Chapter 2.

Lead mining never had a significant place among Scottish industries, but the ore was sought throughout the country, and there were at one time or another mines in the Northern Highlands and to the south among the Galloway hills. In between almost every enterprising laird looked for minerals on his estate, but only at Leadhills and Wanlockhead did lead mining achieve a continuity similar to other parts of Britain.

Leadhills is in upper Clydesdale at the head of Glengonnar and on Friars Muir, one of the three historic moorlands of the Lowther Hills. The village lies in a basin amid bleak hillsides, and it and neighbouring Wanlockhead share the distinction of being the highest villages in Scotland. Winter weather can be extreme, with severe frosts and snowfalls so heavy as to bury the little cottages. Wanlockhead is about 2 Km distant and lies on Robert Muir in Nithsdale; although the mining grounds are adjacent, only one of the veins crosses the March-dyke, the county boundary. Until the late seventeenth century the whole ore field was known as the "Leid Hillies" and the settlement which became Leadhills was called Hopetoun.

The Romans may have found some of the lead veins when they established their forts in Clydesdale, but there is no record they ever mined the ore - perhaps their hold on the Scottish countryside was too tenuous. The first firm reference to mining is in 1239, when the Abbot of Newbattle raised an action claiming the loss of 1000 stone of lead ore from mines which were on the monastery's lands at that time. In 1604, the English prospector George Bowes found a shaft on Stakemoss which had been "sunke in so ancient a time" that nothing was known about it, and the early medieval mining in the district does not seem to have had the sort of regulation and register found in some English mines in the period.

In the fifteenth century interest turned to the gold in the gravels of the Lowther burns. To encourage Royal support the area was described as "God's Treasure House", but in any case the extent of Crown interest in these Scottish mining ventures was considerable. The early history is confused and some prospectors worked mines on both Glengonnar and Wanlock. Two such were the partners John Acheson and John Aslowan, both of Edinburgh, who mined lead in the 1560s and who shipped 5000 stone of ore to Flanders.

By the late sixteenth century Thomas Foulis of Edinburgh, goldsmith and banker, had secured some of the mines in the "Lead Hillies" and took a flamboyant engineer and prospector, Bevis Bulmer, as his partner. At the same time, George Bowes was mining on the Wanlock and writing complaining letters to his backers. Frost and snow had delayed the work, the victuals he needed to feed his men had to be brought six miles, they became ill with scurvy. and storms blew down their tents. Bowes' letters demonstrate the way the isolation of the area, and the hostile weather on the high moors, were a hindrance to the early development of the mines. Another problem was the lawlessness of the times, for Bowes also complained of the "many wrongs offered by mean persons to provoke me to break the peace", and it seems that the various prospectors were not above disrupting each others work.

After the death of Thomas in 1611, a relative, Robert Foulis, took over and concentrated all his efforts on mining lead. By 1615 the other prospectors had given up or been driven out, and Robert controlled all the mines on the Lanarkshire side of the county boundary.

Robert left no male heir and Anna Foulis, she may have been Thomas's granddaughter, inherited the mines. Her uncle, Sir William Baillie, assumed their management, but when Anna married a writer (lawyer), James Hope, Baillie refused to give them up. After three years of legal wrangling he had to be forcibly evicted, and in 1641 Hope got the "lands and minerals of Friars Muir" and secured them by Royal Charters.

Hope was not without a prior interest in lead for his uncle was involved in trade with Holland, where the "ingenious Dutch" were importing and working lead by the fifteenth century. Hope was master of the Scottish Mint, and his diaries show he was energetic and inquisitive. He visited continental mines; concerned himself with glass making; and a keen interest in anatomy led him to direct autopsies on some of his own children. By 1649 he had "a great number of workmen both natives and strangers, with their wyves and families at Waterhead in Glengonnar"; and his mines were recognised as the "onlie of that natur within the Kingdom of Scotland". References suggest the first settlement was lower in the glen than the present village.

