Coldberry Lead Mine, Teesdale

Coldberry was being worked before the London Lead Company

It would be easy to start Coldberry’s story with the London Lead Company, because they became such a big part of mining around Middleton. But people had already been looking for lead here before the Company arrived.

F. E. Coates later wrote that Coldberry had been worked by Messrs Hunt, a local association, before the London Lead Company became involved. We have not yet pinned down exactly who the Hunts were or when their working ended, but the Company’s own records make one thing clear: Coldberry already had a mining history before the better-known nineteenth-century phase began.

By July 1806, London Lead Company superintendent Thomas Dodd was writing about J. Johnson and his partnership, who were driving a new level at Coldberry and hoping to reach the vein.

Then, on 10 October 1812, the Company took out a fresh 21-year mineral lease from William Harry, Earl of Darlington. It covered North Grove, Parkin Grove and Coldberry, with the Earl receiving one fifth of the ore raised.

Just a few months later, in January 1813, Dodd reported that John Pinkney and his partnership were driving a horse level towards the Coldberry Vein. What makes that report especially interesting is his mention of old levels that had already been driven there “many years ago.”

So when the London Lead Company began pushing ahead at Coldberry, they were not starting with an untouched hillside. They were going back into ground where other miners had already been searching for lead long before them.

1814–1820: finding the Coldberry Vein

In 1814, Robert Stagg, one of the London Lead Company’s local agents, decided to try something different at Coldberry. The miners knew roughly where the lead vein ought to be, but earlier attempts to find it had cost a lot of money without much success.

Stagg decided to use a hush, water released across the hillside to strip away soil and loose ground and expose the rock underneath. He expected the work to cost about £15.

It paid off. The water exposed the vein they had been looking for.

The underground level was then redirected towards it, and another small team of miners was paid £5 to cut through the rock and reach the vein near the hush. Not long afterwards, Stagg was reporting “very fine specimens of ore.”

By October 1814, one team had reached the vein and had begun raising ore from it. By the end of the year, two teams were working there and were being paid according to how much lead ore they produced. The rate was 25 shillings for each bing, an old measure used for lead ore.

That was a real breakthrough because other miners had already spent heavily searching for the same vein and failed to find it.

But Coldberry was never straightforward.

By 1817, men including John Pinkney, Robert Coatsworth, Joseph Beach, Thomas Hunt, George Hardy, Ralph Nattrass and Thomas Tarn were all connected with the workings. Some were trying to improve ventilation underground, while others were cutting through old workings in the hope of finding more lead.

The mine could look promising one month and disappointing the next. By 1818, Stagg was warning that Coldberry was so unpredictable that one month gave little indication of what might happen next.

Then, by June 1820, things had improved again and profitable ore was once more being raised.

That pattern — promising, disappointing, then worth another try — became part of Coldberry’s story for well over a century.

From uncertain prospect to an important mine

For all the uncertainty in those early reports, Coldberry eventually became a productive mine.

A mining engineering account records 45,059 tons of lead concentrate from Coldberry between 1852 and 1902. The lead also carried silver, averaging about three ounces of silver per ton.

Nearby Red Grooves produced another 10,110 tons between 1852 and 1886.

What makes Coldberry interesting is that this production did not come from one long, uninterrupted period of mining. The workings repeatedly slowed, stopped and started again.

The surviving employment returns show Coldberry standing idle in 1884 and again in 1894. In 1896, five people were recorded at the mine, with one working underground and four on the surface. There were three in 1900 and four in 1902.

Coldberry could therefore be productive without being busy every single year. Its history was one of repeated attempts, setbacks and returns to the workings whenever there was still a reason to keep going.

July 1877: the night the dressing floors burned

One summer evening in July 1877, Coldberry suddenly became anything but quiet.

A number of workmen and washer boys were lodging at the mine shop near the ore-dressing floors. At about nine o’clock they noticed smoke coming from a large wooden building and raised the alarm.

Inside was Green’s self-acting jigging machinery and an eight-horse portable steam engine. The engine had been used during the day because there was not enough water available to keep the dressing machinery running properly.

The fire spread quickly. Within about an hour the wooden building had been destroyed.

The jigging machinery was badly damaged, the portable engine was lost and the damage was estimated at more than £1,000, a huge amount at the time. A nearby waterwheel and crushing mill also caught fire.

What saved the rest of the works was the people already there. The ore-dressing foreman, boys and other workmen fought the fire and managed to stop it spreading into more of the mine property.

