Chapter 3.

THE BUSINESS OF MINING.

For centuries the lead miner broke rock and ore with no power other than his strength and skill. His tools were picks and drills, hammers to clear the spurs; and hand barrows, and kibbles to move the ore and spoil. Operations were wholly manual and the emotive illustrations of medieval miners describe scenes that would have been familiar two hundred years later. By the early nineteenth century mechanisation had transformed the textile industry, but it was not until a century later that machinery became widely used underground in British mines.

The lead miners worked at the bargains they made with the mining companies and each partnership was divided into shifts, rotated each week. Writing of a visit to Leadhills in 1792, the traveller, Robert Heron, commented

"The labour of the miners is severe and unremitting.

Through night and day it is continued; one class

relieving another by turns .."

Explosives, first black powder and later dynamite, were used sparingly, for the miners had to purchase what they needed, and water, trickling through the rocks, always threatened success. Improved pumps allowed mines to be worked deeper, but the technological advance which increased a miner's output was the availability of alloy steels for picks and drills in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was not until the end of the century that mechanisation played an effective role and, in 1910, Mark Wyman, of the School of Mining, Colorado, claimed the significant advances had only been in the previous thirty years. During that time the air-powered drill made anyone a miner, but it was the first decade of this century before drills were in regular use at Leadhills. For the earlier period, the picture is one of manual toil at a pace not only influenced by the men themselves, but also by the weather and the seasons.

Working conditions were always arduous and could verge on the impossible; as when work on the Humby shaft had to be abandoned in 1794 because subterranean waters were "pouring from every quarter" upon the miners. Even in the toilsome eighteenth century, the lead miners only worked a nominal six hour shift, and although women and children worked long in the coal pits, few worked underground in British lead mines and none at Leadhills.

The early prospectors might find a vein on the evidence of the ribs of bright lead ore, galena, exposed in the rocks along the burns, or prospect for it with the ore pan, divining rod, and other techniques of the "mineral man". Outcrops could be worked by an open-cast, or rake, as was the great Susanna vein at one time, and where water could be ponded above the vein its sudden release opened the ground in a "hush" which exposed the ore and tore it from the rocks. No special skills were required to work an exposed vein but to get at the ore deep underground needed miners who could open a tunnel, variously known as an adit or level, from the surface and follow the line of minerals. When this had gone about 100 metres, a shaft was sunk to meet it for, before the advent of tub rails, it was easier to haul rock and ore up a shaft than move it along the level. So long as the lowest tunnel was above the valley floor any water drained along it keeping the mine fairly dry.

About seventy veins cross the district of Leadhills and Wanlockhead. All are nearly vertical, and all have only scattered lodes of lead ore within them. A Geological Survey of 1871 aptly commented - "the veins vary at every step, sometimes remarkably rich, sometimes the miners can drive for many fathoms without meeting any ore". Parts of the Susanna vein at Leadhills were indeed remarkably rich. Tradition has it that one knot, or belly, of ore was so wide that the miners cut a room within it, and visitors were taken inside to marvel at walls and ceiling of sparkling galena.

The medieval "mineral men" believed the ore "grew" in the veins, and this gave rise to the tradition of calling an ore field "the farm" and the lead "the crop", even in the mid nineteenth century the mines at Leadhills and Wanlockhead were still referred to being "farmed".

The country rock in the Lowther Hills is an Ordivician grey-wacke. Sometimes it is dense and contains bands of hard chert, sometimes it is fractured by earth movement. The fissures which allowed the minerals to accumulate followed faults which gave the pickmen a line of attack, for a fault could be opened to make a groove and the surrounding rock broken into it. Where no fault existed, the rock might be so fractured as to be easily worked. Otherwise a starting groove was made with a pick or, where the rock was dense and hard, resort was made to explosives placed in holes made with a jumper drill. One man held the drill while he or another struck it. Skilled miners could deliver 100 blows a minute, and drill a hole 12 inches deep in an hour in hard rock. It was filled with explosive, primed, and fired at the end of the shift so that the fumes might clear.

The tiny "coffin" levels in some English lead mines are not common at either Leadhills or Wanlockhead where most are about a metre wide .

Where the rock was kind, a level 2 metres high could be driven at the rate of 3 metres per week. But in hard rock a week's work might result in no more than a metre of progress, little more than a few centimetres per shift, and shaft sinking could be even slower. Fire setting, that is using a fire to heat and fracture the rock, was a very ancient method of mining hard ground. It was used in some English mines, particularly in open stopes, but there is no record it was ever used at Leadhills or Wanlockhead.

