Among the limestone outcrops on the plateau to the East and West of the valley in which Brassington lies, are hundreds of hillocks and hollows, and many deep trench like scars, often accompanied by a pile of stones that can just be recognised as the remains of a rough limestone building. These are what are left above ground from centuries of lead mining, the work of the independent miners of Carsington and Brassington. The miners were true prospectors, skilled in spotting the signs of lead, and tough and persistent in winning it from the hard rock. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, lead mining provided the second main living in Brassington, after farming. Most miners had some ground of their own, or grazed animals on common land, and many small farmers mined lead when they found it.
There can be no
doubt that lead mining in and around Brassington has been carried out for at
least two thousand years. A Roman
pig of lead was ploughed up in 1946 on the Brassington-Carsington border, but it
is most probable that the Romans smelted only surface lead, since there is no
evidence of their mining. There are
specific records of mining for the last seven hundred years, and it is this
period that has probably seen the industry in its most productive years.
In 1305, a local landowner, Roger de Bradbourne, was prosecuted for
mining lead in land belonging to the Prior of Dunstable.
There are surviving documents referring to the Brassington mines in the
1550's. These include production figures for one year, plus evidence that
Brassington was one of the Earl of Shrewsbury's main sources of lead ore at a
time when the Earl's smelters were the largest producers in the country. There is strong evidence in the next century that prospecting
had by then become an important activity in the village in a list of
"penalties" decreed by the Brassington Manor Court. This was in 1663,
and one of the penalties read "Noe myner shall carry either on horse or
otherwise water from the Coole Well or common wells aforesaid to wash oare or
ould hillocks in the liberty or att their houses uppon payne to forfeit
12d". The reference to washing
"ould hillocks" indicates the industry's long history, since it
reveals that improved washing and dressing methods had made it possible by then
for the miners to retrieve lead ore which had been discarded as waste by earlier
generations.
The miners were
independent operators and had been long before the wastelands had been tamed and
brought into cultivation. For
centuries they had made a living from otherwise unproductive moorland and
because the lead they won was a valuable commodity from very early times - for
roofing, piping, leaded windows, ammunition - they had been granted remarkable
privileges. They were allowed to
mine anywhere except under highways, churchyards and orchards, and were entitled
to make roadways to give access to their mines and to use streams to wash their
ore. In Brassington the miners
almost always worked in their own mines or in their neighbours', and the London
Lead Company was very untypical in owning a Brassington mine - Ballingdon Wood,
advertised for sale in the Derby Mercury of June the thirteenth, 1777.
The lives of the
miners are best described by using the words of the celebrated London writer,
Daniel Defoe. In his book, "A tour through England and Wales" (1724),
he gives an account of a meeting with a Brassington mining family.
While the impression made on a sophisticated London writer cannot express
the miner’s own view of his life, Defoe's outsider's view gives a shrewd and
detailed picture. He stayed at Wirksworth during his trip through Derbyshire
and visited Brassington. He notes
the peculiar mining customs, including the role of the "master and twenty
four jurors" in settling the miners' disputes and thinks this is "the
greatest of all the wonders of the Peak" for the miners "are of a
strange, turbulent, quarrelsome temper".
Defoe and his party saw a miner climbing out of a shaft carrying a basket
of tools and three quarters of a hundredweight of lead.
He describes the "pieces of wood" by which the man had climbed,
and his appearance - "...the man was a most uncouth spectacle; he was
cloathed all in leather, had a cap of the same, without brims....For his person,
he was lean as a skeleton, pale as a dead corps, his hair and beard a deep
black, his flesh lank, and, as we thought, something of the colour of the lead
itself..." This miner seems to have been working in a partnership, as he
told Defoe, through an interpreter, since Defoe could not understand his
dialect, that he was working at sixty fathoms, two others "of his
party" at eleven fathoms deeper, and three at fifteen fathoms deeper.
Defoe and his friends bought some of the miners' lead ore for 2/-, more,
according to the local guide, than the man could have earned from his mining in
three days, and later bought him a drink at a local alehouse - "good Pale
Derby". Defoe expresses the horror of the gentleman contemplating the
life of a poor labourer - "...how much we had to acknowledge our Maker,
that we were not appointed to get our bread thus, one hundred and fifty yards
underground, or in a hole as deep in the earth as the cross upon St. Paul's
cupola is high out of it...." He
had earlier talked to a miner's wife, "tall, well-shap'd, clean, and (for
the place) a very well looking, comely woman" and five children, living in
a cave. Defoe found it clean and
well provided with utensils and food. There
was a plot of ground with a crop of barley, some pigs and a cow, and Defoe was,
of course, surprised that the family seemed happy and healthy.
The woman told him that her husband had lived in the cave all his life,
and his father before him. The
husband earned 5d on a good day, while she could earn 3d by washing the ore.
Defoe was a practical, enquiring writer and his picture of the miners'
life can be relied on.
Until the
nineteenth century, mining in Brassington was unmechanised.
The ore was extracted by either cutting a trench along the line of a
vein, necessarily shallow because of the danger of collapse, or by sinking
shafts joined by tunnels. There was always the difficulty of bad ventilation, though
some of the oldest mines at Brassington and on Carsington pasture are fairly
deep - the Nickalum or Old Brassington Mine is about two hundred feet deep and
the Great Rake, worked at least as early as 1735 is four hundred feet.
The shafts were sunk in "turns", the ore and waste being lifted
from the bottom of the shaft to the first turn and progressively to the surface.
The shafts were in most cases descended by ladders or "stemples"
- wooden steps inserted in the shaft wall (Defoe's "pieces of wood") -
or even more precariously by footholes. The
main tools used were fire or gunpowder, to loosen the ore, picks, often straight
so that the point could be inserted into the lead or jointed rock and the blunt
end hammered, and wedges. Winding
was usually hand winding by windlass.
This hard and dangerous occupation came to an end around 1875, when the seams of lead finally became uneconomical to mine. Centuries of hardship that had sustained a close knit village life, created the customs by which the people had regulated their lives, and provided the wealth to sustain succeeding generations of families, finally came to an end and most of those same families emigrated to pastures new, to areas where the skills of the mine-workers were needed and could be traded for a living wage. The inhabitants of the ancient village of Brassington today are mostly middle class people seeking the seclusion of rural tranquillity, interspersed with the occasional self employed operator; all that is left of the spirit of independence that once was the hallmark of this proud village.