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Home » Articles » Aerial photographs of lead minesAerial photographs of lead mines
Aerial photographs of lead mines from the collection of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales.
Aerial photographs of lead mines from the collection of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales.
The lead mining tradition goes back 4,000 years to the Bronze Age, and traces of Britain's earliest known lead extraction have been found at Copa Hill, Cwmystwyth, in mid-Wales. In this area, the lead ores have quite a high silver content and it was for this valuable metal that many mines were started in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A mint producing coins from the local silver was established in Aberystwyth Castle during the Civil War. The Victorian period saw a large demand for lead for piping, roofing and paint manufacture and the lead mines became important sources of employment and in some cases, prosperity. One of the biggest and most successful mines was the Van Mines near Llanidloes. The Van Mines prospered after the 1865 discovery of a rich seam of lead, and by 1876 was producing thousands of tons of lead and providing many jobs. Dylife in the Cambrian Mountains, which reached its peak around 1862, was second only to the Van Mines. Llywernog, known as Gwaith Poole, was worked from around 1742. William Poole held the mining lease between 1807 and 1810, employing 60 miners and making substantial profits with the high price of lead ore (£19 a ton). Between 1824 and 1834, Llywernog Mine was leased (along with many others in the district) to Cornish 'Mine Adventurers' which began a long association between the Mining Districts of Cardiganshire and Cornwall that was to continue until the 1900s. By the 1880s new mines were being opened up all over the world at places like Broken Hill in Australia and Leadville in Colorado, and the silver-lead ore market crashed. Mines closed and whole communities emptied as people left to seek work in mines overseas or digging for 'Black Gold' in the valleys of south Wales. Most lead mines fell into decline and closed, primarily due to the fall in lead prices because of cheaper imports.
www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba58/news.shtml
www.wales-underground.org.uk/llywernog/history.shtml