With luck, lead ore would be discovered along the vein, and it would be mined out to create a stope, a high cavity known locally as a roosting. Timber props called stemples were jammed between the walls both to prevent rock falls, and provide the "bunnings", the platforms which the miners made to get at the ore.

Ore mined from the stopes would be guided down chutes to the level, then moved on barrows to a shaft foot and hauled to the surface. Rails for wheeled tubs, tramways, were in use at Leadhills by 1827, but before this, and in exploratory works, the miners used barrows, or else box-sleds like one now in the museum at Wanlockhead. Ponies could be used in day levels, adits, and were taken down the Glencrieff shaft at Wanlockhead in 1916. But human locomotion was the norm. Moving spoil was always a handicap to production and, where ever possible the miners' rubbish was left in the mine, precariously piled in empty stopes.

Windlasses turned by two men, or winding gins turned by a horse or water-wheel, lifted material until the early nineteenth century when various hydraulic hoists were introduced. There was once a horse gin by the Wilson mine at Leadhills, and the base of another can be seen alongside the beam engine at Wanlockhead.

Until the 1830s the miners were wound up and down the shafts on the end of the rope. The practice was to put a leg through a loop, clutch the rope with one hand, and ward off the sides of the shaft with the other. Moving a miner by this means not only required the service of two others on the windlass, but was also prone to accident and in 1774 an overseer at Leadhills was killed when he "slipped from the rope". By 1841 ladders were being used in the deep shafts even though climbing them could add an hour to the men's working day for every 300 metres in depth.

Tunnels in dense rock will stand indefinitely, but stopes and levels in weak or loose ground have to be supported. Timber was used in on-going operations, but stone, often quarried at the surface and carried underground, provided more permanent support for tram ways and drainage adits in many British mines. At Leadhills and Wanlockhead timber, procured from the woods of Clydesdale and Nithsdale, was used in all situations. Fifty loads could be needed in a year, and it was common practice to salvage old supports. It was at best a frugal policy and rotting and collapsed timbering was a handicap to long term development.

There were no problems with inflammable gas in the lead mines, and candles were once the miners' only lights. They had the advantage that they could be fixed in a lump of clay and placed on the work-place to give all-round illumination, and the amount they burned was a measure of the time into a shift.

By the early nineteenth century the Leadhills miners used candles rated at 9 to the lb., about 1.75 oz (50 grams) each, and costing 8/- (40p) a stone. They were heavier than those used in English mines, where 16 to the lb. was the norm, and a miner might use 2 lbs. in a week. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the "duck", a tiny oil lamp shaped like a coffee pot and which could be hooked onto a hat, provided an alternative. But for those now accustomed to working in well lighted conditions, the problems of working by candle light in a large stope, or when setting up machinery underground, can hardly be imagined.

A partnership could always relight their candles from each other, but when the overseer descended alone into the Laverockhall workings in 1843, he recorded how his visit had to be abandoned because his candle had gone out and he was "unable to get light" his tinderbox being damp. Presumably he then had to make a hazardous journey back up the dark shaft.

A bell, one still hangs in Leadhills, was rung at 6.0 am to signal the first shift of the day. Until the early nineteenth century the miners mustered at the "rendezvous" so that they might assist each other when moving by rope in the shafts. The introduction of ladders gave a greater flexibility and shifts were changed at the minehead.

Little record remains of the clothes the miners wore underground. They must often have worked stripped to the waist, but in the eighteenth century they seem to have had hooded coats which were extended at the back into the "arse leather" as shown in medieval woodcuts. John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, who visited Leadhills in 1790, wrote that visitors were given such clothes for their protection, and he was told that Irish gypsies came to barter for the cast off garments. A list of the property left by a Wanlockhead overseer in 1777 shows he had a suit of "grove (mine) clothes" which consisted of a coat, breeches, stockings, waistcoat, and hat. By 1841 the miners still wore "clothes (made) expressly for the purpose in the coarsest white woollen cloth", and had "thick clogs" to protect their feet from the often wet ground in the mine. It may be remarked that William Howitt, the Victorian writer, was given what he called a "sort of flannel frock" for protection when he visited a coal pit in Derbyshire.

Safety helmets are a recent innovation and the "old men", as the miners of previous ages were called, wore caps, or the felt hats favoured by the Cornish miner, well stuffed with hay. The lack of adequate head protection was a potential for worse injury. In December 1882, a Wanlockhead miner, Thomas Russell, was stunned by a falling stone and then had his back broken by being struck by a rock as he lay on the ground.

The provision of distinct "grove clothes" seems to have ceased at Leadhills by the mid nineteenth century and by its end photographs show miners wearing the ubiquitous waistcoat, heavy trousers, and tweed caps of all labouring men.

