Mining Terms & Methods

The vocabulary, methods, hazards and machinery that recur across British mining history — explained on their own terms, and linked to the mines where there's real evidence of each one.

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Commodities (80)

Term	Also known as	Definition
Alum	—	A naturally occurring double sulphate of aluminium and potassium, historically extracted from shale by slow burning and prolonged chemical processing rather than simple digging, and essential for over two centuries as the mordant that fixed dye permanently into cloth before synthetic alternatives replaced it.
Anhydrite	Anhydrous Gypsum	Anhydrous calcium sulphate — gypsum's drier chemical twin, formed the same way but without the water locked into gypsum's crystal structure — worked in Britain not as a building material but as the raw material for making sulphuric acid.
Anthracite	Stone Coal, Hard Coal	The highest rank of coal — 86 to 97 per cent carbon, with the fewest impurities and the least volatile matter — a hard black coal with a semi-metallic lustre and a conchoidal fracture that ignites with difficulty and burns with a short, blue, smokeless flame. In Britain it occurs in quantity only in the western part of the South Wales coalfield, west of Swansea and Llanelli, and in the small Pembrokeshire field beyond it.
Antimony	—	A brittle, silvery-white semi-metal mined chiefly as the sulphide ore stibnite, historically alloyed with lead and tin to make hard, durable metal, and today used mostly as a flame retardant — a mineral known and worked in Britain only on a small, short-lived scale, at Glendinning in Dumfries and Galloway.
Aplite	—	A fine-to-medium-grained igneous rock of granitic composition, valued not for any single mineral it contains but for its unusually pure, glass-ready mix of potassium, aluminium, sodium and silica.
Arsenic	—	A highly toxic semi-metal (As), recovered in Cornwall almost entirely as a by-product of roasting tin and copper ore, and refined for use as a pesticide, pigment and industrial chemical.
Ball Clay	Potters' Clay	A kaolinitic sedimentary clay — commonly 20-80% kaolinite, 10-25% mica and 6-65% quartz, with organic matter — that is exceptionally plastic and fires to a buff, cream or off-white body. It is not dug where it formed: unlike china clay, which is washed out of the granite it weathered from, ball clay was carried away by water and redeposited in sedimentary basins, and the sorting on that journey is what makes it fine and plastic.
Barite	Barytes	A dense, chemically inert mineral (barium sulphate, BaSO₄), long worked in Britain as a by-product of lead veins and, from the mid-20th century, increasingly for its own sake as the essential weighting agent in oil and gas drilling fluid.
Barytocalcite	—	A barium-calcium carbonate mineral, BaCa(CO3)2, found as a gangue mineral alongside lead-zinc ore in the North Pennine orefield -- a heavy, pale grey, cream or white mineral with a resinous to greasy lustre, its high density (specific gravity around 3.7) coming from the weight of barium in its structure.
Bauxite	—	A sedimentary rock rich enough in aluminium to be worth smelting, made of gibbsite, boehmite and diaspore with iron oxides and clay, and coloured reddish-brown, white or tan. Named after Les Baux in southern France, where it was identified in 1821. It is a weathering product rather than a vein mineral: lateritic bauxites form where silicate rocks like granite and basalt weather intensely under good drainage, concentrating aluminium hydroxide beneath an iron-rich surface layer.
Blackband Ironstone	—	A dark, carbon-rich variety of ironstone containing enough coaly matter to smelt itself, requiring little or no additional fuel to calcine.
Brick Clay	Common Clay, Clay and Shale	Not a single mineral but a working category: 'clay, shale, mudstone and other such materials' worked for structural clay products — facing and engineering bricks, pavers, roof tiles and vitrified clay pipes. The materials range from soft plastic clays to hard mudstones of wholly different geological ages, and what unites them is fitness for purpose rather than composition. Brickmaking is by far the largest use, taking around 95% of the clay extracted in this sector.
Calcite	—	A soft, common carbonate mineral (CaCO₃) mined as a vein "spar" alongside lead, fluorspar and other Peak District ores, distinct from limestone (the bulk sedimentary rock made largely of the same mineral) and valued for its purity and industrial uses.
Cannel Coal	Cannel, Parrot Coal (Scottish), Candle Coal	A hard, dense, dull-black coal so rich in hydrogen that it lights readily and burns with a bright, steady flame like a candle — which is where the name comes from, whether from the Welsh canwyl or the English word itself. It breaks with a smooth conchoidal fracture rather than in layers, takes a polish, and gives off far more gas and oil on heating than ordinary coal, at the cost of being a poorer plain fuel.
Celestine	Celestite, Strontium Sulphate	Strontium sulphate, a soft, often glassy-blue mineral whose only real importance is as the world's principal source of the element strontium — and which, for the better part of a century, came overwhelmingly from one small stretch of Gloucestershire.
Chalcopyrite	—	Copper iron sulphide (CuFeS₂), commonly called copper pyrites — the commonest and most widely worked ore of copper in Britain and worldwide.
Chalk	—	A soft, fine-grained, almost pure white limestone formed from the compacted skeletal remains of microscopic marine algae, worked across southern and eastern England both as a locally hard building stone and, far more commonly, dug and spread on fields as marl.
Chert	—	A hard, dense, cryptocrystalline silica — flint's cousin, found as beds and nodules in limestone rather than chalk — too brittle to build with and too hard to shape, whose value lay entirely in that hardness: blocks of it lined and paved the flint mills of the Staffordshire potteries, grinding calcined flint to the white powder that whitens earthenware and strengthens bone china without contaminating it.
China Clay	—	China clay, or kaolin, is a soft white clay used chiefly in papermaking, ceramics and paint, worked in Cornwall by washing it out of decomposed granite with high-pressure water jets.
China Stone	Cornish Stone	A medium-grained, feldspar-rich, partially kaolinised granite, distinguished by the near-absence of iron-bearing minerals — quartz, feldspar, mica, kaolinite and fluorspar, and almost nothing that would stain a fired body. It is the flux in the porcelain recipe: china clay gives the ware its whiteness and plasticity, china stone melts at firing temperature and binds it into something hard and translucent.
Chromite	Chrome Ore, Chrome Ironstone	An iron-chromium oxide, the only commercially important ore of chromium, worked in Britain almost nowhere but Unst — a mineral valued first as a pigment and later, once steelmaking demanded it, as the source of metallic chromium itself.
Chrysotile	White Asbestos, Serpentine Asbestos	The fibrous, curly-stranded form of serpentine that gives ordinary asbestos its name — soft, flexible and fire-resistant enough to be spun into cloth, and now understood to be lethal to breathe.
Coal	—	A combustible sedimentary rock formed from ancient compressed plant matter, worked underground or by opencast methods and burned as fuel — Britain's dominant industrial fuel from the 18th century until well into the 20th.
Cobalt	—	A hard, ferromagnetic metal (Co), worked in Britain on only a small, short-lived scale, chiefly for the intense blue pigment its compounds produce in glass and ceramics.
Copper	—	A reddish, highly conductive metal (Cu) mined in Britain from the Bronze Age onward, worked at Parys Mountain and Great Orme on a scale that briefly made Wales the centre of the world copper trade.
Coprolite	Phosphate Nodule	Properly, fossilised animal dung — a trace fossil, largely calcium phosphate, formally identified by William Buckland in 1829 after Mary Anning noticed from 1824 that odd stones inside ichthyosaur skeletons held fish bones and scales. Commercially the word meant something looser and mostly wrong: the phosphatic nodules dug by the ton from the Crag and Greensand of eastern England were only sometimes coprolites, and the name stuck to the industry regardless.
Diatomite	—	A soft, powdery sedimentary rock built up from the fossilised silica shells of microscopic algae called diatoms.
Diorite	—	A coarse-grained igneous rock, intermediate in composition between granite and gabbro, quarried commercially across Charnwood Forest for roadstone and railway ballast rather than for any decorative or chemical use -- sold commercially as 'granite', a name geologically inexact but long-established in the trade.
Feldspar	—	A group of common rock-forming aluminium silicate minerals, crushed and used chiefly as a flux in ceramics and glassmaking.
Fireclay	Seatearth, Fire Clay	A fine-grained clay found beneath coal seams, valued not for any decorative or structural quality but for one thing alone: it can be fired into brick that survives furnace heat without melting, cracking or losing its shape.
Firestone Surrey	—	A hard, siliceous building stone from the Upper Greensand of the North Downs, used for construction and for lining fireplaces and kilns.
Flagstone	—	A thinly bedded siltstone or fine sandstone that splits naturally along parallel bedding planes into flat, durable slabs.
Flint	—	A hard, fine-grained form of silica found as nodules in chalk, worked since prehistory by knapping it into sharp-edged tools, and later into gunflints for firearms.
Fluorspar	Fluorite	The mineral fluorite (calcium fluoride, CaF₂) worked as an ore, historically most often as a by-product of lead mining, and today the raw material for most of the world's fluorine chemistry.
Freestone	—	A general term, not one specific rock, for any fine-grained sandstone or limestone that can be cut and worked freely in any direction without splitting along natural bedding planes — the quality that made Bath, Portland and Beer stone Britain's premier building stones for a thousand years.
Fuller's Earth	Fulling Earth, Bentonite	Not a single mineral but a functional category: clays that absorb, filter and bleach, usually palygorskite (attapulgite) or bentonite — hydrous aluminium silicates of varying composition. What defines a fuller's earth is what it will take out of a liquid, not what it is made of.
Galena	—	Lead sulphide (PbS), the principal ore mineral of lead — a heavy, brittle mineral that breaks along a distinctive cubic cleavage into bright, silvery-grey cubes.
Ganister	Gannister	A hard, fine-grained quartzose sandstone — an orthoquartzite — cemented by secondary silica, breaking with a splintery fracture and running over 90% silica with only traces of alumina and lime. It occurs as a seatearth in the Coal Measures: a bed within the ordinary coal sequence rather than a vein, which is why it was worked along its outcrop rather than sunk to.
