Our children called this place the jewel mine when we first brought them here 30 years ago to collect fluorspar from the bed of Middlehope burn. There was still glittering under the water as I climbed down the bank this week to pick up a few crystals.
Depending on the purity, the crystals vary from pink to purple. One piece, larger than the rest, seemed unusually heavy. When I turned it over I could see that it was fused to a chunk of galena, or lead sulphide, the raw material for products such as bullets and the lead flashing that goes on church roofs.
In this valley miners crouched in tunnels just big enough to take a small pony then descended a shaft to almost 600ft below the surface to bring up the ore. Artefacts of the industry are still here; rusting pieces of waggonway rail, a waterwheel pit, mountings for a hydraulic engine powered by water piped from West Slitt dam high up on the fell. Those who earned a living here 200 years ago laboured weekdays in a candlelit labyrinth and tended hill farms and smallholdings at the weekend.
With the small lump of galena heavy in my hand I walked across from the beck to the row of bouseteems, 10ft high stone bins where each team of miners stored unprocessed ore hauled up from the tunnels. It must have required a herculean effort to fill one bin using just hand tools and muscular effort.
At the washing floor, above a bend in the beck, miners would have watched anxiously as grey metallic galena was separated from crushed stone and fluorspar in the current.
Miners were paid according to the lead content after the ore was crushed and separated on the washing floors, and not by amount of rock mined. So even a full bouseteem might mean a meagre reward. Half the rock I held would have been worthless, destined for the spoil heap.
Much of the ground here is still bare because few plants tolerate the concentrations of toxic heavy metals in the soil. One survivor is mountain pansy; a single purple flower was still in bloom on my visit, another jewel in the autumn sunshine.
