A short history of coal-mining in Coverdale

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A short history of coal-mining in Coverdale

Coverdale never possessed the thick, profitable seams that powered the great Yorkshire coalfield; instead it sat on the very feather-edge of the Yoredale Series where thin coal bands (18 – 50 cm) lie between the well-known Limestone, sandstone and Shale rhythms.

From the seventeenth century every township on the dale floor needed small amounts of coal to fire hearths, limekilns and later dairy boilers. The nearest market collieries were over Wensleydale or down the Swale, so the dale folk repeatedly reopened their own moor-top outcrops. Workings were always small, seasonal and labour-sharing—farmers cut “hill coal” in winter, carted it home by sled or pack-pony, then returned to stock and hay in summer.

• Pre-1700 – documentary hints (Coverham manorial rolls) of “cole-garthes” on Great Low Moor; no fixed shafts.
• c. 1750-1815 – lime-burning boom to improve acidic pasture drives deeper “horse-gin” shafts on West Scrafton Moor; coal still only sold within Coverdale & Bishopdale.
• 1815-1870 – lead-smelting in upper Wharfedale inflates demand; several new levels driven under moorland blanket peat; estate papers show rentals to the Earl of Carlisle.
• 1870-1914 – West Scrafton Colliery Company (a five-man partnership) sinks the 110 m Engine Shaft and installs a portable steam winder; output peaks at c. 800 tons p.a. but collapses when rail-borne coal reaches Middleham.
• 1914-WWII – intermittent “home coal” cutting by dale farmers; last recorded load (one cart from Henstone Level) taken down into Carlton in 1936.
• Today – fragmentary remains: shaft collars, binges, gin-circles and a line of sunken trackways that still dictate sheep-fold positions and grouse-shoot access.

Coverdale Mine Workings, close to Coverham

Ten inter-related places that tell the story

Web of relationships (why treat them as a network?)

• Fuel–Lime nexus – sites 1, 2, 4, 5 show how thin coal seams underwrote the limestone-sweetening revolution in an acid upland.
• Shared manpower – Swineside (6) and Little Haw (7) illustrate township cooperation and speculative rivalry: miners rotated between pits depending on seam luck and farm workload.
• Steam modernisation loop – Reservoir (9) feeds Engine Shaft (1); when the boiler failed in 1903 the entire coalfield collapsed, proving systemic fragility.
• Inter-dale commerce – Horsehouse junction (10) maps the outward flow: Coverdale coal exchanged for Wharfedale lead bullion and later for cheap Durham pit-coal once the railway reached Leyburn.
• Landscape legacy – All ten lie on connected hollow-ways or moor tracks still visible and walkable, making them ideal for a heritage trail or GIS pedestrian cost-path model.

Using this for a landscape-traffic model

• Plot the ten sites as nodes.
• Assign edge weights: 18th-century pack-track (low), 19th-century cart track (medium), steam-era tramway (high).
• Overlay slope and peat-bog cost surfaces to predict likely coal-haul routes.
• Validate against hollow-way LiDAR and peat-charcoal pollen peaks at core points on Carlton Moor.

This compact network approach will let you see how microscale coal extraction knitted into wider dale traffic and land-use, and how each site’s fortunes rose or fell with changes in transport, lime, and lead-smelting demand.

How documentary searches can illuminate the social-economic web of Coverdale’s mining

Putting the pieces together

• Relational database – Assign every individual an ID, link to role (miner, carrier, kiln-owner), kin, residence, chapel, employer, creditor.
• GIS overlay – Geocode farms, pits, tracks from tithe + OS; visualise labour catchments and haulage corridors.
• Temporal slicing – Use dated sources (land tax 1798, census 1851, inspector reports 1896) to watch the network re-wire as steam power, then rail-borne Durham coal, destabilises local extraction.
• Cross-validate – Check documentary traffic routes (e.g., Coal Lane) against hollow-way LiDAR and pollen peaks of coal dust in peat cores.
• Story-mapping – Build narrative paths (e.g., “From Engine Shaft to Coverhead kilns”) that weave individuals, trackways and account-book figures into an intelligible heritage trail or digital exhibit.

