MineArchiveAll mines (page 9 of 9)
Mines 801–840 of 840, A–Z (page 9 of 9).
| Mine | Region | Worked | Commodities |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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–1895 | Tin |
| 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 | — |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Winsford Rock Salt Mine Europe's largest operating salt mine |
Cheshire | from 1844 | Salt |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |