MineArchiveAll mines (page 13 of 13)
Mines 1201–1287 of 1287, A–Z (page 13 of 13).
| Mine | Region | Worked | Commodities |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 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 | Started in 1845 as one of the original setts making up Devon Great Consols–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 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 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 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 closure); reopening attempts 1911-18, 1938, 1950s all failed | 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 | Ancient; no date for this sett alone has been found.–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 | Worked from 1816, as one of the mines later absorbed into the United Mines group.–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 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 |
| 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 |
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–uncertain | 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 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 |
| 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 | Part of Winster's extensive 18th- and 19th-century lead workings; uncertain–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 |
| 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 |
| Winsford Rock Salt Mine Europe's largest operating salt mine |
Cheshire | from 1844 | 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 |
| 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. |
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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 | sunk 1898 (Gazetteer for Scotland) or 1904 (RAILSCOT) by the Niddrie and Benhar Coal Company–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 |
| 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 | Wyndham: sinking from 1865, shafts to Six-Feet seam completed 1868. Western: sunk 1873-75–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 |
| Yarner Copper Mine The mine's own engine house kept collapsing long after the copper ran out -- a 1978 rainstorm punched a fresh hole through it more than a century after the last ore was raised. |
Devon | 1857–1865 | Copper |
| Yate Celestine Mines Ninety-five per cent of the world's celestine came out of these fields — and it was dug by farm labourers in the slack season |
South Gloucestershire | 1880s–1994 | Celestine |
| Yesnaby Quarries A tsunami from the 1755 Lisbon earthquake reached this clifftop and nearly wrecked the quarry — and two centuries later the islanders themselves stopped a uranium mine here |
Orkney | Millstone quarrying from an unknown early date–Quarrying declined after the Second World War | Freestone |
| Yew Craggs Quarry The other side of Honister Pass — green slate carried down by hand-sledge for a century, then by counterbalanced tramway. |
Cumbria | Working by the early 18th century–Closeheads abandoned 1963 | Slate |
| Yew Tree Colliery Site of the worst mining disaster in Tyldesley's history: a 25-death firedamp explosion in 1858, caused by a skipped safety inspection after the fireman overslept following a pay-rise celebration. |
Lancashire | 1845–19th century (exact closure date not established) | Coal |
| Ynisdavid Colliery Its seams were the Finery and the Sulphur: a colliery named by the copper and iron works it was sunk to feed. |
Neath Port Talbot | By 1854–1872 | Coal |
| Ynysarwed Colliery Already being worked under one owner or another for well over a century by the time it finally closed in 1955 — a genuinely old colliery whose exact opening date has been lost to an incomplete nineteenth-century record. |
Neath Port Talbot | By 1823–December 1955 | Coal |
| Yorkshire Main Colliery The colliery was renamed from 'Edlington Main' to 'Yorkshire Main' while still being sunk — a rebrand that stuck for the next seventy-four years. |
South Yorkshire | Sinking began 1909; opened 1913–11 October 1985 | Coal |
| Ystrad Einion Mine Small lead, copper and zinc mine in Cwm Einion, worked intermittently from the 18th century to 1903; retains a rare surviving underground waterwheel. |
Ceredigion | 18th century–1903 | Copper, Lead, Silver, Zinc |
| Ystumtuen Mine Really a complex of several closely worked mines around the village it takes its name from, whose first industrial operator, the Company of Mine Adventurers, collapsed in 1709 amid accusations of fraudulent accounting. |
Ceredigion | Working by 1698–Appears to have closed in 1882 | Lead, Zinc |