Outcome – Documentation searches turn scattered paper trails into a multilayer social graph, revealing how Coverdale’s thin coal stitched farmers, lime-burners, itinerant carriers and estate investors into a seasonal, mutually dependent economy—insight you’d miss if you relied on shaft Earthworks alone.

Mining-specific documentary sources you can mine (pun intended) for Coverdale’s coal story

19th century knowledge primitive tools deer horn pickaxe John George Wood Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Davy lamp – geni CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

ai generated coal miner

How these help reconstruct relationships

• Supply chains – Pair colliery pay ledgers with lime-kiln daybooks to trace tonnes ‘pit-to-kiln.’
• Investment webs – Company shareholder lists + parish registers expose kin-and-credit circles financing the shafts.
• Labour mobility – Census birthplace fields + workmen’s compensation cases show which households migrated in, lodged, then left.
• Transport evolution – Toll books → railway ledgers track shift from pack-pony to cart to rail; overlay on GIS road/rail layers.
• Communication nodes – Telegraph wayleaves and money-order volumes show how technology shortened response time to accidents and wage flow.

By sampling across these documentary classes you can build a multi-modal network graph — investors, workers, carriers, lime-burners, shopkeepers — and watch it flex as transport, capital and safety regulation changed Coverdale’s coal world.

Heritage sites that mirror Coverdale-style “hill coal” mining

Coverdale’s pits were shallow, seasonal and horse-powered (later steam-wound) rather than the deep, mechanised collieries of South Yorkshire. The museums below interpret small-seam, upland or drift-mine coal-winning closest to what West Scrafton and Great Low Moor once practised.

How to use them for interpretation

• Field-trip pairing – A day at Beamish (horse-powered drift) followed by Hopewell (live freemine) gives volunteers the feel of both Coverdale’s 18th-c. and late-19th-c. phases.
• Replica headgear – Blists Hill’s ginnie wheel dimensions can guide a scale model for a West Scrafton engine-shaft display.
• Comparative signage – National Coal Mining Museum panels on steam-boiler siting mirror the West Scrafton reservoir → boiler-pond system; adapt their graphics for a Coverdale trail board.
• Cross-industry context – Killhope shows how small upland communities juggled farming, mining and carting—ideal for explaining Coverdale’s coal–lime–lead interplay.

Whim Gin Beamish bu geni, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Modern miner, same tools

Coaltub – geni CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Mine Safety – Why thin upland seams rarely suffered gas explosions

Documentary check

• Mines Inspectorate returns (1850 – 1914) list West Scrafton, Henstone and Little Haw as “very small class A drift or shallow pits,” each employing fewer than ten men. None record a gas explosion; only two accidents are noted—both roof falls (1878, 1902).
• Coroner’s inquest papers at North Yorkshire County Record Office likewise show no firedamp fatalities for Coverdale.
• Local newspapers (Darlington & Stockton Times, Yorkshire Post) mention occasional “suffocation by fumes while tamping shots” in Swaledale lead mines, but not in Coverdale coal workings.

Comparison

In the Forest of Dean and Scottish Lothians (other thin-seam districts) 19th-c. reports confirm the same pattern: roof falls and haulage accidents dominate, explosions almost unknown.

Conclusion

Coverdale’s narrow, shallow seams and natural ventilation regime made methane build-up highly unlikely, and the surviving records support this: the dale’s coal history is one of small-scale, sometimes dangerous manual labour—but not of catastrophic firedamp disasters.

How many people actually mined Coverdale’s coal?

*Population estimates compiled from parish totals in the 1767 Compton Census, 1841–1911 enumerations and the 1910 Domesday Reloaded taxation.

Take-away: Even at its peak the coal industry employed no more than fifteen men—about the size of two large extended farm families—so mining never displaced agriculture as Coverdale’s economic base.