Mining in the seventeenth century faced problems in management and organisation which were unknown in the embryonic industries of the day, and Hope's interest in operations on the Continent shows his determination to make a success of his mines at Leadhills. Before long they were over 40 metres deep, and producing about 190 tonnes of ore, most of which was exported through Leith. Fifty men were employed, and a wage bill of £6000 Scots, about £500 sterling, gives average earnings of about 2/6 (12p) a week. Little evidence now remains of these early works. Many have been obliterated by later operations, and the scars of others are now so healed by time that they are lost among the heather.

The explorations begun by James Hope continued with the family carrying the burden of investment. In 1702 James's grandson, Charles was created Earl of Hopetoun, and he took an estate at South Queensferry where he set about building the palatial Hopetoun House. After his elevation Charles no longer took a personal concern in the lead mines; by 1719 Hopetoun had become Leadhills, and in the years which followed the family gradually withdrew from mining.

In 1706 the Earl leased some of his mines to George Lothian, of Stafford Hall in Cumberland, and other speculators followed. However, the Hopes kept a close control over their lessees and took an active interest in the community at Leadhills. In 1861 a single company acquired all the mines; its successors worked there until 1929, and the ground was finally abandoned in 1940.

Lead mining on a permanent basis at Wanlockhead began with English investment when a partnership headed by Sir James Stansfield leased ground from the Duke of Queensberry in 1675. Stansfield had problems with the hostility of the Hopes and the intransigence of his own men. He seems to have had difficulty in keeping the latter at work, and the overseer was cautioned not to "hector" them but to treat them "civilly"; comments that may well point to the way the skilled and itinerant lead miner saw himself as his own master.

In 1710 the Quaker managed London Lead Company took a lease of the Wanlockhead mines, where it was usually referred to as The Governor and Company. The Quakers were involved in many industrial enterprises in the eighteenth century, and Arthur Raistrick refers to their "live" social consciousness and their belief that by meeting the mental as well physical needs of their workers, the dangers from radical ideas could be averted. The Company laid out much of the village at Wanlockhead and ensured living conditions which were probably superior to those at Leadhills at that time. The Quaker directors claimed they were willing to discuss any grievances with the men, but to what extent the miners' views were heeded at Wanlockhead can be only conjecture.

In spite of developing the ground and investing in machinery, none of these concerns were particularly successful and it was not until 1756, when a partnership headed by Ronald Crauford of Edinburgh took a lease, that the scale of operations at Wanlockhead began to equal those at Leadhills. Crauford was another who was involved in trade with Holland. This Continental mercantile interest is a common thread through all those who were concerned with mining in Leadhills and Wanlockhead in the eighteenth century, and was perhaps the motor for the development of the industry.

One of the partners was a son of a previous lessee, Alexander Telfer, and when he pulled out in 1761 his quarter share was taken by Gilbert Meason, an Orcadian trader, who became the managing partner. Like his near contemporary, James Stirling, Meason had no prior knowledge of lead mining but, like Stirling, his company's success owed all to his own management of the mines. Stirling was a scholar and was perhaps guided by the discipline of mathematics. Meason seems to have imposed the sort of autocratic authority which had helped to make him a wealthy merchant. He allowed no challenge to his decisions, and James Watt declared the letters he wrote in a dispute about one of the latter's steam engines were "abusive" in tone.

Over the years the output from both mining grounds was very similar, but Wanlockhead had an advantage in that its ores were richer in silver and its refinery worked until 1910. Mining there continued longer than at Leadhills; the Wanlockhead Mining Company kept going until July 1931, and the mines were briefly reopened in the 1950s.

When the Swede, Henry Kalmeter, visited the Leadhills mines in 1719 he remarked that "the great extent of the works .. serves as testimony to their antiquity", but he noted that only three veins were being mined, Raik, Brown's and Laverockhaw. Which points to the way the Hopetoun activities had wound down.

Among the lessees was a partnership headed by Scottish merchants who had moved to London, and who were given a lease of the North East portion of the ore field in 1729. The partners paid the Earl a cash entry fee and agreed to a royalty, tack, or "lordship", of one bar in six from the lead they smelted. They formed a Chartered Company and took the lengthy title, The Governor and Company for Working the Mines and Minerals in that part of North Britain called Scotland, but were commonly and generally known as the Scots, or sometimes Scotch, Mines Company. The "Court", of twelve directors and a secretary, met in the Sun Fire Office, Cornhill, and the Company had a nominal capital of £100,000, of which only £8,800 was subscribed by the original 75 shareholders. Their number may have later increased for in 1825 someone with an address in Leadhills had a "holding in the Scots Mines Company".

The company's interest in Leadhills was initiated by Sir John Erskine of Alva, but after an inauspicious beginning, it appointed James Stirling as managing agent. He had visited Leadhills in 1734 and 1735 to assess the situation and report, and took up residence in 1736. Stirling was the third son of Sir Archibald Stirling of Garden, a Jacobite family who knew what it was to hazard life itself in standing for a principle. James was an intellectual with a European reputation. He had lived in Venice so must have been at home among the cosmopolitan coterie of Scottish lead merchants, but his move to Leadhills when he was 43 years of age confounded his London friends.

In the event his direction of the Company's affairs made him one of the most capable managers of the time. He turned the company into a profitable venture, based on a disciplined and orderly workforce. Profits rose to give a return of 100% on the subscribed capital, and even a century later it was said that the good character of the villagers was a legacy of Stirling's reign. His reputation, and the style of his house, which was built by William Adam and still stands in the village, meant Leadhills became a mecca for interested travellers.

Some turned aside to visit what was seen as a remarkable place; others were invited to make the journey. In 1770 James Watt visited the Susanna mine to advise on pumps. His friend, Dr Joseph Black came two years later, and reported to the Earl on "the question of gold". The engineers John Smeaton and John Rennie advised on the availability of water power at both mining grounds, and later an array of consultants provided lengthy, and usually critical, reports to the noble land owners.

By the time the Scots Mines Company took a lease, the Earl of Hopetoun was still working mines on Broadlaw; to the South west George Lothian and his son Richard had extensive works around Mine Hill; and James Majoribanks, and the Edinburgh Society, - a group which included the coal master Sir Thomas Hope, a relative of the Earl, - were mining on the north side of the Glengonnar Water. Most of these lessees were co-partnerships which included merchant interests, and some, like the Lothians, were personally involved in the business of mining.

By 1785 the Hopes had given up working their mines, and the ground on Broadlaw was leased by a Leith merchant, Alexander Sherriff. On Mine Hill a group of Derbyshire mine owners led by Anthony Tessington of Swanwick, secured an interest in the Lothian lease, and traded as the Leadhills Mining Company, or sometimes just the "Leadhills Company'. In 1783 they were succeeded by a partnership led by Alexander Popham of Hungerford, MP for Taunton and something of a social reformer.

Over the years the Scots Mines Company took up most of the other leases, and it not only became the largest concern but was the most successful until disastrous lawsuits in the 1840s and 50s forced it to abandon its operations and left one company managing all the mines.

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Mining created Leadhills for there was no earlier settlement on the high moors. Bevis Bulmer built "a fair house to live in" near Glengonnar Burn - its ruins stood into the nineteenth century - and there is a reference to a building, the "Leadhill House on Crawford Muir". It was probably at the so called Gold Scars by the Elvan Water, and where the remains of buildings were still visible in the 1850s. But the early mining was largely seasonal; the miners lived in huts or tents, and all was abandoned once the winter set in. The effects of the severe upland climate were a constant preoccupation with the mining companies, and even in 1792 the Scots Mines Company looked for men prepared to work in the summer only.

There was no historic body of lead miners in Clydesdale and in the sixteenth century skilled men were being recruited on the Continent. However, the presence of these "strangers" gave cause for concern, and a contract dated 1567 forbade the employment of more than twenty without licence from the Royal Court. Another way of finding men to work underground was to employ prisoners, and in 1650 six "lusty fellows" who had been captured after the battle of Philipshaugh were taken by Sir James Hope to work at Leadhills.

Like their counterparts in the coal mines, the early lead miners were bound into serfdom and Sir James was granted this "privilege" in 1649. The Leadhills men were ostensibly given their liberty in 1695, but record shows that even fifty years later a man discharged from the mines had to have a pass from the Burgh Baillie to "protect him on the Road".

Experience was to prove that legal restrictions might in the end hinder a company recruiting men, and it was economic bonds that best held them. Paying them once a year was one way of creating such ties for it meant the miners were in debt to others in the bargain partnership as well as to the mining company. It also had the advantage that money "to make the pay" was available from the sale of the year's crop of lead.

George Bowes "brought out of England eight and twenty officers and miners"; other English companies would also have brought men with them, and the lifting of the old restrictions no doubt also encouraged others to move north. Men also came from the Highlands, where lead mining on Islay may have predated operations elsewhere, and there was a "William Telfer, Strontian" and a "John McDonald, Baldinoch", at Wanlockhead in the early eighteenth century. English and Scots seem to have worked amicably together, and bargain records of the mid century at Leadhills show that McKendricks and McLachans; Whitfields and Waltons, were all working underground, and two Highlanders, Alex McDonald and William McLean, were among the skilled men who smelted the lead ore. There were also some Irish. William Ross, an "Irish Myner", is buried in the graveyard, and research in the bargain records notes a "John Thomson Irish", and a Bryan Connor, perhaps an Antrim name. But by the mid eighteenth century most of the miners seem to have been of Scottish origins. Unlike the coal mines in lower Clydesdale, Leadhills had no Irish invasion in the nineteenth century so escaped the sort of ethnic friction that was found elsewhere as the pace of industrial development increased.

Were the men who came to Leadhills and Wanlockhead pulled by hope of greater reward or pushed by conditions at home ? Many were no doubt pushed by the threat of poverty or by religious pressures. Others were perhaps the "roughnecks" of their day, pushed by debts and pulled by hopes of higher wages.

One immigrant miner was the centenarian, Old John Taylor, who died in 1770 and lies in the Leadhills burial ground. He had worked at Alston in the Northern Pennines before moving to Scotland; first to the Islay mines, then to Strontian, and later to the Hope's silver mine at Hilderstone near Bathgate. Living conditions at Strontian resulted in his getting scurvy, but tradition has it he lived on at Leadhills to reach 133 years of age.

A century later the obituary of Wanlockhead miner, John Cameron, showed how such movements continued. He was born in Strontian in 1829, began work in the mines there and then emigrated to America to mine copper. After returning to Strontian, he came to work at Wanlockhead and then moved to oversee a lead mine in Ireland. In the 1870s he returned to the Wanlockhead mines and died there at the age of 64 years. It was remarked that he kept a fluency in the Gaelic language of his childhood.

Unlike lead mines elsewhere in Britain there was little other work to seduce men away from Leadhills and Wanlockhead. An exception was the Nethanhead lead mines on Nutberry Hill, some eight kilometres north east of Muirkirk and twenty two from Leadhills. In 1742 these were being worked by a Mr Mooter who was joined by one of the Leadhills miners, Thomas Rutter. Rutter returned to Leadhills in 1745, when he remarked that few of the men at Nutberry had "any knowledge of the business". It therefore seems unlikely any of his colleagues had joined him, but Rutter's comings and goings again point to the way skilled miners moved about the country.

Within the mining grounds men seem to have gone from one company to another, for the overseer's Journal of 1768 records how two miners had left the Scots Mines Company and returned to the "Earl's service". Another record notes a bargain with "William Thomson, Wanlock", which suggests he had come from the neighbouring mines. Not all lived by their work for a record of 1790 shows some walked each day from the neighbouring village of Crawfordjohn.

