Open questions: North Yorkshire

Where sources disagree, MineArchive keeps both accounts rather than picking one; where a fact could not be settled, the record says so. 65 such claims on 38 records. All regions.

Aysdalegate Mine

• Buddlepit gives the mine as worked from 1863 to 1902; the Wikipedia table of Cleveland mines gives 1863 to 1880 at NZ652149 and notes that it later became part of the Spawood Mine as ventilation shafts. (disputed)

Beezy Mine

• Beezy Mine, Askrigg, appears in the Lists of Mines for 1863 to 1874. (uncertain)

Belman Bank Alum Works

• The Dictionary of National Biography and Bulmer's directory of North Yorkshire name Belman Bank, about two miles south-east of Guisborough, as the site of the first alum works in England, begun by Sir Thomas Chaloner. (disputed)
• Slapewath, a hamlet about a mile and three quarters east of Guisborough, is reported to have had an alum works developed in 1604 and is described as reputedly the oldest alum quarry in Cleveland and the United Kingdom, working on into the early nineteenth century. (disputed)

Belmont Mine

• The Durham Mining Museum gives the mine as closed in 1933; Buddlepit records Dorman, Long & Co. holding it from 1929 to 1933 and the mine as worked from 1853 to 1929; and a site account gives the second working as 1907-1931 with no ore extracted after 1921. (disputed)

Boosbeck Mine

• Two shafts were sunk to 288 feet in 1872 under a lease held by Stevenson, Jaques and Company; the Durham Mining Museum gives the opening as 1873, the year the mine first appears in the Lists of Mines. (disputed)
• Production ended and the mine was abandoned in March 1887 after a water feeder struck in February 1886 flooded parts of the workings; the Durham Mining Museum records the closure as 1886. (disputed)
• The BGS mine-plans catalogue holds a Mining Remediation Authority abandonment plan titled 'Boosbeck' (catalogue OM2372, Ironstone, dated 1887); the catalogue gives no location and the plan's details do not clearly tie it to this working, so it may belong to another of the same name. (uncertain)

Booze Mine

• A local legend describes a flood that killed 24 miners and 2 pit ponies after miners broke into an underground lake near Boldershaw, but researchers have found no record of this in parish registers; a smaller, unconfirmed accident killing three miners has been suggested as the story's possible real origin. (disputed)

Buckden Gavel Mine

• Robert Higgs drove the level in at the head of Buckden Gill in 1803. (disputed)
• Robert Higgs and Company began driving the level from the head of Buckden Beck in 1804. (disputed)
• The smelt mill in the gill was built in 1698 and worked until the early 1730s, when it was replaced by Birks Mill, built in 1713. (disputed)
• The smelt mill above the tips, Buckden High Mill, had a single bellows-blown ore hearth and worked for only about eight years. (disputed)

Chaloner Ironstone Mine

• The Durham Mining Museum dates the mine October 1869 to 12 August 1939; the local history society's timeline has a Chaloner ironstone mine opened just north of Guisborough in 1853. (disputed)

Cliff Mine

• The BGS mine-plans catalogue holds a Mining Remediation Authority abandonment plan titled 'Cliff' (catalogue OM2082, Ironstone Cleveland, dated 1887); the catalogue gives no location and the plan's details do not clearly tie it to this working, so it may belong to another of the same name. (uncertain)

Clitherbeck Colliery

• Mining around Clitherbeck continued until the mid-1860s. (disputed)
• Coal was worked here until the 1890s. (disputed)

Cragg's Hall Mine

• A family history of east Cleveland ironstone miners attributes a Cragg Hall ironstone mine at Carlin How to Bell Brothers, working from 1871 to 1892. Bulmer's directory of 1890, written while the mine was at work, gives it to Pease and Partners. The directory is the better authority and this record follows it; the discrepancy is recorded rather than resolved. (disputed)

Goathland Whinstone Mine

• The Sil Howe whinstone mine at Goathland, which worked the dyke underground by a drift of 1,770 feet, is probably this mine; its surviving mine building is dated 1899 and its drift entrance 1940. (uncertain)

