Vieille Montagne Zinc Company

The Société Anonyme des Mines et Fonderies de Zinc de la Vieille-Montagne, a Belgian company founded at Kelmis in 1837 and for a time the world's oldest and largest zinc producer, which in 1896 bought the mineral leases, mines, royalties, mills, works and machinery on Alston Moor and worked them from the village of Nenthead for fifty-three years. It came in after the failure of its predecessor. The London Lead Company had sold its interests in 1882 to the Nenthead and Tynedale Lead and Zinc Company, which did well at first but was broken within fourteen years by a collapse in the zinc price and by the Earl of Carlisle's refusal to renew its lease of the spelter works at Tindale Fell. VM bought what was left in 1896 and brought money and method with it: hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment, plant at the front of British and European practice, and enough of a reputation that people travelled to Nenthead to look at it. What the company took out of Alston Moor and West Allendale was zinc ore, won both by mining and by reworking the waste dumps the old lead workings had left; at one point it was producing sixty per cent of the United Kingdom's zinc. Any lead it found was dressed too rather than thrown away. Nothing was spelted or smelted here: the ores were sorted, crushed and cleaned at Nenthead and then sent by road, rail and sea to the parent works in Belgium. When the old mill in the middle of the village burned down in 1905 the company built the Rampgill Mill in its place, in full production by 1910. It employed hundreds of men of several nationalities — Belgian, German and Italian among them, some of the Italians from Pestarena in the Alps — which made a remote Pennine village briefly and genuinely international. The company survived two world wars and the inter-war depression, and then in 1949 sold its leases, plant and equipment and left. In Belgium it was merged into the Union Minière group in 1989, which became Umicore in 2003; the VMZinc brand still carries the name.

Mines operated