Gold	—	A dense, chemically inert precious metal (Au), worked in Britain both from hard-rock quartz veins and from alluvial gravels, valued throughout history for coinage, jewellery and as a store of wealth.
Granite	—	A hard, coarse-grained igneous rock, quarried and dressed across Britain for building, monumental and engineering stone — the material that gave Aberdeen its "Granite City" nickname and paved much of Victorian Britain's streets.
Graphite	—	A soft, crystalline form of carbon, historically known in Cumberland as 'wad', 'plumbago' or 'black lead' — mined at Seathwaite, Borrowdale, in a purity never matched elsewhere in Britain.
Gypsum	—	A soft sulphate mineral formed by the evaporation of ancient seawater; its finest, translucent form, alabaster, was long prized for sculpture, while coarser gypsum is calcined into plaster of Paris or used directly in cement.
Haematite	—	The principal ore mineral of iron, a form of iron oxide (Fe2O3) ranging in colour from steel-grey to deep red, and the source of the exceptionally pure, high-grade iron ore that made west Cumbria's iron industry so significant.
Hearthstone Surrey	—	A soft, calcareous variety of Reigate Stone from the Upper Greensand, used from the Victorian era into the 1960s for whitening doorsteps, stone floors and hearths.
Iron	—	Britain's most industrially important metal (Fe), mined chiefly as haematite in Cumbria and as ironstone in the Forest of Dean and the Weald, and the raw material that underpinned the Industrial Revolution and, later, the steel industry.
Ironstone	—	A sedimentary rock — clay ironstone in the Coal Measures, or the distinct Jurassic ironstones of the Cleveland, East Midlands and southern England belt — containing enough iron carbonate or oxide within a clay or shale matrix to be worked commercially as an iron ore.
Jet	—	Jet is a hard, black, fossilised form of ancient driftwood, a relative of coal, dug or gathered along the North Yorkshire coast around Whitby and carved into jewellery and ornament.
Kidney Ore	—	The mammillated, kidney-shaped variety of haematite, formed where the mineral precipitates freely inside open cavities.
Lead	—	A soft, dense, low-melting metal (Pb), Britain's most widely worked historic metal ore, smelted from galena and used for roofing, pipework, shot and paint.
Limestone	—	A sedimentary rock composed mainly of calcium carbonate, quarried and mined across Britain for building stone, lime burning, ironworking flux and, from the 19th century onward, cement — one of the few commodities on this site extracted almost as much by underground mining as by open quarrying.
Magnesian Limestone	Zechstein Group, Dolomite rock, Raisby Formation, Cadeby Formation, Lower Magnesian Limestone, Upper Magnesian Limestone	The suite of Permian carbonate rocks that runs from Nottingham north through Yorkshire into County Durham, where it forms the coastal cliffs between Hartlepool and South Shields. Much of it is dolomite rather than ordinary limestone, and it has long been Britain's main source of dolomite rock.
Manganese	—	A hard, brittle metal (Mn) essential to modern steelmaking, added as ferromanganese or spiegeleisen to strip impurities from molten steel and strengthen the finished metal — a comparatively minor British industry whose entire commercial life was dictated by the rise and fall of demand from a single revolutionary technology, the Bessemer converter.
Marble	—	A stone capable of taking a fine decorative polish — either true metamorphic marble, or, as with most historic English 'marble', a hard, fossil-rich limestone that polishes just as well.
Micaceous Haematite	Micaceous Iron Oxide, MIO, Shiny Ore	A variety of haematite occurring as tiny, glittering, greyish-purple flakes rather than solid rock — 'shiny ore' to the miners who worked it — mined not to be smelted for iron but to be ground into one of the most effective anti-corrosion paint pigments ever found.
Mineral Black	Bideford Black, Biddiblack	An earth pigment: a soft, clay-like carbonaceous shale of carbon with silica and alumina, ground to a dense, non-reflective black. Worked in Britain almost only in north Devon, where it ran beside the thin anthracitic culm seams of the Bideford Formation and was sold as Bideford Black or Biddiblack.
Mudstone	Mudrock, Heavy clay	A fine-grained sedimentary rock made of consolidated mud — clay and silt particles below about a sixteenth of a millimetre across — which, unlike shale, does not split readily along bedding planes. The distinction is fissility rather than composition: in the standard classification of mudrocks a fissile rock of that grain size is a shale and a non-fissile one a mudstone, with siltstone and claystone at either end of the range.
Nickel	—	A hard, corrosion-resistant metal won from two quite different kinds of ore: sulphides such as pentlandite and pyrrhotite, which are richer and account for about 40% of land-based resources, and oxide laterites — nickeliferous limonite and garnierite — which hold the other 60%. Around 130 million tonnes of nickel is estimated in land-based resources.
Ochre	—	A soft, iron-oxide-rich earth pigment, dug or washed from weathered iron-bearing deposits and refined by settling and drying — mined in Britain for at least 4,500 years and, at Clearwell Caves in the Forest of Dean, still worked by hand today.
Oil Shale	—	A fine-grained sedimentary rock rich in kerogen, which yields a petroleum-like oil when heated (retorted) — the basis of an entire Scottish industry built around it decades before conventional oil was ever struck in Britain.
Polyhalite	—	An evaporite mineral, a hydrated sulfate of potassium, calcium and magnesium (K₂Ca₂Mg(SO₄)₄·2H₂O), crystallised from ancient seawater as it evaporated, and mined today for use directly as a multi-nutrient fertiliser.
Potash	—	Potash is a group of potassium-bearing evaporite salts, mined chiefly as sylvite (potassium chloride) and used almost entirely as agricultural fertiliser.
Pyrite	—	Iron pyrite (FeS₂), "fool's gold" — a common, brassy-yellow mineral mined and roasted not for its iron but for its sulphur, the raw material of the sulphuric acid that underpinned much of Victorian Britain's chemical industry.
Rhyolite	—	The most silica-rich of the volcanic rocks: a pale, fine-grained lava with the chemical make-up of granite, which cooled quickly at the surface instead of slowly underground.
Roadstone	Road Metal, Road Stone, Roadstone Aggregate	Crushed rock quarried for road building — the single largest use of crushed rock in Britain. It is sold either coated with bitumen for asphalt or uncoated for the unbound layers beneath, and in 2014 the two together accounted for just under 40 million tonnes, about a quarter of all primary aggregate sold in Great Britain.
Salt	—	Salt is the mineral halite (sodium chloride), worked in Britain either by dry rock-salt mining or by pumping and evaporating brine, and used for winter road de-icing, food and chemical manufacture.
Sandstone	—	A sedimentary rock formed from compacted and cemented sand-sized grains — chiefly quartz — that splits and dresses well, making it Britain's most widely used building stone.
Sarsen Stone	Sarsen	An extremely hard silicified sandstone -- the eroded remnant of a once near-continuous desert crust -- found as scattered boulders across southern England.
Serpentine	Serpentinite	A metamorphic rock — properly serpentinite — made largely of serpentine-group minerals, formed when mafic or ultramafic rock is hydrated deep beneath the ocean floor at mid-ocean ridges and in subduction zones. It is soft enough to carve at 2.5 to 3.5 on Mohs, takes a high polish, and its mottled green colouring gives it both its name and its whole commercial value: it was never worked for a mineral it contained, but for how it looked when cut.
Sett (Paving Block)	Granite Sett, Paving Sett, Street Sett, Stone Sett, Cassie (Scottish), Belgian Block	A small rectangular block of dressed stone laid to surface a street. A sett has six identifiable faces, which is what separates it from a cobble — a rounded stone with no worked sides at all. The modern standard puts a sett between 50 and 300 mm in plan with a thickness of at least 50 mm, and neither plan dimension usually more than twice the thickness; a cube is simply a sett whose three dimensions are roughly equal.
Silica Sand	Glass Sand, Silver Sand	A very pure, fine-grained quartz sand — grains worn down to rounded quartz with almost nothing else mixed in — valued not for any single mineral but for its chemical cleanliness and near-absence of the iron that discolours ordinary sand. The finest, palest grades have long been sold as silver sand.
Silver	—	A precious metal (Ag) almost never mined for itself in Britain, recovered instead as a by-product of lead ore, and historically valuable enough that lead mines were sometimes worked chiefly for the silver locked inside their galena.
Slate	—	A fine-grained metamorphic rock that splits cleanly into thin, flat sheets along its natural cleavage, quarried and worked chiefly as a roofing material.
Sphalerite	—	Zinc sulphide (ZnS), the principal ore mineral of zinc, historically known to British miners as blende or blackjack.
Talc	Soapstone, Steatite, Kleber (Shetland)	A hydrated magnesium silicate, Mg3Si4O10(OH)2, and the softest mineral there is — 1 on the Mohs scale, soft enough to mark with a fingernail. Its massive carvable form is soapstone, or steatite. It has perfect basal cleavage, splits into thin sheets, and its low shear strength makes it a solid lubricant.
Tin	—	A pale, corrosion-resistant metal (Sn) smelted from cassiterite ore, worked in Britain for over 4,000 years — the metal that gave Cornwall its name in trade with the ancient Mediterranean and underpinned Britain's Bronze Age economy.
Tungsten	—	A very dense, extremely high-melting-point metal (W), worked chiefly from the mineral wolframite, prized above all for hardening steel.
Uranium	—	A dense, radioactive metal (U), mined in Britain on only a small, largely historical scale — chiefly at South Terras in Cornwall, worked first as an incidental iron-mine curiosity and then, briefly, as one of the most valuable ore sources on Earth.
Whinstone	—	A provincial British quarrying name for any hard, dark, fine-grained igneous rock -- typically dolerite or basalt -- rather than a single specific mineral or geological formation.
Witherite	—	A barium carbonate mineral, a heavy white or colourless mineral mined almost nowhere else in the world in commercial quantity outside Settlingstones, Northumberland.
Zinc	—	A bluish-white metal (Zn) worked chiefly from sphalerite ("zinc blende") ore, long treated as a troublesome waste mineral in British lead mines before galvanising and brass-making turned it into a valuable target in its own right.