Goldsborough Ironstone Mine

• The ironstone at Kettleness was worked at two sites. Between 1838 and 1857 stone was won directly from the cliffs and beach and loaded onto ships in the bay, which was a hazardous operation, and shipped to the Wylam furnaces of Losh, Wilson and Bell. The other mine was west of the hamlet and operated between 1910 and 1915, the ironstone being forwarded to Skinningrove ironworks by rail. (uncertain)

Grinton Smelt Mill

• Several sources give a closure in 1886; the York Herald of 1887 reported the mine closed in 1886 and a new 21-year lease taken. (disputed)
• Repairs were made in 1888 and 1892, but the Grinton Mining and Smelting Co Ltd was dissolved in 1895 and the mill never smelted again. (disputed)
• The London Lead Company is believed to have bought the site and two mines in 1733, though modern research doubts it ever operated in Swaledale. (uncertain)

Hungry Chert Quarries

• Chert was taken from the Hungry Hushes and along Fremington Edge, ceasing after 1940. (disputed)

Huntcliffe Mine

• The BGS mine-plans catalogue holds a Mining Remediation Authority abandonment plan titled 'Huntcliffe' (catalogue OM4990, Ironstone Main, dated 1906); the catalogue gives no location and the plan's details do not clearly tie it to this working, so it may belong to another of the same name. (uncertain)

Loftus Mine

• The East Cleveland industrial-heritage account gives a different succession: ironstone gathered from the shore from 1830, a Skinningrove mine opened under the Maynard royalty in 1848, Pease and Partners moving the mine south in 1865 to meet the new railway and giving it the Loftus name, a new South Drift in 1871, and Pease and Partners as lessees until 1947, with the Skinningrove Iron Company from 1947 to 1958. (disputed)
• Loftus Mine's output peaked at 654,000 tons of ironstone in 1881, and by 1896 employed 781 people, 676 of them underground. (uncertain)
• The mine's North Drift was used as an air-raid shelter for the Skinningrove steelworks during Zeppelin raids in the First World War. (uncertain)

Longacres Mine

• An outfall believed to come from Longacres discharges bright orange water into Holme Beck, and minewater first appeared in Saltburn Gill on 18 May 1999, described locally as thirty-five years after the mine closed. (uncertain)

Lumpsey Mine

• The Victoria County History states that Lumpsey mine, in the northern part of Kilton near the railway, was opened in 1880. (disputed)
• Bulmer's directory of 1890 states that Lumpsey Mines were commenced in 1882, and the Durham Mining Museum's first return for the mine is for that year. (disputed)

Merrybent Copper Mine

• The BGS mine-plans catalogue holds a BGS plan titled 'Merrybent Mines' (catalogue KP13415, undated in the catalogue); the catalogue gives no location and the plan's details do not clearly tie it to this working, so it may belong to another of the same name. (uncertain)

North Selby Mine

• Cementation Mining Ltd began sinking the shafts in 1978. (disputed)
• Shaft sinking started at North Selby in July 1979. (disputed)
• Extreme floor heave and other geological problems led to North Selby's closure and the merger of its take with Stillingfleet in July 1997. (disputed)
• North Selby continued until 1998, when it was combined with Stillingfleet, and mining on site stopped in 2000. (disputed)
• The shafts are given as 1,043 m (NMRS), 'reaching 1040 meters' (Abandoned Britain) and 1,046 m (Mark Hillyer). (uncertain)
• The Whitemoor and North Selby sites were converted to mixed commercial use as business parks by December 2005. (uncertain)

Peak Alum Works

• Thomas Chaloner is popularly said to have smuggled the Pope's alum workers out of Italy in casks to found England's first alum works at Guisborough in 1604, earning his own excommunication. The story is regarded as apocryphal: Thomas Fuller, writing within fifty years of the founding, said the workmen were brought from Rochelle in France and named one of them as Lambert Russell, a Walloon, and the text long printed as the papal anathema is word for word the curse of Ernulphus in Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Chaloner did travel in Italy, did visit the papal alum works, and did found the Guisborough works. (disputed)
• Accounts differ on when alum working began at Peak. Historic England dates the first works to about 1650. Popular accounts credit Sir Bryan Cooke of Wheatley near Doncaster with finding alum in the rocks at Peak in 1640, and one gives 1615 for his starting the works. (disputed)

