Company of Mines Royal

The Crown-chartered Society of Mines Royal, the Elizabethan enterprise that brought skilled German miners from Austria and Bavaria to the Caldbeck Fells from 1563, running the first well-documented large-scale copper mining and smelting operation in the British Isles; the Hochstetter family supervised its Caldbeck workings until around 1630. It began organised working at Cwmsymlog in 1585, developing it into one of Wales's most important lead and silver mines, and opened the first commercial workings at Coniston in the 1590s through the merchant agent Daniel Hechstetter, where operations ceased around the start of the Civil War in the 1640s.

Mines operated