Eggleston, The Mines & Smelting Mills

Blackton Smelting Mill, built on the North side of Blackton Beck.

Being at the base of the moor with good connections to Alston and Stanhope via the old Roman Road, Eggleston had always been the primary choice location for smelting ore . Water was found in abundance to feed the milling processes and the mines were a relatively short distance away, all of which made transportation less of a problem.

From as early as 1517 a mill already existed at Eggleston alongside Eggleston Beck, but the Bowes family constructed a new water powered blast furnace to replace it at around 1610. It stood just below Blackton Bridge but little is known about the smelting capacity with only the name remaining on old maps of ‘The Lady Bowes Leade Mylls’ to serve as a reminder of its existence.

 

As the London Lead Mining Company had recently taken on the leases of several local mines, it stood to reason that the Lady Bowes Leade Myll would need modernising to handle the anticipated increase in ore refinement. The current mill was also at the mercy of dry summers with frequent issues of the beck drying out. Eggleston ‘Middle Mill’ was constructed around 1771 and was slightly higher up on Blackton Beck, situated towards the right flank and it featured three ore hearths, a smelting furnace and two refining furnaces. The company were always at the forefront of experimentation and modernisation and soon constructed an ‘experimental’ mill in 1787. The Eggleston ‘Low Mill’ which trialled the efficiency of an air furnace versus a blast hearth for smelting slag – the result of which were very much in favour of the air furnace.

 

Robert Stagg, superintendent of the London Lead Mining Company was put in charge of developing another new mill on the site, this to be situated to the North East of Blackton Beck and eventually it would replace the three mills that came before it. The construction of Blackton Mill was started in 1820 and Robert was adamant to construct it in an arrangement whereby the lead would require no lifting through the process. Gravity would be employed as the main form of transport so that the ore was brought to the top of the mill and would work its way through the processes until it emerged as lead at the bottom.

Recorded mill particulars of Eggleston from the London Lead Mining Company asset register.

The mill featured one roasting furnace, one smelting furnace, two ore hearths, two refining furnaces and one reducing furnace. A ‘modern’ stone lined horizontal flue of 1790 feet in length was built to move poisonous gasses away from the mill site and away from the village below. Robert had advanced the site into a place for learning and development where by new processes in smelting could be trialled. He further expanded the site with a modification to the flue which required altering the route to take a sharp Northward twist as it made its way almost all the way to the upper mill reservoir some 2627 feet in total length. An octagonal chimney 152ft tall was constructed at the end of the flue to increase the natural draw. Robert installed an early form of fume condenser 20ft from the base of the chimney which allowed the capture of small lead oxide particles that were being expelled in the furnace smoke.

Blackton Mill was already working almost constantly at full capacity, so much was the extraction of ore around the area that a further new mill had to be constructed in the Gaunless valley near Copley in 1845 to ease the workload.

Robert was working hard to gain experience in ore smelting and  put of lot of his knowledge that he had gained from Blackton to use when in 1843 he patented the  ‘Fume Condensing Equipment’ that he had designed and developed for installation in the  mill at the Nenthead Mines. Unfortunately it was later proven that his idea for further condensing the fumes by water chambers was largely ineffective with greater achievements being made in the horizontal flue designs.

 

The London Lead Mining Company

Teesdale House, London Lead Mining Company Head Office (Middleton-in-Teesdale).

The London Lead Mining Company was founded by a group of Quakers on the 4th October 1692 by Constantine Vernatty and Thomas Addison to ‘take advantage of the smelting downe of Lead with Seacoale or Pittcoale’. The company’s first mine lease was  that of a small concern at Newbiggin near Middleton-in-Teesdale and the business rapidly expanded because Lead was in such high demand. There was a surge in exploration to find ore rich land from which to stake lease claims from the land owners with many small mines having already been discovered and were being worked by a small handful of men. Conditions were generally appalling with labourers being put to work in order to extract the precious Galena ore from beneath the earth. Death, disease and entrapment were frequent with very basic methods of mining being used, it was almost a blessing to the area when the London Lead Mining Company arrived with their beliefs that the company should provide for the workers and reduce the suffering that everyone involved had to face in order to raise a profit. In 1851 it was recorded that over 20% of the population of Teesdale was employed in some way by the London Lead Mining Company and this equates to over half of the working inhabitants of Middleton-in-Teesdale being employed or directly connected with the Quaker company.

Saddlehouse, an old Jagger stopping point that was used to rest the horses before the climb to Blackton Mill.

Massive investment was brought to the area when it purchased land within the villages and with it came the building of schools, reading rooms and spacious cottages. In Eggleston Prospect and South Terrace were built along with the reading room a little later in 1889. They helped put into place a basic infrastructure to help support a better living standard where temperance was strongly encouraged. The company would not employ an uneducated man in the mines as this was in effort to promote child education to work alongside labour – educated children could of course be employed for menial roles such as work in the washeries and separation processes, but schooling was a priority that was an essential for working for the company.