Women worked in the coal pits and, during his tour of Britain, Defoe applauded the way children as young as four could "everyone earn their own bread" in the cotton mills. But leadmining was a man's world. There is an entry in the Bargain Records of an Elizabeth Carmichael washing ore at Leadhills in the 1740s, but there are no records of any women working underground, and by the end of the eighteenth century there was no female labour about the mines. Much of the ore was washed by boys; they started at about nine years of age and worked a nominal ten hour day, with a half day on Saturdays. They worked out of doors, but if they were "peculiarly exposed to the weather", this was in contrast to their sisters who acquired a "delicacy" spinning or sewing for long hours in the tiny cottages. Writers have been concerned with the hardships of the colliery girls but less with the domestic slavery which poverty imposed on their counterparts in the leadmining villages and elsewhere.

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The Hopes were much concerned with the proper development and maintenance of the mining grounds, and in 1674 it was noted by the Commissioners of the Treasury that Sir James Hope, had "kept many poor people at work when he could have no Sale of ore by reason of the War". It was a condition of the later leases that a minimum number of miners should always be employed, and failure to do so meant the lease could be forfeited. The Scots Mines Company was obliged "to constantly employ fifty pickmen", and in 1808 the smaller Leadhills Mining Company had to employ not less than twenty.

To secure a labour force was not enough for the men had to be so managed as to work regularly and to "good effect". The advent of "strangers" affected more than national security for some itinerant metal miners could be rough characters at best. In his Survey of the (English) Lakes of 1787 the author, James Clarke claimed the lead miners who came to work there were "the most abandoned, wicked and profligate part of mankind". It was probably such men who were among those who came to Leadhills, for before Stirling's appointment in 1739 the miners there were said to have been "thoughtless and dissipated"; in spite of policies where drunkenness could merit corporal punishment and absence from the occasional Sunday service a fine.

"Dissipated" was a description often applied to workmen at that time, and a condition employers sought to reform. When he had arrived in Oxford, Stirling complained that "nothing like strictness" was to be found there, and his aim at Leadhills seems to have been to create a regime based on a paternal but strict discipline, perhaps with the sort of order he had found in mathematics. This science expected specific results from a given process, so rules were drawn up to regulate all aspects of work at the mines. The tasks the men were to undertake were clearly defined and the overseers were expected to ensure that instructions were followed. The reports they provided in the day-books or Journals were not only read by Stirling himself but were also perused by those of the directors who visited Leadhills.

The underground shifts were fixed at six hours and, out with this time the miners were required to collect the timber they needed and attend to their tools. Their recreational behaviour was no less important and idleness was discouraged by suitable institutions. In the short summer the men were encouraged to reclaim ground for smallholdings and cultivate gardens, and in the dark winter they had a library. In his study of the genesis of management, Sydney Pollard points to the importance attached to regimes which dominated the workers' lives, and Martin Bulmer quotes a claim by early industrialists that "A body of intelligent, well conducted, and sober men tends to prosperity".

Stirling's reforms may have been instigated by the directors, for when appointed to Leadhills he was given sets of "instructions" which were to be "considered and observed". The Company was no doubt mindful of the degree of social control achieved by the English Quaker companies, and Stirling's programme of paternal management had perhaps been anticipated by the Quakers at Wanlockhead. But their reign seems to have been an anonymous one, directed by a travelling "Court" and without a senior manager at the mines. Success at Leadhills owed everything to strong direction on the spot.

Stirling's rule evinced a benevolent concern for the welfare of his men, and on one occasion he postponed "turning superfluous workmen off" because the "living was dear". The lasting effect of his regime can be seen in the way Dorothy Wordsworth found a "decent" group of miners at Leadhills, whereas those George Borrow met in Wales were a "wild" lot.

