Snailbeach
Encyclopedia
Snailbeach is a village
Village
A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet with the population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand , Though often located in rural areas, the term urban village is also applied to certain urban neighbourhoods, such as the West Village in Manhattan, New...

 in Shropshire
Shropshire
Shropshire is a county in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes, the county is a NUTS 3 region and is one of four counties or unitary districts that comprise the "Shropshire and Staffordshire" NUTS 2 region. It borders Wales to the west...

, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, located near Shrewsbury
Shrewsbury
Shrewsbury is the county town of Shropshire, in the West Midlands region of England. Lying on the River Severn, it is a civil parish home to some 70,000 inhabitants, and is the primary settlement and headquarters of Shropshire Council...

 at . The village was formerly home to a large lead
Lead
Lead is a main-group element in the carbon group with the symbol Pb and atomic number 82. Lead is a soft, malleable poor metal. It is also counted as one of the heavy metals. Metallic lead has a bluish-white color after being freshly cut, but it soon tarnishes to a dull grayish color when exposed...

 mine.

Early history

A village was built for workers at the local lead mine - Snailbeach Mine, which reputedly dates back to Roman times
Mining in Roman Britain
Mining was one of the most prosperous activities in Roman Britain. Britain was rich in resources such as copper, gold, iron, lead, salt, silver, and tin, materials in high demand in the Roman Empire. The abundance of mineral resources in the British Isles was probably one of the reasons for the...

. The mine has some of the best preserved surface buildings of a lead mine left standing in Britain including a Cornish Engine House
Cornish engine
A Cornish engine is a type of steam engine developed in Cornwall, England, mainly for pumping water from a mine. It is a form of beam engine that uses steam at a higher pressure than the earlier engines designed by James Watt...

. It is managed by the Shropshire Mines Trusthttp://shropshiremines.org.uk/. Snailbeach Mine was the biggest lead mine in Shropshire and it is reputed to have yielded the greatest volume of lead per acre of any mine in Europe. Although the miners mainly extracted lead ore (galena
Galena
Galena is the natural mineral form of lead sulfide. It is the most important lead ore mineral.Galena is one of the most abundant and widely distributed sulfide minerals. It crystallizes in the cubic crystal system often showing octahedral forms...

) from the mine, smaller quantities of Barytes
Barite
Baryte, or barite, is a mineral consisting of barium sulfate. The baryte group consists of baryte, celestine, anglesite and anhydrite. Baryte itself is generally white or colorless, and is the main source of barium...

, Calcite, Fluorspar, Silver and Zinc were also obtained.

Late 20th century

Underground mining ceased in Snailbeach in 1955. Since 1955 only some reworking of the spoil heaps for spar, to use as pebble dash on buildings, has occurred. Barytes from here was sent to the Windscale nuclear reactor
Sellafield
Sellafield is a nuclear reprocessing site, close to the village of Seascale on the coast of the Irish Sea in Cumbria, England. The site is served by Sellafield railway station. Sellafield is an off-shoot from the original nuclear reactor site at Windscale which is currently undergoing...

 to smother fuel cells after an accident. Locals carried on working the tips until the 1970s. Although some ore is said to have been left standing in the mine, it does not seem likely that the mine will reopen. The old miners were very thorough in their working and rarely left much ore for later generations. Once a mine has been allowed to flood and the machinery removed the cost of reopening the mine increases dramatically and the prospect usually becomes too expensive. Any large amounts of lead remaining in the area are likely to be below the Ritton Castle area. Unfortunately miners would probably have to dig at least 1,000 feet down before they reach the top of the lead deposits, if they could find them. This is too deep and too expensive so lead mining in Shropshire is unlikely to become a major industry ever again.

The Shropshire County Council, using government grants, did extensive work in the early 1990s to make some of the shallow workings safe for the villagers. At the same time, they acquired many of the surface buildings and preserved these http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/69328 or restored them http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/101448 from a semi-derelict condition http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/242660. The white spoil tip on the northern edge of the village, which had been a local landmark, was landscaped and planted with trees as part of the mining reclamation works.

Mine tourism

The Shropshire Mines Trust manages the site on behalf of Shropshire Council
Shropshire Council
Shropshire Council is a unitary authority in Shropshire, United Kingdom.It replaced the former two-tier local government structure in the non-metropolitan county of Shropshire on 1 April 2009, which involved its immediate predecessor, Shropshire County Council, and five non-metropolitan districts -...

.

Many of the mine buildings and land are owned by Shropshire Council and you can have free access to visit them, although many of the remains are on privately held land. Despite this, a number of mine buildings and features are not accessible to the public, although guided tours can include such features otherwise not accessible.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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