The investment in infrastructure included the means of transit for the miners to their place of work and the movement of ore from the mines to the mills. Many of the old Jagger routes that had been in use for hundreds of years were improved with the construction of bridges and viaducts over ravines. Cartways over moorland were improved by widening and reinforcing with a stone base and they had regular stops with resting places to reduce the burden on the animals and also that of the travelling folk. Remains of the animal enclosures can still be seen next to the roads around the area with rows and circles of fallen stone across the moor.

 

Jagger route Ford on Eggleston Burn, Tofting Plantation.

During the construction of the new Blackton Mill it was found that the route was arduous for the Jaggers because of the steep descent and ascent over Eggleston Burn. The route took the traveller all the way down to the bottom of the valley, across a ford at Eggleston Burn then at Blackton Beck and then a steep ascent all the way back up to the mill site. Having reviewed the route it was immediately apparent and put into action that the London Lead Mining Company built the viaduct to cross Eggleston Beck which relieved the labour intensive crawl of the movement of heavy ores across the valley. The road from Eggleston to Stanhope was massively upgraded (B6278) from the old Roman path for a more direct access to the mines and at Middleton-in-Teesdale, the road to Alston was also much improved. The good times were not destined to last however as it was always in the back of everyone’s mind that eventually the mines would become exhausted of minerals and that hard times would surely come back to haunt the area. In 1904, this unfortunately was the case...

 

Collapse of the Lead Industry

Remaining area of Little Eggleshope Processing Site.

The output of Flakebrigg Mine was beginning to faulter and output fell steadily to 32 tons in 1879. The London Lead Mining Company appears to have known around 1878 that the lead industry had reached a terminal decline. This was mainly due to the increase in cheap imports from abroad as well as many of their ‘flag ship’ mines were showing signs of being completely worked out. The days of lead mining in the UK were numbered – all the miners would have known that the mines were failing and closure would be inevitable. The company had always made efforts to keep employment high in times of depression by commissioning new trial levels and improving mill processes, but  around 1892 it was realised within the company that the entire British lead market was going to collapse.

 

Flakebrigg and the other mines in the area continued under the London Lead Mining Company all the way until 1902 whereby the mines were officially recorded as having been ‘exhausted’ or containing such little galena ore reserves that it was no longer viable to continue the extraction. Between 1894 and 1902 Flakebrigg was standing with only a skeleton staff maintaining the site but the word came in 1906 that the London Lead Mining Company had finally collapsed, the mines were officially abandoned. Much of the equipment was auctioned off to local land owners and some of the mines continued in a small way but the nail was in the coffin for the lead industry.

It should be noted at the London Lead Mining Company had for some reason never made attempts to diversify the business, as along with lead extraction came other natural minerals such as fluorite, zinc and barytes all of which were discarded and piled upon the spoil heaps. The fluorspar crystals  being kept by the miners as ‘bonny bits’ from which they would construct ‘spar boxes’ in which they would display the mineral without knowing of its use or potential value to the market. It would appear that along with the collapse of the lead market came the realisation that many of the directors and share holders of the company were also of advanced years, the company seems to have naturally met its end with little drive to survive.

With the fall of the company came a reduction in population. At the time of collapse almost three quarters of the population of Middleton-in-Teesdale were employed either directly or indirectly by the lead mining industry. In 1904 the Blackton Mill closed it’s doors with the remaining 125 men becoming redundant and loosing their jobs with the companies property put up for auction.

 

In 1932, the final demolition took place at Blackton mill with the felling of the iconic hexagonal chimney and dismantlement of the flue. An enormous fire was built at the chimney base by a retired miner, Tom Allinson. A large crowd gathered to witness the destruction but it was unfortunate that with the fire came a dense grey smoke which engulfed the area and the chimney finally fell with not a single person that could witness the sight.

Today many artefacts and scars on the landscape remain. The mill site almost completely having been reclaimed by nature but the villages of Eggleston and Teesdale continue to thrive with the mines leaving only their spoil heaps and fallen stone to reminds us of the enormous industry that once thrived in the valley.

The viaduct at Blackton will forever hold the memories of the Jaggers that used it to transport 14,000 bings by horse – or 6272 modern day metric tons of ore transported to the new Blackton Mill, the ford crossings in Tofting Plantation holding the history of the arduous journey that came before the building of the bridge.

 

The London Lead Mining Company was one of the main driving forces of modernisation, education and development within the Teesdale Valleys. Along with it brought improvements in employment, living standards and life expectancy due to the better standard of housing and encouraged temperance.

When the company folded, it was unfortunate that almost all records of the ventures were destroyed, the history being cast to only memory of the living with little remaining hard record being held in existence. The information that does remain gives us a small glimpse into the management and structure of the business that really helped to shape our villages into what they are today.

 

Blackton Viaduct, constructed 1860 to improve the transport of ore from the Lead mines of Middleton-in-Teesdale and Eggleston and Moor.

 

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