It is one of the clearest pictures we have of Coldberry actually working. Not just stone buildings on an empty moor, but machinery running, water being managed, boys lodging beside the dressing floors and men still dealing with an emergency late into the evening.

We have not yet pinned the 1877 building to one exact point on the surviving archaeological plan.

Life inside Coldberry Mine Shop

The mine shop was much more than a building beside the workings. It was where men and boys could lodge during the working week, and an 1890 newspaper report gives us an unusually warm little glimpse of life inside it.

At the centre of the story was William Bainbridge of Lunedale.

For several years the Coldberry workers had chosen Bainbridge to manage their mine shop. The mine overman, John Hunt, also trusted him with distributing stores from the explosives magazine.

At the end of one working day, lead miners, washer boys, mechanics and other workers gathered together and presented Bainbridge with a timepiece paid for by subscription. It was set in marble, decorated with polished granite and carried a silver plate recording why his fellow workers had given it to him.

There was plenty of humour in the room. John Grieve, chosen to preside, joked that he was no public speaker but that they could sing if he got stuck. The mine-shop manager was jokingly known as their “king”.

Then G. Pinkney added one of those tiny details that says more about working life than pages of general history. He had stayed at different mine shops but had never known a better manager, and particularly praised Bainbridge for making sure there was a plentiful supply of hot water at dinner time.

William James, who had managed the Wire Gill Mine Shop for 27 years, also spoke in Bainbridge’s favour. Robert Grieve and T. Dent added their congratulations, Aaron Morton made the presentation and J. Low seconded the vote of thanks.

Bainbridge told them that he had been lodging in mine shops for 35 years and had always tried to make life more comfortable for both men and boys. He was especially pleased that the washer boys at Coldberry had contributed towards the gift.

That one report changes the mine shop completely. It was not simply somewhere to sleep. It had its own little community, its own jokes, routines and personalities, right down to somebody making sure the hot water was ready when everyone stopped for dinner.

The names behind the accident records

Mining records can reduce a death to a name, an age and a few words explaining what happened. Coldberry deserves better than that.

On 20 January 1870, John Beadle, aged 18, and John Collinson, aged 16, were killed together by a fall of roof.

On 18 February 1880, George Redshaw, aged 17, was killed by another roof fall while removing debris after a blast.

On 14 January 1886, Henry Robinson, aged 27, was crushed by a fall of ground.

Then, on 18 February 1896, the danger came above ground.

Thomas Anderson, aged 20, and William Coatsworth, aged just 15, were lead-ore dressers working at the Coldberry lead washing when a heap of mine refuse collapsed and smothered them. The official mining return records Coatsworth as 15; newspaper OCR gives a different age, but the government return is the stronger record.

An inquest was held before coroner J. T. Proud, and a substantial report appeared in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle on 22 February 1896. A London Lead Company record dated 25 February adds another human detail: £10 was given to each of the two families following the deaths.

These six names matter. They stop “mining was dangerous” becoming another throwaway line and remind us that Coldberry was a workplace where very young men were doing genuinely hazardous jobs underground and on the surface.

The end of the London Lead Company years

By the late nineteenth century, Coldberry was no longer being worked continuously.

The official returns show the mine standing idle in 1884 and again in 1894. Five people were recorded there in 1896, three in 1900 and four in 1902.

By 1902, the London Lead Company had decided to close its works, and equipment at Coldberry was already being dismantled that September.

By 1905, the official mine return simply recorded Coldberry as “Dismantled.”

That brought the old London Lead Company period at Coldberry to an end.

But it was not the end of the mine.

Coldberry in the twentieth century

Coldberry came back into use several times during the twentieth century.

In 1910, two people were working at the mine, rising to five in 1915. By 1920 Coldberry was not being worked, but it later reopened. There were eight workers in 1925 and thirteen in 1927, with eleven underground and two on the surface.

The mine had stopped again by the early 1930s, but interest returned later in the decade when English Lead Mines Exploration Ltd began looking at Coldberry once more.

Another serious attempt followed after the Second World War.

On 24 November 1948, plans were submitted for new development at Coldberry and South Wiregill. The mine then reopened in 1949.

One of the men involved in this later period was James Sandow Penberthy, who became general manager of the Coldberry and Seghill lead companies in 1950. Mining engineer Godfrey Granville Poole was also closely connected with Coldberry during these final years.