A diary for the year 1745 gives an insight into the work of Matthew Wilson, a young man who was learning the business at Leadhills. Much of his time seems to have been spent chatting with others at the mines, keeping Stirling company, or reading. Indeed when he himself made a break-down of his week's time, he found he had only spent 25 hours on business in the Counting House. The tone of the diary suggests Wilson's own attitude to his work had that degree of casualness which Stirling sought to eradicate. However there is nothing in the diary to suggest any criticism of Wilson by Stirling himself.

There was much hard drinking. On one occasion Stirling instructed his clerk to entertain a party of visitors and threatened he would "need a new clerk" if any of them went home sober. Wilson himself records many evenings spent drinking with his superior, and one Sunday night they got through five bottles of strong ale and a bowl of "shrub" punch; leaving young Wilson "indisposed" for work the next day.

Drunkenness under Stirling's roof was one thing, but it was regarded as an "abominable vice" if the workforce indulged too freely, and one of Stirling's first reforms was to close the liquor shops in the village. The overseers might drink in private but were not to be seen setting a bad example by being drunk about the mines, and when Edward Whigham, another of Stirling's staff, was drunk at work the fact was noted in the Journal. Whigham's hard drinking may have endeared him to the miners for when he died in 1749 they took the day off to attend his funeral.

At the time Stirling took over, the men seem to have taken days off as they pleased and stopped work at Christmas, the New Year, and Fair days besides. After 1745 a tighter management meant the miners had to work on Christmas and the Fair days and efforts, with varying success, were made to ensure they worked on Newyear's day as well. Later in the century, the Kirk's Assembly moved to reduce the number of holidays in the country at large, but at Leadhills the men usually had days off for the Fast days at the two annual Communions and the occasional Thanksgiving. It was not until 1837 that they were given a holiday at New Year and a half holiday on each of the two Fair days.

An entry in the Diary demonstrates that, as well as being amenable to the work pattern, the men's attitude to their superiors was no less important. The management style was paternal so having the right demeanour was expected. Wilson refers to a miner who, after being accused of not paying the labourers working in his bargain, was discharged on the grounds he had treated the matter "indifferently", and exhibited a "haughty temper". Given a proper humility the miners might voice their views and be consulted about the daily running of the mines. Stirling was said to have "la grande manniere", but he, and his successor Archibald Stirling were perhaps the last agents at Leadhills to have a familiarity with the lives of the men.

The isolated situation of the villages, and the difficulty in obtaining skilled miners, meant the companies had to be concerned with their welfare. Lead mining was in any event an unhealthy occupation and by the 1740s a surgeon (doctor) was employed to attend to the men. Diet was seen as important and, with the sup-port of the Earl of Hopetoun, Stirling encouraged the reclaiming of the moorlands to make gardens, "kaleyards", and smallholdings where the villagers grew potatoes for their tables and hay for their cows.

In spite of the altitude and the severity of the weather some hundreds of acres were reclaimed over the ensuing years, making Leadhills a green place amid the bleak moors. The practice was followed at Wanlockhead and also at other British mines, for experience demonstrated that working a small holding not only made profitable use of leisure time but also augmented earnings and provided subsistence when work was slack. The smallholdings were also part of the social control for they gave the miners a territorial stake in the village and discouraged them from doing anything which could result in their being sacked and turned out.

Mining as a continuous industry at Leadhills and Wanlockhead spanned three centuries and those who came to mine in the late Middle Ages had to contend with the lawlessness of the times. Men taking ore to Newbattle Abbey in the thirteenth century were robbed, and violence was in any event common place. In 1590 a mine agent was "cruelly murdered" and the situation became so bad that an act was passed in 1597 requiring protection by the Crown forces for the miners, who would be identified by lead blazons, against the forays of the "broken men of the Borders".