Structures & Machinery (74)

Term	Also known as	Definition
Acetylene Lamp	Carbide Lamp (American usage)	A portable lamp burning acetylene gas, generated inside the lamp by dripping water onto calcium carbide, giving a bright, unenclosed flame; used underground as an alternative to candles and oil-wick lamps, but -- unlike a safety lamp -- with no wire gauze or other means of containing its flame.
Aerial Ropeway	Aerial flight (Lake District and the Pennines), Ropeway, Aerial tramway (North American), Aerial cableway	An overhead cable carrying buckets or tubs of ore, coal or stone from a mine or quarry to a mill, railway or wharf, usually across ground no road or tramway could sensibly cross. Distinct from a blondin, which lifts loads within a single quarry rather than carrying them from one place to another.
Atmospheric Engine	Newcomen engine, Fire engine, Newcomen fire engine	The first practical steam engine, invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712: steam let into a vertical cylinder was condensed to make a partial vacuum, and the pressure of the atmosphere pushed the piston down, rocking a beam that worked pump rods in a mine shaft.
Balance Bob Cornish	—	A large counterweighted lever, attached to a shaft's pump rods, that offset the rods' own weight so that a Cornish pumping engine only had to do the work of lifting the water itself.
Beam Engine	—	A large stationary engine built around a massive pivoting overhead beam, used from the early 18th century to pump water from mine workings and, later, to wind ore, waste and men up the shaft — the machine, above all others, whose iconic engine houses still define the skyline of Cornwall's mining districts.
Belland Yard Derbyshire	—	A walled enclosure built around a Derbyshire lead mine's ore-dressing ground to keep cattle and horses away from 'belland' -- waste contaminated with lead and other toxic minerals, capable of killing livestock that grazed on it or drank water that had washed through it.
Blondin	Blondin crane	An aerial ropeway spanning a quarry pit, carrying a powered carriage that could travel along the cable and also raise and lower a load beneath it — so material could be lifted straight up out of the bottom and set down anywhere under the span.
Boiler House	Boiler-house	The building, usually a light lean-to against the engine house, that held a steam engine's boilers and the firing floor in front of them, with the chimney stack either attached to it or built into a corner of the engine house.
Bouse Team Derbyshire	Bouse Teem (Derbyshire)	A small stone-built storage bay, or a row of them, used to hold raw ore ('bouse') as it was drawn from a Derbyshire lead mine, ready for processing on the adjoining dressing floor; also written bouse teem.
Breathing Apparatus	—	A self-contained device supplying breathable oxygen and scrubbing exhaled carbon dioxide, worn by rescue workers to survive and operate in the irrespirable, gas-filled atmosphere left behind after a mine explosion, fire or inrush.
Bunton	—	A horizontal timber or steel beam fixed across a mine shaft, generally at intervals of 4 to 8 feet, carrying the vertical guides that keep a cage, kibble or skip running true as it is raised and lowered.
Cage	—	The lift used to raise and lower miners, materials and ore in a mine shaft, named for the strong wire mesh that formed its sides.
Capstan	Crab (North East England), Ground Crab (North East England)	A drum on a vertical axle, worked by hand, horse or engine, used at a mine for heavy lifting in the shaft — pumps, pump rods, tubbing and sinking gear — as distinct from the winding engine that raised the coal.
Charcoal Blast Furnace	Wealden Furnace (the Weald)	The furnace that made Britain's iron before coal did: a tall charcoal-fired shaft furnace, blown continuously by water-powered bellows, that could run for months at a time and draw off molten iron rather than the solid lump a smaller bloomery hearth produced.
Coal Cutter	—	A mechanical machine used to undercut a coal seam ahead of extraction, replacing the hand pick as the standard way of loosening coal from the face.
Coe Derbyshire	—	A small stone cabin built by Derbyshire lead miners over or near a shaft, used to store tools and spare clothing; the ordinary miner's equivalent of the grander Count House kept by a mine's management.
Colliery	Coal Mine, Coal Pit, Glofa (Welsh)	A coal mine considered as a whole working establishment: the shaft or shafts and the underground workings they serve, together with the surface plant that makes the coal saleable — winding engines, screens, washery, workshops, offices and sidings. The distinction from 'coal mine' is real if slight: a coal mine is the excavation, a colliery is the entire concern standing over it. It is the word the official record almost always uses, which is why so many British pits are catalogued as a colliery rather than a mine.
Colliery Brickworks	Fireclay works (Scottish), Firebrick works	A brick and fireclay works attached to a colliery, working the clay that comes up with the coal. Fireclay is the seatearth beneath a coal seam — the fossil soil the coal-forming plants rooted in — so a pit working coal is already cutting through the raw material of refractory bricks, and many British collieries turned that by-product into a second business.
Cornish Engine Cornish	—	A distinctive high-pressure single-acting beam engine, developed in Cornwall in the early 19th century, that became the standard heavy pumping engine of British metal mining — a step beyond the earlier, lower-pressure beam engines associated with James Watt, and expensive fuel is exactly why the improvement mattered so much to Cornish mine owners.
Count House Cornish	Counting house	The mine's administrative building — a shortened form of "account house" — where the purser and mine captain worked, miners were paid, and the rights to work sections of ground were auctioned on setting days.
Detaching Hook	Ormerod Hook, Ormerod Link, Safety Link, Self-detaching Hook	A safety device fitted between the winding rope and a cage or skip which, if the cage is wound past its stopping place at the top of the shaft, releases the rope and holds the cage suspended in the headgear instead of letting it be dragged over the pulleys or drop back down the shaft.
Drumhouse	Drum House, Winding Drumhouse	A small building at the head of an incline housing the large rope or cable drum, and its associated braking gear, around which the incline's haulage cable was wound.
Endless Rope Haulage	Endless Haulage, Endless-rope Haulage, Endless Rope, Endless Chain, Clipper	A system of underground haulage in which tubs are clipped to a single wire rope that runs continuously in a loop, driven by an engine at one end and tensioned round a return wheel at the other, so that full tubs travel out on one track while empties come in on the other. The North Staffordshire glossary defines it as 'a system of haulage, normally double track, employing a moving endless rope to which the tubs are clipped either individually or in sets'.
Engine House	Beam engine house, Engine Houses	The building erected over a mine's steam engine — in Cornwall and west Devon most often a beam engine, and elsewhere a beam, rotative or horizontal engine — used to pump water, wind ore and men up a shaft, or crush ore ahead of dressing.
Fan House	—	The building housing the mechanical fan that drove a mine's ventilation system, usually a Guibal or Waddle-type centrifugal fan driven by a steam engine.
Fishbelly Rail	Fish-bellied Rail, Fish Belly Rail	An early cast-iron tramway rail, cast noticeably deeper in the middle of its length than at its ends, giving it a curved profile likened to the belly of a fish.
Flat Rods	Flat-Rod	A reciprocating system of jointed iron or timber rods that carried mechanical power overland from a waterwheel or engine to pumps or other machinery some distance away, often up to a quarter of a mile — a way of putting one water-power source to work at several places at once, without needing a separate wheel or engine at each.
Gads	—	A simple wrought-iron hand tool — part wedge, part chisel — driven with a hammer to split or break rock by hand, before power drilling and explosives made the job faster.
Guibal Fan	—	A large, steam-driven centrifugal ventilating fan, patented in 1862 by the Belgian engineer Théophile Guibal, that became the dominant mechanical ventilation technology in British and European collieries and ironstone mines from the 1860s until well into the twentieth century.
Haulage	Rope Haulage, Main and Tail, Main and Tail Haulage, Tail Rope, Horse Haulage, Jig Brow, Underground Haulage	The movement of coal, ore, materials and men along the roadways of a mine, as distinct from winding them up and down the shaft. Barrowman's 1886 glossary defines it simply as the transit of mineral by horses or by mechanical means; a later definition makes the distinction plainer, calling haulage the transport of men, materials or ore from one point to another in a broadly horizontal direction, against hoisting for the vertical.
Headgear	Headframe (North American)	The structural frame built directly over a mine shaft to carry the wheels that guide the winding cable — the single most recognisable structure at almost any mine site, also called a headframe, winding tower, gallows frame or poppethead.
Heapstead	Heap-stead, Pit bank, Pit top	The whole of the surface works about a colliery shaft — the raised platform or bank at the shaft top with its headgear, screens and loading arrangements, and the engine houses, workshops and stores grouped round it.
Journey South Wales	—	A train of trams or drams coupled together and hauled along an underground roadway by rope, the South Wales word for what the North East calls a set.
Keps	Fangs (South Wales), Cage Props	The supports at a shaft landing that a cage rests on while its tubs are changed — a pair of pivoted arms or catches swung in under the cage to take its weight off the winding rope, and swung clear again before it is wound away.
Kibble	Kibble bucket, Bowk, Hoppit (Kent and South Wales)	A large, open-topped iron or steel bucket, hung on chains or a rope, used to raise ore, waste rock, water and — before cages became standard — miners up and down a shaft.
King Hook	—	A safety detaching hook fitted between a mine cage and its winding rope, designed to release the cage automatically if it was ever wound too far and struck the headgear.
Koepe Winding	—	A friction-based winding system, invented in Germany, that hauls a shaft's cages on a rope running over a fixed, grooved friction wheel (sheave) rather than winding the rope onto a drum — letting a shaft be deepened without ever having to re-equip the winding engine itself.