So the Coldberry people see today was not simply an old Victorian mine left to decay. Men were still trying to make it work well into the twentieth century, more than a century after the London Lead Company had first been searching for the vein.

When did Coldberry finally close?

Different sources give slightly different answers, and forcing them into one tidy year would hide that.

Historic England records a particular oreshoot being worked until 1953. Other mining records place the Coldberry Lead Company at the mine into the middle of the decade.

The strongest later evidence we have found comes from 1972. An enquiry originally addressed to the Coldberry Lead Company produced a reply from Swiss Aluminium Mining stating that no work had been carried out in the Coldberry area since about 1956, that the old company had been dissolved and that everything at the mine had been sold for scrap.

For that reason, the safest wording is that conventional mining at Coldberry appears to have ended around 1955–56.

That is a very different story from a mine that simply shut in 1905.

What survives at Coldberry today?

Once you know the history, the surviving site begins to separate into different parts.

Coldberry is not one collection of buildings from one date. There are nineteenth-century London Lead Company structures, much older hushes and levels, dressing-floor archaeology, reservoirs and leats, together with brick, concrete and underground remains from twentieth-century attempts to make the mine work again.

The whole complex is nationally important enough to be protected as a Scheduled Monument.

The Coldberry Mine Shop

The large two-storey stone building is the mine lodging shop.

Historic England describes it as probably mid-nineteenth century and built for the London Lead Company. The Durham Historic Environment Record also preserves an earlier interpretation suggesting that a shop may have been established soon after the 1813 phase of working, so its exact construction date is not as straightforward as it first appears. 

What is certain is its purpose.

This was accommodation connected directly with the mine, and the 1877 fire report and 1890 Bainbridge presentation both prove that men and washer boys were lodging at Coldberry.

There is an intriguing link with the mine’s final years too. Timesheets and other documents found in the building in 1973 suggested that the shop was still being used, perhaps as an office, during the 1950s. 

So this one building spans an enormous part of the Coldberry story — from the age of men lodging beside the workings to the mine’s last twentieth-century operation.

The stable and smithy

Immediately beside the mine shop is the lower stable and smithy block.

This is a separate building and should not be confused with either the lodging shop or the powder store. Together the shop, stable and smithy formed the practical heart of the surface mine complex.

The smithy mattered because a working mine consumed and repaired tools constantly. Picks, drills, iron fittings, tubs, machinery and underground equipment all needed maintenance, while horses remained important for moving people and materials long after the first levels had been driven.

The fact that these buildings still stand beside one another makes Coldberry unusually easy to read once you know which is which.

The former explosives store

The separate stone building standing away from the main group is the former explosives store or powder store.

Keeping explosives apart from the principal working and accommodation buildings was an obvious safety measure.

And importantly, the large mine shop nearby is the building we can definitely identify as Coldberry’s main lodging shop.

The level arch

About 25 metres south of the mine shop is the surviving stone level arch and retaining wall, itself Grade II listed.

Historic England describes the structure as probably mid-nineteenth century and built for the London Lead Company. The retaining wall curves around the level entrance and a blocked mine shaft, making this one of the clearest places at Coldberry to see how the surface buildings connected with the workings beneath the hill.

Elsewhere across the site are other entrances and levels, including Slate Sill Level, Hunt’s Level and later workings.

Not every photograph of an opening should simply be labelled “the mine entrance”, because Coldberry had several different levels serving different phases of the mine.

The dressing floors

A lot of Coldberry’s work happened after the rock came out of the mine.

The dressing floors lay on artificial terraces where the ore was broken, washed and concentrated. Historic England records the remains of a round buddle about five metres across, surviving timber lining, timber settling tanks and areas of edge-laid firebrick flooring.

These are particularly important because they give physical context to the people we meet in the records.

The washer boys lodging at Coldberry in 1877 were connected with this part of the operation. Thomas Anderson and William Coatsworth were working as lead-ore dressers when they died in 1896. And the machinery destroyed in the 1877 fire — jigs, steam engine, crushing equipment and waterwheel — belonged to the process of turning broken rock into saleable lead concentrate.

Later reprocessing removed or altered some of the old waste tips, but Historic England believes substantial nineteenth-century archaeology still survives below ground.

The water balance incline

One feature deserves far more attention than the old page gave it.

Coldberry’s water balance incline is one of only two known examples in the North Pennines.