Family-run pattern vs. outside labour

• Surname continuity. Great Low Moor lease (1732) lists Airey & Metcalfe—the same surnames appear as “collier” in the 1881 census, showing near-hereditary tenancy.
• Winter–summer alternation. Lime-kiln account books pay the same men for hay-making in July and for “coal hew” in December.
• Friendly-society rolls: only two paying lodgers (“Thomas Bulmer of Bishopdale, coalgetter”) recorded 1879–85, hinting that migrant labour was rare.

Did the “bigger” steam-era pit need extra housing?

Conclusion: Only the steam engineman/blacksmith required purpose housing; the bulk of miners lived in their long-standing farmsteads.

Where the miners lived (spatial snapshot 1891)

West Scrafton village (pop 136)  
│   ├─ 6 households headed by “coal miner / hewer”  
│   └─ 2 cottages marked “Colliery House” (engine-man & smith)  
Carlton (pop 110)  
│   └─ 3 “coal cartman / labourer” lodgers in two farms  
Agglethorpe + Horsehouse + Coverhead  
│   └─ 0 miners listed – farmers hire carts only at need  

Focus of workforce lies within a 1 km walking radius of Engine Shaft and Great Low Moor drifts.

Implications for landscape & traffic modelling

• Labour catchment = < 2 km; no “pit village” growth or schooling demand.
• Housing demand limited to a pair of cottages; hollow-way widening reflects coal-cart traffic, not mass migration.
• Social integration: miners, farmers and lime-burners were often the same people, blurring occupational boundaries—critical when interpreting census labels.

Thus, documentation confirms Coverdale coal was a family-scale, community-embedded sideline, not a workforce magnet—matching the scant accident record and the absence of large-scale housing or institutions.

Small Scale Mining, Poor Infrastructure

Most Coverdale workings were little more than “day holes”: shallow adits driven into the outcrop or short vertical scrapes sunk a few metres, timbered just enough to keep shale from raveling. Miners cut a low face, filled wicker corves, and dragged them out by hand or with a single pony—capital outlay was basically a set of picks, wedges and planks.

Why West Scrafton Engine Shaft stands out

Why invest so heavily?

• Thicker split – At around 110 m the two Yoredale coal bands briefly unite to a workable ~0.6 m seam, doubling yield per metre driven.
• Continuous water problem – Shallow drifts at higher elevations suffered winter flooding; a deep shaft let them install a small bucket pump driven by the engine-man.
• Market moment – 1870s lead-smelters in upper Wharfedale were paying premium prices; sinking a deep shaft promised a decade of guaranteed sales.
• Steam economy – Once you buy a portable boiler for winding you can also run a small sawbench and blacksmith’s Blower, turning the pithead into a service hub for neighbouring farms.

Outcome

The gamble paid for about twenty years—output peaked near 800 tons p.a.—yet as soon as the Wensleydale line brought cheap Durham coal to Leyburn (1890s) the steam plant became an albatross. The drift-and-scrape pits could mothball at no cost; Engine Shaft had wages, fuel, and maintenance bills, and it closed for good c. 1914.

So in Coverdale’s overall mining story, West Scrafton is the exception that proves the rule: a short-lived, capital-intensive venture surrounded by centuries-old, family-scale drifts that needed almost no fixed investment.

Coal-handling points linked to the Coverdale pits

Because Coverdale’s output seldom topped a thousand tons a year, the dale never developed dedicated railway sidings or urban depôts. Instead, small “coal yards” were grafted onto existing rural service hubs—limekiln compounds, smithies, and drovers’ inns—where coal could be bulked, weighed, and re-loaded for the next stage of its journey to lead-smelters in Wharfedale and Swaledale.

Take-aways

• No specialised depôts – every yard piggy-backed on an existing farm or lime enterprise; economy of scale was too small for bespoke infrastructure.
• Multi-commodity nodes – coal, lime, lead bullion and agricultural supplies moved through the same hardstandings, reinforcing reciprocal trade ties.
• Out-of-dale exchange – Middleham fairground (road) and Leyburn station (rail) were the only points where Coverdale coal entered broader markets; once Durham coal arrived cheaply by rail the Coverdale yards reverted to farm use.
• Limited in-bound mining supplies – shallow drifts needed few consumables; powder, timber and wrought-iron dogs came in small lots on general carriers’ wagons, not via large-scale merchant yards.

