workers' housing built to serve the industry. The mines took their collective name from the Earls of Lisburne, the Vaughan family of nearby Trawsgoed, who held much of the mineral rights across this part of Cardiganshire. As with most of the district's mines, the boom did not last. Across the wider Cambrian Mountains orefield, mining collapsed through the later 19th and early 20th centuries as cheaper imported ore undercut Welsh production, and the mining villages that had grown up around pits like Logaulas shrank sharply as work dried up — a pattern repeated at neighbouring Ystumtuen, whose own population never recovered after the closure of its last working mine and had effectively disappeared by the 1970s.

Geology

Logaulas worked lead-silver veins typical of the Central Wales Orefield, a series of steeply dipping mineral lodes hosted in Lower Palaeozoic mudstones and gritstones across the upland country between the Ystwyth and Rheidol valleys — the same orefield, worked from Roman times onward, that produced Wales's other major lead-silver mining districts at Cwmystwyth and Cwm Rheidol.

Workings

The mine is recorded as having worked at two distinct locations: one within the village of Pont-rhyd-y-groes itself, and a second set of workings around 700m to the south-east, connected by the same underlying lode system.

Closure

No precise closure date for Logaulas specifically was established from the sources checked for this pass; the mine's decline is consistent with the wider collapse of Cambrian Mountains lead-silver mining through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

What remains

A scatter of mining remains — spoil heaps and shaft or level features — survives across the landscape at both of the mine's recorded locations, a pattern typical of the wider Pont-rhyd-y-groes/Ysbyty Ystwyth mining landscape, where buildings and spoil are dispersed among the rocky outcrops of the upland terrain.

Spoil heaps and mine remains survive at both recorded localities, within and just outside the village of Pont-rhyd-y-groes.

Abandoned workings can be dangerous — unstable ground, uncapped shafts, flooding and bad air are common even where a site looks safe from the surface. This entry describes history and general location only; it is not an access guide.

Old shafts and workings in this area are unmarked and hazardous — this entry describes history and general location only, not an access guide.

Recorded claims

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

• Mining historian D.E. Bick records Logaulas as the largest and most ancient mine in the Pont-rhyd-y-groes area, functioning from at least the mid-18th century. ¹
• Mining remains — buildings and spoil heaps — are dispersed across the rocky upland terrain of the wider Ysbyty Ystwyth/Pont-rhyd-y-groes area, reflecting the extent of a once-important local mining industry. ¹
• Lead-silver mining across the wider Cambrian Mountains district, including at neighbouring Ystumtuen, collapsed through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with mining villages shrinking sharply as the industry closed down. ²

Sources

1. (secondary) Ysbyty Ystwyth & Pontrhydygroes — Historic Landscape Character Area — Dyfed Archaeological Trust
2. (secondary) Ystumtuen — Wikipedia

Record created: 26 August 2026 · Last researched: 26 August 2026