Redmire Quarry

• The aerial ropeway ceased working in 1962. (disputed)
• Stone went by aerial ropeway to the Redmire station sidings until the loading point closed in 1992. (disputed)

Ribblehead Quarry

• Ribblehead Quarry began working in 1943, producing high-quality limestone for the iron industry in Durham. (disputed)
• The owners gave up their mineral extraction rights in 1998 and handed the site to English Nature the following year. (disputed)

Rosedale Ironstone Mines

• This record dates the east-side workings 1859 to 1929, with a brief reopening from 1919; a 2015 field observation gives the east-side working life as 1860 to 1926. The difference is small and neither source explains it. (uncertain)

Slapewath Ironstone Mine

• Out & About dates the shaft to 1878 under Charlton; Hidden Teesside places the shafts around 1880 and has the mine then operated by Samuelson & Co. Both agree the mine began with Charlton's drift in 1864. (disputed)
• Out & About, following Peter Tuffs's catalogue, has the drift driven under the main road; a descendant of two of the mine's workers states it never did and that only the railway passed under, and the old Ordnance Survey map places the drift south of the road. (disputed)

Spa Wood Mine

• Ironstone was extracted between March 1853 and December 1928 on one account, while Buddlepit gives the mine as worked from 1866 to 1930. (disputed)
• East Cleveland's Industrial Heartland gives the Weardale Coal and Iron Company from 1853 to 1890, Sir B. Samuelson and Company from 1890 to 1917 and Dorman Long from 1917 to 1933; Buddlepit gives Tow Law Coal & Iron from 1866, the Weardale companies from 1870, Samuelson from 1889 and Dorman Long from 1923. (disputed)

Stags Fell Quarries

• Wikipedia describes the Stags Fell stone as Yoredale Limestone; the National Park and the Lists of Mines describe sandstone, flagstone and slate. (disputed)
• A level track along the fell is probably the course of a 19th-century tramway that took flags to the road for carting to Hawes station. (uncertain)

Stanghow Mine

• Buddlepit gives the mine as worked from 1872 to 1926; the Wikipedia table of Cleveland ironstone mines gives 1873 to 1925 at NZ654156. (disputed)

Stillingfleet Mine

• Shaft sinking began in June 1978. (disputed)
• Shaft sinking began in September 1978. (disputed)

Stockdale Colliery

• The mine reputedly sold its coal at 4d per hundredweight. (uncertain)

Swinden Quarry

• Aggregates Business names the founding firm J. W. Spencer and Son, where Wikipedia credits the 1899 works to P. W. Spencer. (disputed)

Tan Hill Colliery

• The colliery was abandoned in July 1935, with three employed that year. (disputed)
• Mining at Tan Hill was abandoned in September 1938. (disputed)
• The last mine closed in 1929, with hand working of the upper seams until the mid-1930s. (disputed)
• Tan Hill miners worked through the 1926 General Strike because their wages were marginal. (uncertain)

Upleatham Ironstone Mine

• The ironstone mine at Upleatham was constructed in 1861. (disputed)

Waterfall Mine

• Buddlepit gives the mine as worked from 1892 to 1901 under the Cargo Fleet Iron Co. Ltd; the Wikipedia table of Cleveland mines gives Waterfall at Guisborough, 1880 to 1901, at NZ626172. (disputed)

Whitby Jet Workings

• Slight accidents were reported as frequent among jet miners; in 1873 a miner was reported killed by a fall of shale. (uncertain)

Whiteside Mine

• The history of lead mining in Swaledale is believed to go as far back as the 2nd century BC, though the first written records of lead being worked in the Grinton area are documents dated 1219. (uncertain)

William Gill Colliery

• A visitor in about 2010 judged the covered shaft to be at least 100 feet deep. (uncertain)