Relics

The pub in the village is called the Miners Arms - good chips. We have wondered idly whether we could manage a walk over the hill to the next village for lunch one day; I noticed there is a pub and looked it up - it's the Miners Arms. I tried putting 'Miners Arms' into Google maps; it found 10 within 35km. Book carefully! 

A short, rough track north out of the village continues as this path and, eventually, as a right-of-way across open ground, leading up the steep valley side. The track is called Mining Lane. Up on the hill, the map is dotted with a peppering of small square symbols. A legend says 'Shafts (dis)'. I'm not sure if the squares represent the diggings themselves or the hidden sites of miners' abandoned dwellings. Even to an untrained eye, it is obvious thst the land-surface is much disturbed, with many small holes and an uneven surface that feels wholly unnatural

I have read that extraction began here in Roman times and continued into the 19th century. At one time there were many thousands of individual claims, and a whole infrastructure to support the marketing of the product, the payment of the miners and the collection of taxes; a 'gold rush'. But they were not looking for gold, or even 'black gold', but for lead ore - the part-processing of which created a highly toxic atmosphere to live in. Eventually, cheap, imported ore undermined the economics of small-scale mining and the hillsides were abandoned, leaving behind ghosts on the hill and pubs in the villages