Man-engine	man engine	A mechanism of reciprocating rods fitted with steps and fixed platforms, powered by a steam engine or waterwheel, that carried miners up and down a shaft far faster than climbing ladders.
Mine Dry	Dry house, Changing house, Miners' dry	The building where a shift changed: men came off the surface into clean clothes on one side, went underground, and came back to strip off wet and filthy gear that hung there to dry before the next shift. Part changing room, part drying room, and in practice the social centre of a mine.
Miners' Barracks	Mine shop (North Pennines), Mineshop (North Pennines), Lodging shop (North Pennines), Barracks (Cornish and Welsh)	A lodging house built at a mine for men who lived too far away to walk home — a barracks, mine shop or lodging shop where a shift slept, ate and dried its clothes from Monday to Saturday.
Miners' Row	—	Terraced housing built and owned outright by a colliery or quarry company specifically to house its own workforce, standard practice across British coalfields and many metal-mining and quarrying districts from the 19th century onward.
Mines Rescue Station	—	A dedicated building where trained rescue teams were based, equipped and trained, typically serving every colliery within a set radius — Britain's response, made a legal requirement in 1911, to earlier disasters where volunteer rescuers had no formal training or equipment at all.
Naked Light	Naked flame, Midgie (North East England), Open light	Any unshielded flame carried underground for light — a tallow candle, an open oil lamp, or a torch. Before the safety lamp there was nothing else, and in a mine carrying firedamp a naked light is an ignition source moving about the workings at head height.
Oil Works	Paraffin Works	The surface works attached to a Scottish shale mine where crushed oil shale was retorted -- heated in the absence of air -- to drive off crude oil, gas and ammonia, distinct from the mine itself.
Pelton Wheel	Pelton Turbine	An impulse water turbine whose rim carries a ring of split, spoon-shaped buckets, struck by one or more high-pressure jets of water rather than turned by the water's weight or flow the way an ordinary waterwheel is.
Pithead	Pit Head, Bank, Pit-mouth, Skreens, Colliery Surface	The surface of a colliery at the top of the shaft, and the buildings and works standing on it. Barrowman gives pit-mouth as the surface of the ground at the top of a shaft, and the pithead as the place where the cages are unloaded and the mineral weighed; in practice the word covers the whole working surface — headgear, winding house, heapstead, screens, offices, lamp room, workshops and sidings.
Pithead Baths	Pit Head Baths	A purpose-built washing and changing facility at a colliery's surface site, letting miners wash and change out of their working clothes before going home, rather than carrying pit dirt back to a house with no bathroom of its own — built nationally under a dedicated welfare programme from 1926 onward.
Powder House	Magazine	A dedicated store for gunpowder or other blasting explosives, deliberately built well apart from a mine's other buildings as a safety measure against accidental detonation. Also known, especially in official and scheduled-monument terminology, as a powder magazine.
Powered Roof Supports	Self-advancing supports, Hydraulic chock, Shield support, Walking chock	Hydraulic jacks, set side by side in a line along a longwall face, that hold the roof up over the men and machinery and then walk themselves forward as the face advances. They are called chocks or shields, and they replaced the wooden props and bars a timberman set and drew by hand.
Proto Apparatus	—	The Siebe Gorman 'Proto', a self-contained oxygen rebreathing set that was the standard equipment of British mines rescue teams for most of the 20th century, worn on the chest and back to let a rescuer work in smoke, firedamp or afterdamp for an hour or more without an external air supply.
Pumping Engine	Pumping Engine House, Mine Pumping Engine	An engine whose work is lifting water out of a mine. From the early eighteenth century onwards this usually meant a steam engine at the surface, driving a train of wooden or iron pump rods down the shaft to pumps set in the workings. Winning coal or ore below the water table depends entirely on getting the water out faster than it comes in, so the pumping engine is the machine that decides how deep a mine can go.
Rag and Chain Pump	Chain and rag pump, Chain and washer pump	A mine-drainage pump in which an endless chain fitted at intervals with washers of leather or bundled rag is hauled continuously through a wooden pipe, each washer lifting the water above it to the surface.
Relighter Lamp	Re-lighter, Relighter, Deputy's Relighter	An oil safety lamp with a relighting device built into it, so that its flame could be lit again underground without opening the lamp — issued to officials rather than to ordinary workmen.
Retort	Pumpherston Retort, Bryson Retort	The sealed vessel at the heart of an oil-shale or gasworks — a chamber in which raw material is heated in the absence of open air so that it breaks down into gas, oil and a residue, rather than simply burning away.
Rock Drill	Rock Drills	A mechanical drill, driven by compressed air or (earlier) steam, used to bore the shot-holes packed with explosive to break rock — replacing the slow, exhausting work of driving a hole by hand with a hammer and gad.
Safety Lamp	Davy Lamp, Geordie Lamp (North East England)	A mine lamp designed to burn safely in air containing firedamp, its flame enclosed inside a fine metal gauze so it could not ignite the surrounding gas.
Self-Rescuer	—	A small, personal filter breathing device carried on the belt of every underground worker, designed to give at least an hour's protection against carbon monoxide poisoning while escaping a fire or explosion.
Shearer	Anderton shearer loader, Ranging drum shearer, Shearer loader, Th'cutter (Lancashire)	The machine that cuts coal from a longwall face with rotating drums of picks and loads it onto the face conveyor in the same pass, travelling back and forth along the face. From the mid-1950s it replaced the undercutting coal cutter and the men who filled behind it, and by 1977 it produced four fifths of Britain's coal.
Skip	—	A steel container that runs on guide rails up and down a mine shaft to hoist broken ore or waste to the surface, distinct from a cage, which carries men and materials rather than bulk rock.
Skip-winding	—	A method of raising material up a mine shaft in a skip — a large, purpose-built bucket integrated directly into the winding gear and loaded and discharged automatically — rather than in a cage carrying loaded tubs, letting a single shaft move far more tonnage per hour than cage winding allows.
Slag Hearth	—	A secondary smelting hearth, built alongside a lead smelt mill's main ore hearth, used to re-smelt the slag the ore hearth produced and recover the lead still trapped within it.
Smelt Mill Flue	Condenser flue, Smelt mill chimney	A long stone flue running from a lead smelt mill up the hillside behind it to a chimney, built to take the poisonous fume away from the men at the hearths — and, just as importantly, to let the lead carried in that fume cool and settle on the flue walls, where it could be scraped off and smelted again.
Square-set Timbering	—	A support system of interlocking cubic timber frames, stacked honeycomb-fashion, used to hold open wide underground stopes in ground too weak to stand unsupported.
Starvationer	Starvationers	A narrow, deep-ribbed wooden boat, only around four and a half feet wide, built to fit the cramped underground canal tunnels of the Worsley Navigable Levels and carry coal directly from the coalface to the surface.
Tub	Tram (South Wales), Dram (Welsh), Hutch (Scottish), Hurley (Scottish), Whirley (Scottish)	A small wheeled wagon, running on narrow-gauge underground rails, used to haul coal or ore from the working face to the shaft bottom or drift mouth — also called a tram or dram in some coalfields.
Waddle Fan	Waddle Ventilator, Waddell Fan, Waddle open-runner fan	A very large centrifugal ventilating fan built by the Waddle works at Llanelli, distinguished by having no case: the rotating impeller formed its own shroud, so the fan could be bolted up in the open air beside a pithead instead of inside a fan house. Waddle were the only makers to build fans of this form at this size.
Water Balance South Wales	Water-balance Machine, Balance Pit	A method of winding in which a tank of water, filled at the surface and let down the shaft, raises a loaded tram of coal by its own weight — the pit's power supply being a pond rather than an engine.
Water Garland	Garland, Water Curb	A wooden or cast-iron curb or gutter fixed around a mine shaft's lining, catching water running down the shaft walls and conducting it away by pipe or water box to a lower level rather than letting it fall freely down the shaft.
Waterwheel	Water wheel	A wheel turned by flowing or falling water, whose rotating shaft drove a mine's pumps, crushing rollers or stamps. A wheel fed from above is overshot, one fed from below undershot.
Wheelpit	Wheel pit, Wheel-pit	The stone-lined pit or free-standing masonry structure built to hold a waterwheel, deep enough for the wheel to turn clear of the ground and often the only trace of water power left on a mine.
Whim	Whim engine, Horse whim, Gin, Horse whims	The Cornish word for a winding device used to haul ore, waste and men up a mine shaft: a rope wound around a large drum, its far end lowering an empty container as the near end raises a full one, driven by a horse, waterwheel or steam engine depending on date and the mine's means.
Whim Crane	—	A simple wooden jib crane, or derrick, used at coastal stone quarries to swing and lower dressed blocks from the quarry ledge down to boats waiting below — a distinct device from the shaft-hoisting mine whim, despite sharing its name.
Winding Engine	Winder, Steam winder, Koepe winder, Friction winder, Winding house	The engine at the top of a shaft that raised and lowered everything in it — coal, ore, waste, materials and men. The headgear carried the sheave wheels, but the winding engine did the work, and its house is usually the largest building left on a colliery site.
Windlass	Stow (Derbyshire)	A simple hand-cranked winch -- a wooden drum on supports, turned by an iron handle -- set up over a mine shaft to lower tools and miners and to raise ore to the surface in a kibble or basket; also called a stow in Derbyshire dialect.