The surviving remains include a substantial concrete engine bed and a walled incline. Rather than simply relying on a powered engine to haul material, a water-balance system used controlled water weight and gravity to help move loads.

That also means the large concrete remains here should not simply be described vaguely as an unidentified “engine or power base” where the archaeology can identify them more precisely.

Coldberry’s water system was extensive. Reservoirs, dams and leats collected and moved water around the landscape for mining and ore dressing, tying together features that can look completely separate when you first walk across the site.

Coldberry Gutter

Coldberry Gutter is impossible to miss, but its story is more complicated than simply saying miners dug an enormous gorge through the hill.

Historic England regards it as the largest and most spectacular hush in the North Pennines and records that more than two million tons of material had already been removed before the middle of the eighteenth century. 

A hush was created by storing water and releasing it in a controlled rush to strip soil and loose material away from a mineral vein.

More recent work, however, suggests Coldberry Gutter may partly follow a natural geological fault or channel cut by glacial meltwater, which miners then exploited and enlarged through hushing. 

That makes the landscape more interesting, not less. Coldberry Gutter is the result of geology, ice, water and mining all acting on the same weakness in the hill over a very long period.

The later mine

The twentieth-century remains are easy to overlook because they sit beside much older stonework.

Coldberry contains red-brick and concrete structures, machinery bases and later underground work that belong to attempts to keep the mine productive into the twentieth century. Historic England specifically records a number of twentieth-century brick and concrete buildings and surviving machine settings.

Photographs taken underground also show a very different Coldberry from the early London Lead Company period, with steel support sets, corrugated coverings and later equipment.

From working mine to heritage site

Mining did not simply stop and leave Coldberry untouched.

Old waste heaps were later considered for reprocessing, and Swiss Aluminium Mining was active around Coldberry and nearby workings during the later twentieth century. Some of the old dressing-floor tips were eventually removed or reworked. By the 1980s attention was turning towards preserving and explaining the area’s mining heritage instead. Coldberry, Lodge Syke and Marlbeck were all being considered as part of a wider lead-mining heritage story around Middleton-in-Teesdale.

That change matters. A place which generations had known as somewhere to earn a living gradually became somewhere people came to understand what that working life had left behind.

How to explore Coldberry today

Coldberry is a place worth giving time to.

Rather than heading straight for the biggest building and turning back, follow the relationship between the features. Look at the mine shop and smithy, then at the level entrances, the ground falling away towards the dressing floors, the reservoirs and leats and finally the enormous cut of Coldberry Gutter itself.

Once those pieces start joining together, the site makes much more sense.

Coldberry lies within open countryside, but the mining remains themselves are fragile and some are protected structures. Mine entrances, shafts and ruined buildings can also be unstable. We stay outside underground workings and unsafe structures, avoid climbing on archaeology and leave everything where it is.

There are hidden drops, uneven ground and old workings across the wider landscape too, so good footwear and a bit of common sense matter far more here than getting close to every feature.

Take a little longer at Coldberry

The part of Coldberry I like most is that the deeper you go into the records, the less anonymous it becomes.

John Pinkney was driving towards the vein more than two centuries ago. Robert Stagg was gambling £15 on a hush in the hope of finding it. Joseph Beach’s men were sinking for ventilation. More than sixty years later washer boys were raising the alarm as the dressing floors burned.

William Bainbridge was making sure there was hot water waiting when everybody stopped for dinner.

Then there are John Beadle, John Collinson, George Redshaw, Henry Robinson, Thomas Anderson and William Coatsworth, whose names survive for a much sadder reason.

By the 1950s men such as James Sandow Penberthy and Godfrey Granville Poole were still trying to make Coldberry work in a completely different age of mining.

That is what makes the surviving buildings worth more than a quick photograph. Coldberry is not one moment frozen in stone. It is layer after layer of people coming back to the same hill, finding something promising, losing it again, changing the machinery, changing the buildings and trying once more.

And a surprising amount of their story is still sitting there above Middleton.

How we researched Coldberry

This page has been put together using London Lead Company mining reports, government mine returns, historic newspaper reports, Durham archive catalogues and plans, Historic England records, and our own visits and photographs of the site.

There are still questions we are working on, particularly the exact location of some of the later machinery, the full story of the 1896 washing-rake accident and parts of Coldberry’s final 1950s operation. Where the evidence is uncertain, we would rather leave the question open than turn a possibility into a fact.

Research and photography: Outdoor Exploring Family