MineArchiveAll mines (page 20 of 20)
Mines 1901–1945 of 1945, A–Z (page 20 of 20).
| Mine | Region | Worked | Commodities |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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the UK's first new deep coal mine in thirty years, fought through a decade of planning and legal battles before being withdrawn in 2025 without a shovel turned.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Cumbria | Never opened (withdrawn 2025)–Withdrawn 31 March 2025 | Coal |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 |
| 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 | No reliable opening date has yet been located.–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 |
| Yewthwaite Mine Worked in the shadow of Goldscope over the hill: when the neighbour struck lead in 1853, most of Yewthwaite's men simply went to it. |
Cumbria | 1849–1893 | Lead, Zinc |
| Yniscedwyn Colliery An Ystradgynlais anthracite mine whose flooded shaft forced a 1-in-3 drift, where nine men were sent runaway into the workings by a pulled stop block in 1892. |
Powys | 1872–22 March 1968 | Anthracite |
| 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 |
| Ynys Dafydd Colliery An explosion in the Nine-Feet seam killed twelve men and boys on 24 May 1856, one of the worst disasters recorded for this small Afan Valley pit. |
Neath Port Talbot | 1844 (possibly earlier)–1872 | Coal |
| Ynysamman Colliery A Brynamman anthracite level owned by the Ynysamman Colliery Company of Pontardawe, growing to 138 men by 1915–16. |
Carmarthenshire | 1909–1914 | 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 |
| Ynysfach Colliery A 19th-century mine sited near the Ynysfach Iron Works. |
Merthyr Tydfil | 19th century–No reliable closure date has yet been located. | Coal |
| Ynysfechan Colliery Opened in 1838 by Parsons and Company to feed the Ystalyfera Iron Works, per J.E. Morgan's History of Pontardawe. |
Neath Port Talbot | 1838–1927 | Coal |
| Ynysfeio Colliery The Troedyrhiw company's Rhondda Fawr steam-coal pits at Treherbert, deepened to the Gellideg at 335 yards in 1906 and 1,300 strong before Powell Duffryn shut them. |
Rhondda Cynon Taf | Level early 1850s; shaft 1856; Nos 3 and 4 sunk 1906–Production ceased c. 1930; pumping only by 1945 | Coal |
| Ynyshir Colliery Electrical detonators were tried here successfully in 1886, before most of the coalfield had them. |
Rhondda Cynon Taf | No. 1 sunk from 1875; coal 1877–1968 | 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 |
| Ysguborwen Colliery Founded by Samuel Thomas, one of the pioneers of the Welsh coal trade, whose son David Alfred Thomas became Viscount Rhondda; its abandoned workings caused the fatal 1896 inrush at the neighbouring River Level Colliery. |
Rhondda Cynon Taf | c.1849–December 1895 (a level of the same name closed 1919) | Coal, Ironstone |
| Ystalyfera Colliery When the Coal Board closed it in 1957, its own divisional chairman said there was 'no rational excuse' for keeping the pit going. |
Neath Port Talbot | By 1869; new slant 1914–1957 | 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 |
| Zetland Colliery Twenty-six people in 1937 and a hundred and forty-three by 1954, which is the wrong way round for the period. |
Clackmannanshire | Returned from 1937; sinking date not established–September 1960 | Coal |