Mine Workings & Access (59)

Term	Also known as	Definition
Adit	Day level, Drainage adit, Day-hole, Stulm	A level, or very gently rising, tunnel driven from the surface into a hillside or valley side to give access to a mine, drain it or haul out broken ore, sparing the cost of raising everything up a shaft.
Bell Pit	Bell pits, Shaft mound	A shallow shaft sunk to a seam near the surface, then worked outwards at the bottom until it became too dangerous to go further — leaving a chamber wider than the shaft above it, roughly the shape of a bell in section. It is the simplest way to mine anything that lies just below the ground, and one of the oldest.
Coffin Level	—	A narrow, hand-dug tunnel with a distinctive coffin-shaped cross-section -- wider at shoulder height, narrowing above and below -- typical of mines worked entirely by hand before gunpowder came into general use.
Crosscut	Crut (North Staffordshire), Crutt (North Staffordshire), Cross-measures Drift, Crutter (North Staffordshire)	A level driven horizontally across barren country rock at an angle to a lode or seam's strike, deliberately cutting through ground with no ore in it — the opposite approach to a level or drift, which follow the ore itself.
Cuddie Brae Scottish	Cuddy Brae (Scottish), Goose Brae (Scottish), Cuddie (Scottish)	A Scottish underground incline worked by a counterweight: a loaded bogie called the cuddie, running on its own rails, acts as a drag on the full hutch going down and is hauled back up as it goes. Barrowman's 1886 glossary defines it as 'an inclined roadway, worked in the same manner as a self-acting incline, the cuddie serving as a drag on the full hutch running down', and the cuddie itself as 'a weight mounted on wheels; a loaded bogie'.
Deads Cornish	Attle	The barren waste rock produced alongside ore or coal as a working advanced — stone, shale or spoil with no mineral value, as distinct from the material actually being mined.
Decline	—	A tunnel driven at a gentle, steady downward gradient from the surface, or between underground levels, sized and graded for rubber-tyred vehicles to drive directly in and out — the modern, vehicle-based counterpart to the older, rope-hauled Incline, and an alternative to a vertical Shaft.
Dook Scottish	—	Scots mining word for a roadway driven downhill, following the dip of the seam — the main route by which a Scottish colliery usually got men and coal between the pit bottom and its deeper workings.
Drift	Drift Mine	A near-horizontal underground passage driven into a hillside or seam outcrop — used either as a mine's main means of entry, cutting straight into a lode or seam without the expense of a shaft, or as a general-purpose haulage, ventilation or connecting tunnel within a mine already reached some other way. Not to be confused with 'glacial drift', the unrelated geological term for loose surface sediment deposited by ice.
Fire-setting	Firesetting, Fire setting	Breaking hard rock by burning a fire against the face and then quenching it, so that thermal shock cracks the stone. It was the principal means of working rock too hard for hand tools from the Neolithic until gunpowder replaced it, and in some European mines it survived into the nineteenth century.
Flats Derbyshire and the Pennines	Replacement flat	Sub-horizontal replacement ore bodies spreading sideways out of a vein where it meets a rock that will react with the mineralising fluid — most often a particular bed of limestone. Where a vein is a sheet standing on edge, a flat lies down along the bedding, and can be many times wider than the vein that fed it.
Gallery System	—	A method of working an open slate quarry as a series of stepped horizontal terraces climbing a hillside, each one a working gallery in its own right, connected to the dressing mills below by inclines.
Gate Road	Maingate, Main gate, Headgate, Tailgate, Through road (Somerset)	A roadway driven along the side of a longwall panel to serve the face: air in, coal out, men and materials in and out. Every longwall face has two, and they are named by which way the air goes through them.
Gin Circle	Gin Race, Winding Circle, Horse Gin Circle	The circular track a horse walked to drive a winding gin, and the earthwork it left. The machine is a whim; the gin circle is the ring of ground it stood in — a levelled platform, the horse track worn or built around it, and a hollow at the centre where the bearing block for the vertical spindle sat.
Goaf	Gob, Goff	A worked-out area of a coal mine, left behind once coal has been extracted and usually partly filled with waste rock ('gob') as the roof above it settles or is deliberately packed.
Ground Freezing	Freezing Process, Poetsch Process	A shaft-sinking technique that freezes water-bearing or unstable ground solid before excavation, turning loose, waterlogged strata into a stable, temporarily watertight wall long enough to sink and line a shaft through it.
Gunnies Cornish	Gunny, Gunniss, Gunnis (Cornish)	The open void left behind in a mine once a vertical or near-vertical ore lode has been stoped out along its length — from the Cornish gonis, meaning 'working'.
Hade	Hading	The angle at which a vein, lode or fault leans away from the vertical. It is the complement of the dip, which is measured from the horizontal: a vein dipping at 70 degrees has a hade of 20 degrees. Used as a verb, a vein is said to 'hade' towards the side it leans to.
Holing	Kirving (North East England), Holing Dirt, Bossing (Scottish)	Cutting a wedge-shaped groove into a coal seam — usually along the bottom, sometimes in the middle or the top — so that the coal above it could be broken down. Also the groove itself.
Horse Level	—	An adit or level driven deliberately large enough for a horse to walk through pulling a loaded cart or wagon, rather than sized for miners on foot alone — a specific, purpose-built category of level found throughout the North Pennine lead orefield and beyond, distinct from a narrower man-only adit.
Hydraulic Mining	Monitor, Hydraulic monitor, Hydraulicking, Water jet mining	Winning ground with high-pressure jets of water directed through a nozzle called a monitor, so that the water breaks the material down, carries it away and does the work of both the pick and the shovel.
Incline	Self-acting Incline, Cousie (Scottish), Gravity Incline	A shaft, tunnel or surface tramway driven at a steady angle rather than vertically or level, laid with rail track so that wagons or skips could be hauled up and down it by rope rather than carried by a vertical winder — a practical option wherever the ground itself, or the material being moved, suited an angled route better than a true shaft.
Ladders	—	The fixed ladderway climbed between working levels before mechanical winding or the man-engine made shaft travel faster than climbing.
Leat	—	An artificial watercourse dug to carry water from a river or stream to a mine, mill or waterwheel, sometimes running for miles to reach a site with no water power of its own.
Level	—	A horizontal underground working, usually numbered by its depth below the surface or below the top of the shaft it branches from, used to reach and work the ore along a lode.
Lode	—	The Cornish and general mining term for a mineral vein, or — more precisely — a number of closely spaced parallel veins worked together as a single, wider ore body.
Longwall	—	A method of working a coal (or other flat-lying) seam in which a long, straight face is advanced or retreated across a panel of ground, with the entire seam extracted along that face and the roof behind it allowed to collapse or be deliberately packed with waste.
Man-riding	Manrider, Man rider, Paddy Mail, Paddy train	Carrying men underground to and from the face by machine rather than on foot — in rope-hauled tubs at first, later in purpose-built carriages behind a locomotive, and later still on conveyor belts.
Opencast Working	Opencast, Opencut	Any mine working carried out as an open excavation from the surface downward, rather than underground — a broad excavation or trench following a vein or bed, distinct from a shaft or level driven into the hillside.
Ore Chute	Chute, Ore Pass	A stone- or timber-lined channel, usually near-vertical, used to move broken ore or rock down from a working place to a haulage level or directly into a wagon by gravity alone.
Overburden	—	The layer of soil, subsoil and barren rock lying above a mineral deposit that has to be removed before opencast or quarry working can reach the ore, coal or stone beneath it.
Pipe Vein	Pipe workings	An irregular tube or pocket of ore filling a cavity that already existed in the limestone — not a sheet standing on edge like a vein, nor a bed lying flat like a flat, but a shape the rock had before the mineral arrived.
Power Loading	Power-loaded face, Cutter loader, Mechanised loading, Meco-Moore, Huwood power loader	Getting coal off the face by machine rather than by men shovelling it onto the conveyor. The National Coal Board used the proportion of output that was power-loaded as its measure of how modern a pit was, and the phrase runs through colliery records of the 1950s and 1960s.
Quartz	—	The most common vein-filling mineral in British metalliferous mining — a hard, glassy silica (SiO₂) mineral that formed the visible "reef" prospectors followed underground, and which occasionally itself became the object of extraction rather than merely its host.
Rake Derbyshire and the Pennines	—	The main type of mineral vein in the Derbyshire Peak District — a near-vertical, straight-running fissure filled with ore, often traceable for miles across country.
Retreat Mining	—	Working a seam or panel back toward the mine entrance or main roadways, after the roadways needed to define the panel have already been driven out to its far limit; contrasted with advancing, in which development and extraction proceed together, moving away from the entrance.
Ripping	Brushing (Scottish), Brusher (Scottish), Roof Brushing (Scottish), Pavement Brushing (Scottish), Reddsman (Scottish), Ripper, Ripping Lip	Taking down part of the roof, or taking up part of the floor, of an underground roadway to give it height, because the seam being worked is thinner than a road needs to be. The North Staffordshire glossary defines it as 'a section of roof or roadway that has to be removed by blasting or machine; or to blast or bring down the roof of a roadway. Also called a brushing (Scots)'.
Room and Pillar	Pillar-and-Stall (Midlands and South Wales), Pillar and Stall (Midlands and South Wales), Stoop and Room (Scottish), Bord and Pillar (North East England)	An underground mining method in which the target material is cut away in a grid of open 'rooms', while regularly spaced 'pillars' of unworked rock are deliberately left standing to hold up the roof above — one of the two basic philosophies of underground extraction, alongside total-extraction methods like longwall mining, and the method behind some of the largest man-made underground spaces in Britain.
Scrin Derbyshire	—	A narrow mineralised joint or fault fracture in limestone, worked as a deep, thin opencut -- typically under a metre wide but many metres deep -- distinct from and generally smaller than the wider vertical fissure known as a rake.
Shaft	—	A vertical or steeply inclined excavation sunk from the surface — the primary means of reaching underground workings for access, hoisting ore and waste, pumping water and ventilation, and the one piece of infrastructure no underground mine could do without.
Shaft Capping	Mine cap, Shaft treatment, Capped shaft	The permanent treatment of a disused shaft so that it cannot swallow anything — a concrete cap, a steel grille, a plug or an engineered fill, placed over or in the shaft top and designed to outlast everyone who remembers the mine was there.
Shaft Sinking	Sinker, Sinking, Tubbing, Kind-Chaudron process	The work of driving a shaft downward from the surface to reach the mineral — a distinct trade with its own men, the sinkers, and its own problems, chief among them water. Sinking a shaft was the largest single act of capital and risk in opening a mine, and it happened before a ton of anything had been raised.
Shot-firing	Shotfirer, Shot firing, Blasting, Blaster	Breaking coal or rock at the face by drilling a hole, charging it with explosive and detonating it. In British collieries the work was reserved by law to a qualified shotfirer, and the procedure surrounding it — testing for gas, clearing the district, stemming the hole — mattered more than the explosive itself.
Shrinkage Stoping	—	An underground stoping method for narrow, steeply dipping veins in which broken ore is deliberately left in the excavated void, or stope, as work proceeds, rather than being drawn off — the growing pile of broken rock serving both as a working platform for miners drilling the level above and as temporary support for the surrounding walls.
Slant Welsh	—	A roadway or working driven at a steep angle into a coal seam, used in Wales in place of a vertical shaft where the geology allowed it.
Slate Chamber	Chamber and Pillar, Chamber-and-Pillar, Slate Chambers, Underground Chamber	The large underground void from which slate was taken in a Welsh slate mine, worked in a regular pattern with solid pillars of rock left standing between the chambers to carry the roof. Chamber working is what distinguishes an underground slate mine from an open slate quarry, and the chambers are the mine: Rhosydd had a hundred and seventy of them.
Sough Derbyshire	Soughing	A drainage tunnel driven to lower the water table in a mine, or an area of mines, by letting water run out under gravity rather than being pumped — the term used in this sense mainly in the Derbyshire lead orefield.
Spoil Heap	Pit heap (North East England), Colliery spoil tip, Bing (Scottish), Batch (Somerset), Waste tip, Spoil tip, Hillocks (Derbyshire)	A surface pile of waste rock and processed tailings removed from a mine but containing no economically recoverable mineral — built up over a mine's working life and often remaining as its most visible, and longest-lasting, legacy long after closure.
Stall	Stall Work	The working place at the coal face — a room or chamber driven into the seam in which a collier and his mates cut the coal, with coal or packed waste left between one stall and the next to carry the roof.
Stemming	—	The inert material — clay, sand, drill cuttings or similar — packed into a drilled shot-hole on top of an explosive charge, and the act of packing it, done to confine the blast within the rock rather than let it vent uselessly out of the hole.
Stone Drift	Stone Drivage	A drift driven through rock rather than along a seam — a tunnel cut across the measures from a shaft or from one seam to another, at the cost of yielding no saleable mineral while it is being driven.
Stope	Stoping	The open void left underground once ore has been extracted from a vein or ore body, and the verb ("to stope") for working ground that way.
Submarine Mining	Undersea mining, Submarine mine	Working a lode outward from the coast until the ground overhead is no longer hillside but seabed, with the Atlantic — or the Irish Sea, or Belfast Lough — standing directly above the miners' heads. Not a distinct method of extraction: the stopes, levels and shafts are those of any hard-rock mine, and what changes is the roof.
Sump	—	A collecting pool at the bottom of a mine shaft, or at any low point underground, where water gathered so it could be pumped or hauled to the surface.
Terrace	—	A stepped, roughly level working platform cut into an open quarry's hillside face, one of a stacked sequence rising up the slope, each carrying its own working gallery, rubble tips and processing sheds.
Tophole System South Wales	—	A local variant of the pillar-and-stall method used in the steep seams of the western South Wales Coalfield, in which levels driven along the seam had narrow rises -- 'topholes' -- driven off them to the full pitch of the seam at regular intervals, the coal sliding down them by gravity to be loaded into trams in the level below.
Vein	—	A single mineral-bearing fissure in rock — the basic geological feature almost all metal and mineral mining in Britain was aimed at following and exploiting.
Waggonway North East England	Wagonway, Tramway, Tramroad (South Wales and the Forest of Dean)	An early railway of parallel wooden rails, laid on timber sleepers underground or at the surface, along which horse- or hand-drawn wagons hauled ore, waste and materials far more easily than could be managed on bare rock or mud.
Winze	—	An internal shaft driven downward from one underground level to connect with a lower one, without reaching the surface.

