Magpie mine

The pump engine house at Magpie Mine

Just before attending the Imp Club National, I camped for a few days at Monyash in the High Peak. This was a good choice because within a few miles was the site of an abandoned mine. I'd already researched the area and discovered that there was a Cornish engine house at Magpie Mine, reputedly the best preserved lead mine in the country.

I'd never been to the Peak District before and was very pleasantly surprised by what I found. It's quite beautiful and not at all crowded. It made a pleasant change to find a part of the British Isles that I did not know at all.

When I approached Magpie Mine, though, I felt back at home. You can see the engine house for some way off and it had all the hallmarks of a Cornish engine house.

It was built by Captain John Taylor who operated mines all over the UK, as well as in Mexico, and he brought a team of about twenty Cornish men to Sheldon to

There were other mine engines of this type in the Peak District but they've all been demolished. Only a few walls and footings now remain of them. As I've found Cornish engine houses abroad in Devon, Somerset and Wales (some with engines in), Magpie Mine acted like a magnet for me.

The engine house at Magpie Mine housed a 70 inch engine, which was installed in 1868 after a 40 inch engine proved insufficient to unwater the lead mine, which had been began around 1740, albeit on a very small scale.

From a county where round stacks are common, square stacks are different and look really old to me

Both these engines had been preceded by a Newcomen engine and I was interested to see the square chimney stack some way off from the remaining engine house with its detached round chimney. Square stacks are usually indicators of early construction in mine buildings of this type.

I later went to the mining musuem in Matlock Bath and bought a guide book to Magpie Mine. I ought really to have done this first because, although there are information boards on the site, the book explains things in greater detail and creates a more historical context.

The square stack, for instance, was actually built in 1840 for the "steam whimsey", a rather quaint term for the winding engine or whim. Nothing remains of this winding engine house, or whim as we would say in Cornwall, but another winder was erected in 1869 and the buildings for this still stand near the pump house. This "whimsey" engine lingered here until the mine was briefly re-opened in the 1950s when it was sold for scrap.

The 1869 winding engine house.

Even with the 70 inch engine the shafts were not adequately unwatered and a vast drain or adit, called the Magpie Sough, was driven under the nearby village of Sheldon to drain the River Wye. This was completed in 1881 at vast expense and although it worked mining operations finished in 1883 and the engine dismantled and sold.

Until the final flowering of activity in the fifties, Magpie Mine was worked sporadically and on a mostly small scale, which ensured that nothing changed much above ground.

Magpie Mine with the agent's house in the foreground

The mine is cursed though!

From 1824 to 1835, there were a series of disputes between the men of Magpie and the neighbouring Maypitt miners. The Barmoot Jury (the local equivalent of the stannary law) couldn't resolve ownership of the Great Redsoil Vein that crossed both setts and by 1831 violence had broken out. Sentries had to be posted above grass and below fires were lit by both sides to smoke the other out. Unfortunately, three Redsoil men were asphyxiated by the Magpie miners, who later claimed self-defence to get off scot free. However, the widows of the dead men were said to have laid a curse on Magpie Mine.

I spotted the walls of the round powder magazine and poked around the preserved horse-gin to the south east. To the north west on the Ordnance Survey map is a Wheal Farm and a Wheal Lane and the dispute between Magpie and Redsoil sounds very much like what went between the people of Camborne and Redruth in times gone by.

Some of the mining traditions such as the belief in knockers - the little people who worked the mines at night - also came north with the Cornish.

The mining museum in Matlock Bath is also worth visiting for the pump designed by Cap'n Dick himself. Trevithick designed this pump to pump water using water and it remained underground from 1819 until 1976 when some engineers found it in an abandoned mine 360 feet below Winster in Derbyshire. They recognised it for what it was and retrieved it for public display.

This is the site of the underground murder that prompted the widow's curse.

From the guide book I bought at the mining museum, I could see just how close the mines were. The recreated horse gin to the west of engine house stands on the Maypitt Founder and Redsoil Soil Engine Shafts where the murders were perpetrated.

It all looks so peaceful now. I've heard that it takes three generations for the bad memories about an industrial site to fade.

This site made an interesting contrast to the silver lead mine at West Chiverton, which is near where I grew up.

When I visited the Magpie Mine, it was rather a gloomy day so when the sun came out on my return to my base camp nearby I went up there again. It is free after all and made a lot of difference to the photographs.