Early History

When the Romans came to Yorkshire it is thought likely that there had been some small-scale lead mining from the Bronze Age onwards, although this remains to be proved. The Romans, therefore, probably took over existing mines and organised and expanded them, probably bringing with them experience gained from the mining of lead in Europe.

The Roman Empire used a lot of lead for, amongst other things, making into pipes and lead sheets, which were used for lining cisterns and baths. Lead mining declined when the Romans left Britain in the 5th century AD and the market disappeared. A number of ingots (or pigs) of Roman lead, some bearing inscriptions, have been found. For example, two pigs, dating from A.D.81, were found at Hayshaw Bank, near Pateley Bridge, in 1725. Two others, one found at Nussey Knott near Appletreewick and marked TRAJAN and the other from Hurst in Swaledale and marked HADRIAN, have since been lost, no doubt melted down and sold by their finders. Other than these finds of ingots there is no archaeological evidence to suggest where the Romans worked and the scale of their operations.

Medieval

Mining became important again in the 12th century when, for some 200 years, Yorkshire lead was used in the great castle and cathedral building age. It is said that lead from Yorkshire mines was used in Windsor Castle, St Peter's in Rome and even on church roofs in Jerusalem. During this time, much of the county's lead production was dominated by the monasteries, which were powerful landowners. They ran the mines, issued leases and charters, and collected royalty payments. Their records give the first documentary sources on lead mining. During the late 14th and early 15th centuries plagues, like the Black Death, devastated the country's economy by killing around a third of the population which in turn reduced the need for lead.

Trade gradually increased until, following the orders of King Henry VIII, all 650 monasteries in England and Wales were dissolved in the five years between 1536 and 1540. Lead, stripped from monastery roofs, flooded onto the market and depressed prices, causing many mines to close. Nevertheless, it was needed for the many large houses which were built when the monastic lands were sold by the crown. It was used for pipes, cisterns, guttering, and down-pipes. Work which we would term "plumbing", a word derived from the Latin for lead and, therefore, a plumber was literally a worker in lead. Historically, plumbers were not solely concerned with the supply and disposal of water as today; he was also skilled in the working of sheet lead used on the roofs of important buildings and in the making and repair of leaded windows. Lead was also used for making pigments. White and Red lead are both oxides of the metal and were used in paint manufacture until recently.

One consequence of the dissolution was a growth in speculative mining. The new landowners who had taken over the monastic land were keen to earn royalties and would issue leases on any obscure piece of land. These were often taken up by small partnerships of men who used mining to supplement their farming endeavours. Many of these enterprises were short lived and without profit, the veins so poor that they were soon abandoned. Ocasionally rich pockets of ore were discovered which made the fortunes of the lucky entrepreneurs.

The Industrial Revolution

By the late 18th century wealthier companies began to lease larger areas of land. In Yorkshire, and elsewhere, the mines were transformed. They changed from unplanned rabbit warrens, with small levels and shafts, to became systematically planned and worked, with secure shafts, lined with stone, and levels driven to explore and exploit the veins. This process, which was helped by the introduction of gunpowder blasting in the late 17th century, led to a large increase in output as the industrial revolution got underway.

The first two-thirds of the 19th century was the golden age of British metal mining. Yorkshire's lead mines played an important part, thanks to the development of long level networks, and between 1845 and 1870 produced an average ten percent of the nation's output. At this time the UK was producing about one-half of the world's lead, but the trade was at the mercy of the markets. Fluctuations in the price of lead caused a number of depressions, such as the one in 1830, when many miners left the Dales for more secure jobs, either in the coal mines and textile mills of neighbouring counties, or further afield in America or Australia.

The latter part of the century saw a combination of circumstances, which led to the demise of the industry. The price of lead fell as the market was flooded with cheaper, imported metal. Many of the mines were becoming increasingly poor with depth, whilst others were simply exhausted. The low prices meant that there was an unwillingness to commit capital to development work, which may have found new reserves.

The golden age was over, therefore, and the years between 1880 and 1900 saw the end of most large-scale lead mining in Britain. The market price of lead was reduced to a little over half of what it had been in the previous 30 years. This was not the end of the story, however, as attention was turned to the other minerals, such as barytes and fluorspar, in the early twentieth century. The minerals, which filled the veins alongside the lead ore, had been left as worthless by the Old Man, as earlier miners were known, became the new goal of the miners in the Yorkshire Dales.

20th Century

Small-scale enterprises recovered minerals from the old lead mine hillocks from the 1920's onwards. The mines in the Greenhow Hill area were the busiest, where considerable amount of fluorspar also remained underground. A number of mines were reopened, albeit on a small scale, and several new shafts, levels, and inclines were developed in the 1960's on the Burhill veins. That decade was the most productive the dales had seen for many years.

Much of the fluorspar went to the steel industry, for use as a flux in iron making, but the chemical industry used the highest grade to make hydrofluoric acid. Barytes is used as a high-density drilling mud by the oil industry, as well as a filler in paper and paint making. A small amount of calcite was also mined and sold for decorative pebble dashing. Washing plants were established at Cockhill and Dry Gill, both on Greenhow Hill, with others at Grassington Moor and in Swaledale.

The last underground mining was at Gillheads Mine near Appletreewick, in 1981, and the last plant for re-washing tip material, near the Old Gang smelt mills in Swaledale, closed in the early 1990s. As most of the mineral veins occur within the boundaries of the Yorkshire Dales National Park it is highly unlikely that planning permission will be granted for future mineral extraction, so a long history of mining has come to a close.