Ore Processing (31)

Term	Also known as	Definition
Arsenic Flue	Arsenic Labyrinth	A long, often zig-zagging brick or stone tunnel — sometimes called an arsenic labyrinth — built to carry poisonous arsenic-laden fumes away from a calciner and cool them slowly enough that the arsenic condensed out as a solid soot on the flue's own walls, rather than simply venting straight into the air.
Ashlar	Ashlar Masonry, Small Ashlar	Building stone cut and dressed to true rectangular blocks with square edges and smooth faces, so that it can be laid with very thin mortar joints. Also the masonry built from it.
Baum Washer	Baum Jig, Baum-type washer	A coal-washing jig, invented by Baum in 1892, in which the pulsing of the water is produced by compressed air admitted above the water on one side of the washbox rather than by a mechanical plunger. It became the standard way of cleaning run-of-mine coal in British collieries and stayed so for most of the twentieth century.
Bessemer Process	Bessemer converter, Bessemer steel	The first cheap method of making steel in bulk, patented by Henry Bessemer in 1856. Air was blown through molten pig iron in a vessel called a converter, burning out the carbon and other impurities; the heat of the reaction kept the metal molten. In its original 'acid' form it could not remove phosphorus, so it needed iron made from low-phosphorus ore, above all the haematite of West Cumberland and Furness.
Black Tin and White Tin	Black Tin, White Tin, Cassiterite	The two stages tin ore passed through on its way to market: 'black tin' was dressed cassiterite concentrate, still an oxide and dark in colour, ready to sell to a smelter; 'white tin' was the pure, silvery metal produced once that concentrate had actually been smelted. The distinction runs through almost every Cornish and Devon tin mine's production figures.
Blowing Mill Cornish and Devon	Blowing House	A small water-powered building used to smelt tin ore directly at or near the streamworks or mine that produced it — a furnace and a pair of bellows, driven by an adjacent waterwheel, that turned raw cassiterite into ingots of workable metal.
Boring Mill	Boring House	A mill or workshop equipped with machinery to bore, or ream, a newly cast gun barrel's rough bore true and smooth — an essential finishing step in gunfounding before a gun could be proved and accepted into service.
Buddle	Buddling, Round buddle	A shallow, usually circular pit in which crushed ore was washed and mechanically stirred so that heavier mineral settled out from lighter waste by gravity.
Calciner	—	A furnace used to roast ore at high temperature, driving off impurities as gas — in Cornwall, most often used to burn arsenic and sulphur out of tin ore, and to recover the arsenic itself as a saleable by-product.
Coke Oven	Beehive Oven, Beehive Coke Oven	An oven in which coal was heated with only limited air admitted, to drive off the volatile matter and leave behind lumps of carbon — coke — for ironmaking and other uses that raw coal would not serve.
Cornish Rolls Cornish	Rolls, Crushing rolls, Roll crusher, Copper crusher (Cornish)	A pair of heavy iron rollers, geared to turn inwards against each other, between which ore was crushed. Ore fed from a hopper above passed through the gap and came out reduced to a coarse gravel; a weighted arm held the rolls at the right pressure and let them spring apart on anything too hard to break.
Dressing Floor	Dressing Floors	The surface area at a mine where raw ore, once brought up from underground, was crushed, sorted, washed and concentrated into a saleable product before being sent for smelting — the industrial 'shop floor' of a working mine, as important to its output as anything happening underground.
Froth Flotation	Flotation, Flotation cell	An ore-dressing process that separates minerals by chemistry rather than by weight: reagents make the wanted mineral water-repellent, air is beaten through the pulp, and the treated particles cling to the bubbles and rise as a froth that is skimmed off, while the rest sinks.
Gangue	Veinstone	The worthless rock that comes up with the ore whether anyone wants it or not — the quartz, barite, calcite or other mineral that shares a vein with the metal actually being mined, and has to be broken away from it before the ore is worth anything.
Gunfounding	—	The specialised trade of casting iron or bronze cannon and other ordnance directly from a blast or air furnace — a distinct, exacting branch of ironfounding in which a single flaw in the casting could burst a gun under fire.
Heavy Media Separation	—	An ore-dressing technique that separates minerals by density rather than by size or surface chemistry, by suspending crushed ore in a fluid — a 'dense medium' — whose effective density sits between that of the wanted mineral and the surrounding waste rock, so the heavier material sinks and the lighter material floats.
Jigger	—	A gravity-based ore-dressing machine that separates crushed ore from waste rock by pulsating water through a perforated screen — a specific piece of dressing-floor equipment, distinct from the buddle or the kieve, used at the stage where crushed material still needed sorting by density before sale.
Kieve Cornish	—	A large wooden tub, also spelled keeve, used in the final stage of dressing Cornish tin ore, in which crushed ore and water were stirred so that heavy metallic particles settled out from the lighter waste.
Launder	Launders	A trough or channel — usually of wood, though sometimes canvas, hide or later iron — used to carry a controlled flow of water, or of crushed ore in water suspension, around a mine's surface dressing floor.
Lime Kiln	Limekiln, Lime works, Draw kiln, Hoffmann kiln	A kiln for burning limestone or chalk to quicklime. Heating the rock hard enough drives off its carbon dioxide and leaves calcium oxide — quicklime — which reacts violently with water to make slaked lime. Almost every limestone quarry of any size had kilns at its foot, because burnt lime is worth carrying and raw limestone largely is not.
Ore Hearth	Ore Hearths	A simple, low, open (or part-enclosed) furnace used from the 16th to the late 19th century to smelt lead ore directly, without first roasting it, using a bellows-driven air blast and fuel of peat, wood or coal.
Patent Fuel	Compressed Fuel, Coal Briquette	A manufactured smokeless fuel block made by compressing fine, otherwise unsaleable coal dust ("small coal" or slack) with a binder, usually coal-tar pitch, in a heated hydraulic press — the briquette industry that turned waste from South Wales's collieries into one of the region's biggest export products.
Quicklime	—	Calcium oxide, the caustic white product made by burning limestone or chalk hard enough to drive off its carbon dioxide -- the product a Lime Kiln exists to make.
Reverberatory Furnace	Cupola (Yorkshire Dales and the Peak), Air Furnace	A smelting furnace in which the fuel and the ore being smelted are kept physically separate, with heat and flame from a coal fire reflected down onto the ore by the furnace's low arched roof — the technology that displaced the older ore hearth in British lead and copper smelting from the mid-18th century onward. Also known, especially in the Yorkshire Dales and Peak District lead fields, as a cupola.
Screens	Screening Plant, Screen, Picking Belt, Picking Table, Plate Table, Hand Picking	The plant on the pit bank where run-of-mine coal was graded dry, by size, before sale — Gresley's 1883 glossary calls it 'a mechanical apparatus (a sort of gridiron) for separating small from large coals'. Bars set a fixed distance apart, or steel plates punched with holes, let the small through and carried the large on, and what passed over and what fell through were sold as different products at different prices.
Smelt Mill	Smelting Mill, Cupola Mill	A water-powered works where dressed lead ore was reduced to metal, usually built on a stream below the mines it served and recognisable today by its flue running away up the hillside.
Stamps	—	Heavy iron-shod timber (later steel) hammers, raised and dropped mechanically in sets to crush lumps of ore into sand-sized material ready for further dressing — the standard first stage of ore crushing in British metal mining from the 16th century into the 20th.
Tailings	—	The finely ground waste material left over once ore has been crushed and its valuable mineral extracted — a slurry of rock fragments and residual chemicals that historically had to be dumped, discharged into a stream, or, in later, more regulated practice, stored in an engineered lagoon or dam.
Trunnion Mark	—	A maker's identifying mark, cast or stamped into one of a cannon's trunnions — the two cylindrical pivots projecting from its sides, by which the gun was mounted on its carriage — recording who cast the gun and often when.
Vanning Cornish	—	A hand-testing technique for judging the quality of crushed or partly-dressed ore, in which a small sample is washed and flicked on a shovel to separate heavy ore from lighter waste by eye.
Washery	—	A colliery's coal-washing and preparation plant, where run-of-mine coal was cleaned of stone and dirt, crushed and graded by size before sale.

Ventilation & Mine Gases (16)

Term	Also known as	Definition
Afterdamp	—	The toxic mixture of gases — chiefly carbon monoxide, alongside carbon dioxide and nitrogen — left behind in a mine after an explosion or fire, distinct from firedamp (the methane that often causes the explosion in the first place).
Bad Air	Choke damp (North East England), Foul air	The general, everyday term British miners used for any unbreathable underground atmosphere — oxygen-deficient, suffocating air, as opposed to the explosive firedamp — used across metal and coal mining alike, long before, and alongside, the more specific 'damp' terminology coal miners developed.
Blower	—	A sudden and violent discharge of firedamp into the workings from the coal, the roof or the floor — gas arriving all at once from a fissure instead of seeping steadily.
Brattice	—	A partition, built or hung inside a mine shaft or roadway, used to separate and direct the flow of ventilating air.
Canary	—	A caged canary carried underground as a simple, living early-warning system for carbon monoxide and other toxic gases — the bird's collapse gave miners a warning of dangerous gas well before it would affect a person.
Chokedamp	Blackdamp, Stythe (North East England)	An asphyxiating mixture of gases — chiefly nitrogen and carbon dioxide, with the oxygen removed — that can silently accumulate in a mine; also called blackdamp, or stythe in parts of North East England.
Coal Workers' Pneumoconiosis	—	A chronic, incurable lung disease caused by years spent breathing in fine coal dust, leaving scarred, blackened lung tissue — distinct from silicosis, which is caused by quartz and other rock dust, though the two conditions frequently occurred together and were, for decades, compensated in Britain as if they were a single disease.
Downcast Shaft and Upcast Shaft	Downcast Shaft, Upcast Shaft	The paired shafts of a mine's ventilation circuit: the downcast shaft, down which fresh air is drawn into the workings, and the upcast shaft, up which that same air — now warmed, damp and contaminated — is expelled back to the surface.
Firedamp	—	The explosive gas — chiefly methane — that seeps naturally out of coal seams into a working mine, distinct from afterdamp (the toxic gas mixture left behind once firedamp, or the coal dust it disturbs, has actually exploded).
Furnace Ventilation	Ventilation furnace, Cold furnace (North East England), Dumb drift (North East England)	Ventilating a mine by keeping a large coal fire burning at or near the foot of the upcast shaft, so that the heated column of air rising up the shaft draws fresh air down the downcast and through the workings.
Radon	—	A naturally occurring radioactive gas, produced by the decay of uranium and thorium present in trace amounts in almost all rock, which can accumulate to dangerous concentrations in poorly ventilated underground workings — especially across Cornwall and Devon's granite mining country, where it remains one of the most hazardous legacies of abandoned hard-rock mining.
Return Airway	Return air course, Intake	The roadway that carries used air back out of the workings. A ventilated mine has two separate air courses — the intake bringing fresh air in to the men, and the return taking the spent air, gas and dust away — and keeping the two apart is the whole basis of mine ventilation.
Silicosis	—	A progressive, incurable lung disease caused by inhaling fine crystalline silica dust — generated wherever miners drilled, blasted or crushed quartz-bearing rock — and one of the deadliest occupational hazards in British hard-rock and coal mining history, known to miners themselves for generations as "miners' phthisis" or "miners' consumption" long before it had a formal medical name.
Stone Dusting	—	The practice of spreading inert limestone or other stone dust across mine roadways and workings, so that even where firedamp ignites, fine coal dust stirred up by the blast cannot itself sustain or carry the explosion further through the mine.
Thirling	—	The driving of a short connecting passage — a thirl — between two adjacent underground roadways or workings, most often to complete or improve a ventilation circuit.
Whitedamp	—	A toxic mixture of gases formed by coal burning slowly in a confined space, whose dangerous constituent is carbon monoxide — colourless, odourless and tasteless, and lethal even at very low concentration.