South West Scotland was a stronghold of the Covenanters, and there were some among the miners. The rescue, in the Enterkin pass, of Covenanters who were being taken in 1684 to stand trial in Edinburgh is a part of the local history. In his definitive paper on the event, David Ford has found that those who ambushed the dragoons included a Leadhills' miner, Andrew Clark. Clark was later captured and was hanged in Edinburgh. He was only 19 years of age but he and the two companions executed with him recorded how they were "content to lay down our life with cheerfulness".

The community refused to be cowed for three years later the miners gave shelter to the Covenanters James Renwick and Alexander Sheilds while Renwick wrote a tract replying to "various accusations". He had been proscribed as a rebel, and in fact was captured the following year and executed.

The 1745 uprising briefly touched Leadhills, and Matthew Wilson's diary provides a significant comment. In November of that year three Highlanders from the Prince's army, riding up Glengonnar in the early morning, were seen as a threatening force for when news reached the village:-

Immediately all got out of bed and nothing was to be seen but people

carrying burthens of their moveables and hiding them in shafts and levels.

In fact the horsemen had not come to pillage and since Stirling had had Jacobite sympathies it seems that it was his sup-port they sought. Stirling himself was away, so, "missing their aim (the soldiers) left without offering the least insult", and when the army returned through the village on the 23rd December, the event seems to have passed without remark.

There was no love between the Highlanders and the Lowland peasants, particularly in the south west where a Highland regiment, the Highland Host, had used great brutality in dealing with the Covenanters. Stirling's family background must have put him among the Erastians who the Covenanters so passionately hated, but there is nothing in Wilson's diary to suggest Stirling's place in Leadhills was resented by the extremists.

Threats from without and technical problems within the mines gave a common purpose, encouraging solidarity between management and men; and the sort of social distinctions which later seemed so clear were, in any event, blurred. Even in the late eighteenth century, work in the mines can be seen as having the casual quality of medieval industry, and the miners did not necessarily regarded themselves as having any conflict of interest with their employers. Men and management identified with the business in hand, and all shared the hardships of the high moorlands and an insanitary lifestyle. There may have been an attempt at a strike at Leadhills in 1660, but a century later tight managerial control, coupled with a paternal concern for the welfare of the community, meant any protests were muted.

By the early eighteenth century there were little more than one hundred men at the Leadhills mines, but by 1742 the Earl of Hopetoun was employing 102 in his own works. Some of the other concerns were relatively small for at one time Anthony Tessington had only 30 men working for his partnership. By 1772 it was said the total employed at Leadhills was around 500, and the three companies working at Wanlockhead in the 1750s employed 350. But operations were small in British terms, for example the Beaumont Company employed more 1000 in their works in the Northern Pennines.

The lead mines there were the nearest in England and had a long association with their Scottish neighbours. William Blackett, who was involved with Wanlockhead in the 1670s, worked mines in Weardale; the Quakers who succeeded him had a mining empire centred on Alston, and which included Nenthead the highest town in England. The Scots Mines Company looked to the northern dales for technical expertise, and in 1909 the miners took an example of trade-unionism from their colleagues at Stanhope, County Durham.

By the end of the century the peak in employment had passed and the Scots Mines Company was employing around 200 men; producing about 1800 tons of ore of which a proportion was sold as "potters ore", galena of the highest purity and suitable for use by potteries and glass works. It commanded a premium of £4 to £5 but does not seem to have been a part of the production from Wanlockhead.

Ore was being smelted at Leadhills by the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and after 1690 the use of peat as fuel enabled output to be greatly increased. A century later there were as many as five smelt mills; described as the Scots Mines Company's High and Low mills, Mr Lothian's and Mr Sherriff's mills, and there was one by Bail Gill probably belonging to the Hopes.