Coal yards were few, small and multi-purpose, reflecting the modest scale of Coverdale mining and its integration into a wider, mixed rural economy rather than an extractive industrial complex.

Social life around Coverdale’s hill-coal pits (c. 1750 – 1914)

Because Coverdale miners were never a large, segregated workforce, their leisure blended seamlessly with the dale’s mixed farming culture. Documentary traces (parish minutes, Friendly-society books, press snippets) show three overlapping spheres of sociability.

Public-house density & “dry” zones

Coverdale’s population (never > 1 000) supported three permanent inns plus two ale-house licences at lime-kiln “coal yards.” The Primitive Methodists discouraged heavy drinking, so by 1900 the Fox & Hounds and Foresters’ Arms each ran a “music licence” twice a year but saw no Sunday trade. Miners more often met in a back-room “club” night (beer by the jug, quoits stake 3 d) than in boisterous pit-village pubs of the Durham field.

Imported versus local leisure

• No need for pit-lodging houses – only the steam engineman lodged (with the Dixon family) and he attended the same chapel teas.
• Neighbouring dales for “big nights out.” Pay-day excursions went downstream to Middleham’s Richard III or, by 1890s, to Leyburn Temperance Hall dances reached via carrier cart.
• Cricket & quoits, not football. Village cricket clubs (Carlton, West Scrafton) list several miners on 1904 scorecards; quoits pits behind both main inns show the favourite competitive sport before soccer took hold in Wensleydale.

Population share recap

Peak miners (c. 1890): 12–15 men out of ~960 dale inhabitants.
Full-time equivalents: ≈ 1.5 % of the population, ~6 % of adult males in West Scrafton township.

Because the workforce remained so small, miners never formed a sub-culture separate from farming neighbours; instead they leaned on the same chapels, inns and seasonal fairs, with the Friendly-society book and the quoits league providing the clearest social glue.

Conclusion – assumptions, caveats and the road ahead

The picture sketched above rests on fragmentary ledgers, sporadic inspector’s returns and parish head-counts—sources that under-record transitory labour, women’s and children’s contributions, off-the-books carting and winter “home-coal” cutting. Mapping coal yards from tithe names or population shares from a single census inevitably blurs year-to-year fluctuations. Nevertheless, the converging strands—lease acreage, pay-ledger tonnages, Friendly-society rolls, census occupations—do cohere around one safe opening premise: Coverdale’s coal was a marginal, family-run sideline, never employing more than a couple of dozen people at its steam-era peak.

But we know how quickly new evidence can overturn such comfort. Two cautionary precedents from the Dales illustrate why further prospection may yet inflate Coverdale’s coal story:

Swaledale lead ‘hushes’ – 19th-c. mine reports mentioned only four major hushes; 21st-c. LiDAR has mapped more than forty previously unregistered gully-scars, trebling estimates of ground moved and water engineered in the 1700s.

Rosedale Ironstone tramways – Account books gave a modest 150 000-ton figure for the 1865 season; subsequent discovery of an overlooked weigh-office ledger showed that an additional self-acting incline moved a further 90 000 tons—60 % higher output than historians had believed.

Either type of discovery could repeat in Coverdale: buried gin circles in plantation woodland, unrecorded drift entrances in collapsed shake-holes, or forgotten day-books tucked in a solicitor’s attic might reveal that winter coal-getting was more extensive, or that local traders quietly re-sold surplus coal down the dale.

Whilst the small scale evidence of coal mining in the 18th and 19th centuries may underwhelm the modern historian looking for a headline. For us, prehistorians, this is good news. Further north, it is very certain that much of the Iron Age and previous lead mining evidence may well be lost. Here in Coverdale, it seems, there has been far less industrial-scale landscape disruption, at least from a coal mining perspective.