Labour & Roles (28)

Term	Also known as	Definition
Adventurer Cornish	Adventurers	A shareholder in a mine. Under the Cornish and Devon cost book system an adventurer did not simply buy a stake and wait for a dividend: he took a share of the mine's running costs as well as its profits, meeting a call for more money whenever the accounts showed the working had spent more than it earned.
Bal Maiden Cornish	Bal girl	A woman or girl employed on the surface at a Cornish or Devon mine to break and dress ore — from the Cornish 'bal' (a mine or mine-working place) and 'maiden', reflecting that most were young and unmarried.
Banksman	Bankman	The person in charge of the pit bank — the surface area at the top of the shaft — responsible for loading and unloading the winding cage and signalling the winding engineman, working as the surface counterpart to the underground Onsetter.
Buttyman	Chartermaster (Shropshire), Charter Master (Shropshire), Butty, Bond Miner	A subcontractor who took on a stretch of colliery working from the mine owner for an agreed price per ton, then hired, paid and equipped his own gang of miners to work it, keeping the difference as his own profit.
Captain Cornish	—	A senior mine official responsible for supervising and directing work at a Cornish mine — the standard job title for a mine manager or department head, not a military or naval rank.
Checkweighman	Check Weigher, Checkweigher, Checkmeasurer, Justiceman (Scottish)	A weigher employed and paid by the workmen themselves to stand at the colliery weighing machine beside the company's weigher and keep his own account of every tub, so that men paid by the weight of coal they sent out were paid for what they had actually sent.
Colliery Check	Pit Check, Lamp Check, Colliery Token, Motty (North East England and East Midlands), Mottee (North East England and East Midlands), Mottie (North East England and East Midlands), Hutch Pin (Scottish)	A small numbered tag, usually brass, standing for one named man: handed in to be exchanged for his lamp or given to the banksman as he went down, so that the colliery knew who was underground, and hung on the tubs he filled so that the weighman knew whose coal he was weighing.
Consols	—	A shortened form of 'Consolidated Mines': several adjoining setts, often already worked so close together that their underground workings had run into one another, brought together and worked as a single company under one management.
Cost Book System	—	The traditional financing method for Cornish and Devon mines, in which shareholders ('adventurers') funded the mine's running costs directly out of their own pockets, with no bank borrowing and no cash reserve held back.
Dataller	—	A miner paid a fixed rate per day or per shift for general underground work — building and repairing roadways, moving material, and similar tasks — rather than being paid by the ton of coal cut, as a collier working at the face was.
Deputy	—	A certificated coal-mine official responsible for the safety of a specific district underground — examining for gas, checking ventilation and the state of the roof and sides before each shift began. Also known, depending on period and district, as a fireman or examiner; the English coalfield's statutory counterpart to the Cornish mine Captain.
Filler	Danner (Shropshire), Dram Filler, Tram Filler, Tub Filler, Loader	The worker who shovelled coal into trams, tubs or onto a conveyor at the working face, often also pushing or drawing the loaded trams away to the haulage road.
Fireman	—	The underground official responsible for testing for firedamp and inspecting the workings for hazards before a shift began.
Haulier South Wales	Haliwr (Welsh), Colliery Horse Driver (South Wales), Halier (South Wales)	The man or boy who moved the coal along the underground roads: in South Wales, specifically the one in charge of a horse and its drams, shackling up at the face and taking the load out to the main haulage. The same word was also used of a man riding in charge of a journey of drams worked by a haulage engine.
Hewer	—	The standard English-coalfield term for the underground worker who cut coal directly from the seam at the working face, using hand tools before mechanisation.
Horsekeeper	Fettler, Horse Fettler, Colliery Fettler, Ostler, Groom	The worker responsible for feeding and grooming a mine's horses and ponies, above or below ground, and for keeping their harness in good repair and properly fitted.
Millwright	—	A skilled tradesperson who designed, built and maintained the water- or wind-powered machinery — waterwheels, gearing, pumps, shafts — that drove mills, mines and early factories, and one of the direct professional ancestors of the modern civil and mechanical engineer.
Onsetter	Bottomer (Scottish), Pit-bottomer (Scottish), Pit Bottomer (Scottish), Hooker-on (Scottish), Cager (Scottish), Hitcher, Knocker (Lancashire and Wales)	The person stationed at the shaft bottom responsible for loading and unloading the winding cage, hooking and unhooking tubs or corves, and signalling up to the surface Banksman — the underground counterpart to the banksman, working the same shaft from the opposite end.
Overman	Oversman (Scottish)	An underground coal-mining official ranking between the deputy and the under-manager, responsible for the day-to-day supervision of one section, or 'district', of a colliery.
Pit Pony	Pit Ponies, Mining Horse, Colliery Horse, Pit Horse, Underground Stables	A horse, pony or mule worked underground in a mine, chiefly to haul tubs of coal between the coal face and the haulage road or the pit bottom. The word pony was applied loosely to any equine working below ground, whatever its size. The man or boy in charge of one was the driver, known in the north east as a rolley, horse or waggon driver.
Purser Cornish	Mine Purser	The accountant of a Cornish or Devon mine run on the cost book system: the officer who kept the cost book, set the calls on the adventurers when the working had spent more than it earned, and laid the accounts before them at their meetings.
Putter North East England	Hurrier (Yorkshire), Drawer (Lancashire), Waggoner (Lancashire), Foal, Half-marrow	The worker — most often a boy or a youth — who moved the coal between the hewer at the face and the haulage road or shaft bottom, bringing empty tubs up and taking loaded ones away.
Roadman	Road Repairer, Roadsman, Road Fettler (Yorkshire)	A worker whose job was to keep a mine's underground roadways -- the passages along which coal, ore, men and materials travelled -- in safe repair: levelling the floor, resetting timber, and clearing obstructions.
Stoneman	Drifter, Stone man	A man who worked in stone rather than coal: driving and repairing the roadways, taking down roof to keep them open, and setting the supports — the work that makes a colliery navigable rather than the work that wins its coal.
Timberman	Timber Boss, Cogman	The tradesman responsible for setting and maintaining pit props, roof supports, ladderways and other timber structures underground.
Trapper	—	A child employed underground to open and close the wooden ventilation doors that controlled a mine's airflow, letting wagons and hurriers pass before closing again behind them.
Tribute and Tutwork Cornish	Tributers, Tutworkers, Pare	The two-part contract system used to pay most underground miners in Cornwall and Devon: tutwork paid a rate per fathom of ground broken (driving levels, sinking shafts), while tribute paid a share of the value of the ore raised and dressed.
Viewer North East England	Under-Viewer (North East England), Check Viewer (North East England), Coal Viewer (North East England)	The manager of a colliery in the North East coalfield — the man who decided how the mine was to be worked and ventilated, and to whom the overmen answered. In the largest collieries he had an under-viewer beneath him.

Ground Conditions & Hazards (11)

Term	Also known as	Definition
Barricading	—	An emergency survival tactic in which miners trapped underground by fire, explosion or gas seal themselves into a section of the workings with a barrier of stone, timber or whatever material is to hand, to keep out toxic afterdamp or smoke while awaiting rescue.
Cleavage	Slaty Cleavage	The set of closely spaced parallel planes along which a metamorphosed fine-grained rock splits cleanly — in slate, the property that lets a block be opened into roofing sheets. It is created by compression during metamorphism and is independent of the original bedding.
Emergency Escapeway	—	A designated secondary route out of a mine -- a second shaft or outlet, kept clear and marked -- required by law so that men below ground had a way out if the main shaft or haulage road became blocked or unsafe.
Fresh Air Base	—	A forward post established underground, at the limit of breathable air, from which mines rescue teams wearing breathing apparatus advance into gas-filled or smoke-filled workings, and to which they retreat to change apparatus, recover, or hand over to a relief team.
Inrush	Inundation	A sudden, uncontrolled flood of water, mud, peat or other loose material breaking into underground workings — one of the most dangerous hazards in mining, capable of overwhelming a working in minutes with little or no warning.
Mine Tremors	—	A small earthquake caused by mining itself — usually the sudden collapse of old workings or the movement of rock into a void left by extraction — distinct from, but occasionally overlapping with, the rare natural earthquake that happens to be felt underground.
Outburst	—	The sudden, violent ejection of coal, rock and gas from a working face into the workings — hundreds or thousands of tonnes of coal reduced to powder and thrown out with tens of thousands of cubic metres of firedamp, in seconds and without warning.
Overwind	—	A winding accident in which a cage, skip or kibble overruns its intended stopping point at the top of a shaft, driving it into the headgear pulley or sheave with potentially fatal force, or, if the winding rope then fails or detaches, letting it fall back down the shaft.
Roof Fall	Fall of ground, Fall of roof, Roof collapse, Fall of ground or roof	The collapse of the rock above a working place. Roof falls killed more British miners than any other single cause — more than explosions, flooding and winding accidents put together — and they did it a few men at a time, almost every working day, which is why they are far less remembered than the disasters.
Spontaneous Combustion	Spontaneous heating, Gob fire, Heating	Coal catching fire underground with nothing to light it. Broken coal left in the waste reacts slowly with oxygen in the air, giving out heat; where the ventilation is too weak to carry that heat away but strong enough to keep feeding oxygen in, the temperature climbs until the coal ignites itself.
Subsidence	—	The sinking, cracking or sudden collapse of the ground surface caused by the failure or movement of underground workings beneath it — ranging from a slow, shallow sag spread across a wide area to a sudden, narrow 'crown hole' opening without warning.

Later Uses & Research (5)

Term	Also known as	Definition
Care and Maintenance	C&M, On care and maintenance	The state a mine enters when production stops but abandonment has not been accepted: the workings are kept pumped, ventilated and safe, and the shafts kept open, against the possibility of restarting. It is a holding position, and an expensive one.
Operation Orpheus	—	A 1959-60 British Cold War experiment that used two disused or nearly-abandoned mine workings — never a nuclear device — to test whether an underground nuclear explosion could be hidden from seismic detection, at a time when verifying compliance with a future nuclear test-ban treaty depended on being able to tell a genuine test from an earthquake.
Scheduled Monument	Scheduled Ancient Monument, Scheduling, Scheduled Monument Consent, Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979	A nationally important archaeological site or structure given statutory protection under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979. Scheduling is the only legal protection made specifically for archaeological sites, and it is a different regime from the listing of buildings, which works through the town and country planning system.
Show Cave	—	A former mine or natural cave opened to the paying public as a tourist attraction, typically once its mineral had been worked out or ceased to be profitable — one of the most common 'second lives' a British metal mine could go on to have.
Wartime Requisitioning	Requisitioned	The state's practice of taking direct control of a mine or quarry in wartime — whether to force up production of a strategically valuable mineral, or to put its underground space to an entirely different use, such as ammunition storage or protected manufacturing — overriding the site's normal peacetime ownership and purpose for the duration of the emergency.