There is usually silver in the lead ore, and in the sixteenth century argiferous lead was worked in many British mines only for the precious metal it contained. But gold was king, and its romance still attracts the amateur prospector. The precious metal once made Scotland's gold coins ; its Regalia; and fortunes besides. It could be washed from earth dug from "gold holes" on the moors, or from the "sands of the brookes"; which is where the enthusiast works his pan today. It was said that gold working became unprofitable on the Lowthers in the seventeenth century when wages rose over four pence (1.5p) a day. However, Sir John Erskine may have prospected on the Shortcleuch in the 1720s. In 1771 "good gold" was being got on the Roan Burn, and circa 1800 it was worked at Wanlockhead; both of which seem to have been commercial operations. The gold mining efforts of the Leadhills Silver-Lead Mining and Smelting Company in the nineteenth century will be recounted in a later chapter.

In 1796, the Scots Mines Company considered selling the manganese oxide found in some of the veins to the bleach works in Glasgow, but was put off by the high cost of transport. Copper was sought in Glenclach and found on the Shortcleuch in 1760. There is an reference to 9 tons of the ore, perhaps from the latter mine, being sold in London. At Wanlockhead, zinc blende, sphalerite, was worked along with the lead from about 1875; its output rising to 800 tons shortly before the mines closed. There are reports that both copper and blende were found in the deeper part of the Brow vein complex at Leadhills in the 1890s but no record of any commercial production.

The profitability of the lead mines was dependent on convenient and economic transport. The Romans built roads through Clydesdale, and there seems to have been bridle paths through Glengonnar and the Enterkin in the middle ages. By the late seventeenth century there was a cart track, maintained by the mining companies, from Wanlockhead, through Leadhills, to join the Edinburgh road at Abington. By 1780 the track down the Mennock had been sufficiently improved to enable carts from Sanquhar to bring coal for the steam engine on the Margaret mine at Wanlockhead, and a decade later the whole route was a turnpike with tolls at Leadhills and Wanlockhead, where coaches and carts were charged 4d (1.5p) per horse.

From the mid eighteenth century until 1906 only two concerns worked the mines at Wanlockhead, the Crauford partnership and then the Duke of Buccleuch, who had succeeded to the Queensberry title in 1810. At Leadhills there were at least ten operators prior to 1860, and more than half were English concerns. No doubt this led to problems with methods of business; for example the Scots Mines Company's overseers tried to cater for the English New year being on the 25th March, Lady Day, by such notations in their Journals as "5th January, 1739/40", and until 1745 Christmas day was the works holiday.

At both mines those entrepreneurs who "commanded sufficient capital to carry on large works" predominated. Exceptions were Alexander Telfer, the son of a "common miner", who took a lease at Wanlockhead in 1735 and who was able to employ more than two hundred men a decade later; and James Hunter, grocer and spirit merchant, who worked the mines at Snar, near Leadhills, in the 1830s, and who went on to challenge the might of the Scots Mines Company.

Most of these concerns were partnerships of mercantile interests and the only public companies to mine in the district took leases at Leadhills in 1878 and 1903.

James Stirling married Barbara Watson of Thirty Acres, near Stirling. They had one daughter who married her cousin Archibald Stirling, and he succeeded his uncle after the latter's death in 1770, taking over a well structured operation. Pig lead was selling at around £13 a ton in the 1770s but rose to £20 by 1787 and the final decades of the eighteenth century saw investment in the mines and work for all at Leadhills.

Steam pumping engines are a barometer of profitability for they were costly to purchase and expensive to run. The first was erected on the Margaret mine at Wanlockhead in 1778, and Alexander Popham bought a second hand engine to pump his mine at Threshy Grain, Leadhills, in 1786. These engines were manufactured by Boulton & Watt but in 1791 William Symington, inventor and steamboat pioneer, built one of his patent steam engines on the Bay Mine at Wanlockhead, and a year later the Scots Mines Company ordered another to pump the Humby vein.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the community at Leadhills could be regarded as prosperous in terms of its simple lifestyle. The companies too had a simple approach to the business of the mines. Rock was laboriously broken with hand tools, and much lead was lost in the dressing and smelting. But management was content with established practices and a slow pace; and the share holding partners were not preoccupied with the desire for immediate returns on their investment.