Law & Custom (19)

Term	Also known as	Definition
Abandonment Plan	Plan of Abandoned Mine, Mine Abandonment Plan, Abandoned Mine Plan	The plan of a mine's workings that its owner was required by law to deposit with the government when the mine was abandoned. Abandonment plans show the areas worked, the extent of the excavations and the positions of mine entrances, and they are the single most important surviving record of what lies underground at a site where nothing remains on the surface.
Barmaster Derbyshire	—	The officer appointed to administer a Derbyshire lead-mining 'liberty', regulating claims and running the local Barmote Court alongside a steward and a jury of miners.
Barmote Court Derbyshire	—	A local court unique to the Derbyshire lead-mining field, established to administer the customary mining law of the district — granting the right to work a vein, settling disputes between miners, and collecting the lead duties owed to the field's mineral lords.
Coal Mines Act 1911	—	The Act that consolidated and rewrote British coal-mining law, and the statute under which every colliery in the country was run for the next forty-five years. It received royal assent on 16 December 1911, came into force on 1 July 1912, and applied not only to coal but to mines of stratified ironstone, shale and fireclay. It was repealed on 1 January 1957, when the Mines and Quarries Act 1954 replaced it.
Contraband	Contraband Search	Anything forbidden to be taken below ground in a safety-lamp mine because it could make a spark or a flame: matches and lighters above all, and with them cigarettes, cigars, pipes and any other contrivance for smoking.
Free Miner Forest of Dean	Freeminer (Forest of Dean), Freemining, Free Mining	The holder of an ancient customary right, unique to the Forest of Dean, to open and work a mine of one's own within the Hundred of St Briavels — earned by birth and by a year and a day underground, not bought.
Gale and Gaveller Forest of Dean	Gale, Gaveller, Deputy Gaveller, Galee	The Forest of Dean's own system of mineral tenure. A gale is a defined plot of underground mineral rights granted to a free miner; the Gaveller is the Crown officer who grants it, registers who may hold one, and collects the royalties.
HM Chief Inspector of Mines	Chief Inspector of Mines, HM Inspector of Mines, Inspector of Mines, HM Inspectorate of Mines, Mines Inspectorate	The head of His (or Her) Majesty's Inspectorate of Mines, the government officers who from 1850 had the right to enter any mine, examine its workings and machinery, and report on its accidents. The post of Chief Inspector was created in 1908, over the district inspectors who had reported separately to the Home Secretary since the first Coal Mines Inspection Act, and its holder led the investigation of the great disasters of the twentieth century and wrote the annual report that recorded the industry's deaths.
Liberty	—	A defined lead-mining district on the Mendip Hills of Somerset, held under the customary mining law and licensing authority of a particular lord — the Mendip equivalent of Cornwall's Stannary or Derbyshire's Barmote Court system, though organised around fixed geographic 'liberties' rather than a single county-wide jurisdiction.
Meer Derbyshire	—	A fixed unit of length along a lead vein — typically 29 yards in Derbyshire's Wirksworth liberty, though the exact length varied by district — granted to a miner under Barmote law as their measured claim to work a newly discovered vein.
Mineral Royalty	Royalty, Dues (Cornwall and Devon), Lordship, Mineral Dues	A payment made to the owner of the minerals for every ton raised — not rent for the land, but a share of the substance itself. In Britain the minerals under a field commonly belonged to someone other than the person mining them, and the royalty is the mechanism by which that ownership was turned into income.
Miners' Strike	—	A collective withdrawal of labour by mineworkers, usually organised through their union, in a dispute with employers or government over wages, working conditions or pit closures — as distinct from a lockout, in which management shuts a workforce out rather than the men walking out voluntarily, though the two words were often used almost interchangeably by miners themselves in 1893 and 1926.
Miners' Welfare Fund	Miners' Welfare Commission, Mining Industry Act 1920 welfare levy, Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation, CISWO	A national fund for the welfare of coal miners and their families, created by section 20 of the Mining Industry Act 1920 and paid for by a levy of a penny on every ton of coal raised in the country. It built the welfare halls, institutes, recreation grounds and pithead baths that stand in mining villages all over Britain.
Mines Royal	Mine Royal	The Crown's legal claim, confirmed by the 1568 Case of Mines, to any mine anywhere in England and Wales whose ore contained gold or silver in commercially worthwhile quantities — regardless of whose land the mine stood on — and, by extension, the Elizabethan chartered company established the same year to exploit that claim.
National Coal Board	NCB, British Coal Corporation, British Coal	The state corporation that owned and ran almost all of British coal mining from 1947 to 1987. Created by the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946, it took the industry over on vesting day — 1 January 1947 — was renamed the British Coal Corporation in 1987, and was wound up when the industry was privatised in 1994.
Purbeck Marblers Purbeck	Company of Marblers and Stonecutters of Purbeck	A guild of hereditary freemen, formally styled the Company of Marblers and Stonecutters of Purbeck, that controlled who could quarry and sell stone across the Isle of Purbeck -- membership passing by descent, marriage or a seven-year apprenticeship rather than by purchase.
Sett (Mining Lease)	—	The legal boundary — and the licence to work within it — granted to miners under Devon and Cornwall's own stannary mining law, the Cornish counterpart to Derbyshire's Barmote system.
Stannary Cornish and Devon	—	The distinct body of law, courts and self-governing institutions that regulated tin mining in Cornwall and Devon from the medieval period until the late 19th century — the Cornish and Devon counterpart to Derbyshire's Barmote Court system.
Truck System	Tommy Shop, Company Store	The practice of paying miners' wages wholly or partly in goods or tokens ('scrip'), redeemable only at a shop owned by their own employer, rather than in ordinary currency — leaving workers dependent on their employer even for food and household goods.

Periods (5)

Term	Also known as	Definition
Bronze Age	—	The period from about 2300 BC, when metal came into use in Britain, to about 800 BC, in which copper was first mined in Britain and Ireland to make bronze. Mining began in Ireland by about 2400 BC and in Wales and north-west England around 2200 BC, and the Great Orme in North Wales became one of the largest prehistoric copper mines in Europe.
Iron Age	—	The period from about 800 BC, when iron took over from bronze as the working metal, to the Roman conquest in AD 43. Iron was smelted from local ores in small furnaces across southern Britain, Cornish tin was traded to the Continent, and the first written account of mining in Britain, of the tin of west Cornwall, dates from this time.
Medieval	Middle Ages	The Middle Ages, from the end of Roman rule in the early 5th century to about 1500, usually divided into the early medieval period before 1066 and the later medieval period after it. Mining was small in scale but widespread and closely regulated: tin in Cornwall and Devon under the stannaries, lead and silver in the Pennines, Mendip and Wales, iron in the Forest of Dean and the Weald, and coal where the seams came to the surface.
Neolithic	—	The New Stone Age, in Britain from about 4000 to about 2300 BC, when farming and pottery arrived from the Continent, and the first period in which people in Britain dug mines. Flint was mined from shafts sunk into the chalk, and hard stone was quarried from mountainsides for polished axes that travelled the length of the British Isles.
Roman	Romano-British	The period of Roman rule in Britain, from the conquest of AD 43 to the early 5th century, when mining was organised on a scale not matched again until the Middle Ages. Lead, silver, gold, iron, copper, tin, coal, salt and building stone were all worked, and Britain's mineral wealth is often counted among the reasons for the conquest.

Place-names & Language (8)

Term	Also known as	Definition
Bal Cornish	—	The Cornish word for a mine, from 'pal' meaning a shovel — literally, 'a digging'.
Blaes Scottish	Blaize (Scottish), Blaise (Scottish), Bleeze (Scottish), Red Blaes (Scottish)	The Scots word for the soft, laminated, bluish-grey shale and mudstone that lies between the workable seams — Barrowman's 1886 glossary gives it as 'shale; laminated clay; indurated mud'. It is grammatically a plural, from the adjective blae, blue-grey, and it names the rock a Scottish miner spent most of his working life looking at: the roof over his head, the parting in a dirty seam, and the bulk of what went up the pit as waste.
Elvan Cornish	—	The Cornish and Devon miners' name for the quartz-feldspar-porphyry dykes that cut across the region's tin and copper lodes — from the Cornish elven, 'spark'.
Growan Cornish	Growan Clay, Moorstone (Cornish)	The Cornish dialect word for granite that has decomposed in place into a soft, crumbling mass — not a separate mineral from ordinary granite, but the same rock broken down by weathering into something that could be dug and washed rather than quarried whole.
Killas Cornish	Kellus	The Cornish mining word for the dark, slaty metamorphic rock that makes up most of the country rock of Cornwall and western Devon — not itself an ore, but the rock the tin and copper lodes actually run through.
Mundic Cornish	—	The Cornish and Devon word for iron pyrite (and, by extension, related sulphide minerals such as arsenopyrite) found alongside tin and copper ore in a mine's lodes — worthless, and often actively troublesome, waste rock rather than the metal being sought.
Stent Cornish	China Clay Waste	The Cornish and Devon dialect word for the waste granite left over once china clay has been washed out of it -- distinct from the clay itself, which is the only part of the rock actually sold.
Wheal Cornish	—	A Cornish word for a mine or place of work, used as a prefix to the great majority of historic Cornish and west Devon mine names — Wheal Jane, Wheal Coates, Wheal Owles and many others on this site among them.

Prospecting & Exploration (9)

Term	Also known as	Definition
Costean Cornish	Costeaning, Costean pit	A trial pit or trench, dug down through surface soil and loose debris to solid rock, used to search for and trace the line of a mineral vein before any full-scale mine was sunk.
Fathom	—	A traditional unit of length equal to six feet (1.83m), used until the early 20th century as the standard British unit for measuring the depth of a mine.
Gossan	—	A rust-coloured, intensely weathered rock outcrop, formed where sulphide minerals in a mineral vein are broken down by air and water — long used by prospectors as a visible surface clue to buried ore.
Highbanking	—	A mechanised, portable form of placer mining that uses a small water pump to feed loose gravel through a sluice box away from the water's edge — a modern step up from hand panning that lets one or two people process far more material per hour. Almost entirely a recreational and small-scale technique today, not a commercial one.
Hushing	—	A prospecting and extraction method in which a sudden torrent of stored water is released down a slope to strip away soil and loose overburden and expose the bedrock and any mineral veins beneath.
Ore Strike	—	The unexpected discovery of a rich, previously unworked body of ore -- most often used of a single dramatic find rather than the routine, gradual proving-up of a known deposit.
Panning	—	A manual technique for separating gold, or other dense minerals, from loose stream sediment using a shallow pan and water — the simplest and oldest form of placer mining, and usually the first thing any prospector actually does before committing to anything more elaborate.
Tin Streaming Cornish and Devon	—	The washing of loose alluvial gravel from a stream bed or valley floor to separate out heavy grains of cassiterite (tin ore), using nothing more than moving water and gravity — the oldest and simplest way tin has ever been won in Britain.
Underlie	—	The old British convention for describing how far a vein or lode departs from vertical, expressed not as an angle in degrees but as a horizontal distance -- inches or feet -- per fathom of vertical depth.