It could be warm beneath the ground, but in winter the journey to the more distant mines must have been an arduous one. Some sort of changing-room was essential, and in 1744 the overseer recorded how he was arranging to have a "cottage" built at Rispencleuch where the men could leave their out-door clothes. In February 1794 some miners were "imprisoned" by a blizzard, perhaps at the same place. One suffered frostbite as a result and was awarded 16/- (80p) compensation.

The skills of the collier were seen as different from lead mining, but in 1839, the overseer for the Leadhills Mining Company left to take a position as grieve in the Bannockburn colliery, and Harrison Bell, who came to Leadhills as washing master about the same time, had once worked in a Durham coal pit. The 1851 census for Leadhills included four men recorded as "coal miners". They could have come from local collieries, or, since many of the lead miners were out of work at the time, they might have turned to coal mining for there is record of men going to the pits at Dalmellington and Sanquhar.

Mining produced the lead ores, galena and cruesite; to produce the metal these had to be prepared and smelted. The output from each bargain was sorted and the ore,"the bouse", set aside from the "dead heap waste". The best galena, in particular that with a foliated structure, could be sold as "potters" ore, and clean, "blue", ore could go direct to the smelt mill. The "grey ore", cruesite, was not a primary mineral but some was raised in Susanna in the mid eighteenth century and mining it was regarded as being "unhealthy" work.

The output from the mine was measured in bings, and at Leadhills and Wanlockhead a bing amounted to about 90 stones Avoirdupois. Matthew Wilson records how he and Stirling discussed the difference between the measure of their bing and that at the English mines, and noted that it was larger in a ratio of 490 to 684. The fact that Scots therefore worked much harder for their bings seems to have gone unremarked.

The bings of raw ore had to be dressed for smelting, and until the early nineteenth century, all the dressing, i.e the washing and preparation of the ore, was by hand. Ore which was mixed with stones and clay had to be washed by stirring it in water running through a trough, or buddle. This was set on a slope so that the lighter material would be carried away leaving the ore behind. Where ore was intimately trapped among other minerals, the whole was broken and crushed by being "bucked" or "knocked", and the particles were then put in a sieve and agitated in a tub of water, where the heavy ore sank to a distinct layer. Most of the work on the dressing floor was done by boys, some as young as eight years, who worked to the direction of the "master". Some broke the ore, others stirred material in the buddles, and the older ones, or the men, worked the heavy sieves.

Ore from the "adventure" bargains the miners worked at their own expense might be dressed on ad hoc, washing floors by the mines. Specialist washers among the men dealt with the residues from the various processes. As well as "the dead-heap wastes" these comprised the "1st and 2nd wastes", and "the wastes that were carried into the burn".

The production of fines was a part of the washing process, and ore which was reduced to a fine powder, "slimes", was settled out in shallow tanks and then sintered, "roasted", before smelting. Some of the ore obtained in this way was of poor quality, and it was not unusual to find that bargains required that the ore dressers themselves paid for the smelting.

In the late sixteenth century, the Hopes had a wind-driven mill at Leith for "grinding and refining" potters ore, but that for smelting was prepared at the mines. The recovery of ore from the wastes provided employment, but all manual dressing was inefficient, and by the nineteenth century crushers and various forms of mechanical buddles, all driven by water wheels, were in use in Britain. By 1742 a stamp mill was in use at Leadhills, and a century later there was a roller crusher, and a machine to "jolt" the sieves in tubs of water. The mechanisation of the washing, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, introduced an element of factory-like production into the mining process.

A painting by David Allan, dated 1780, suggests the Leadhills' washers worked in open sheds, but in reality most of the dressing was done out of doors. Winter frosts could put a stop to washing in any event, and the need to maximise production meant the washer boys worked long hours in the summer months.

The sites of old dressing floors can still be seen in the patches of bare and sterile ground along Glengonnar and Wanlock and one on Snar Water points to more distant operations.

The dressed ore was smelted to produce bars weighing 8 to 8.25 stones Amsterdam measure, about 64 Kg. The use of the so called Amsterdam measure reflected the dominance of the continental trade and the weight continued in use at Leadhills until 1835 when the stone became 14 lbs. avoirdupois. The old ton was 136.25 stones Amsterdam, about 2000 lbs., and the use of such measures means old records must be interpreted with caution.

Smelting involves a complex chemical process, since the sulphur must first be removed by oxidisation. The early furnaces were simple affairs called "bole hearths", and were sited on windy hillsides. Smelting left a cake of lead at the bottom and this was then re-melted to remove the dross. Improved furnaces were developed on the Continent in the medieval period, and by the late seventeenth century the hearths at both Leadhills and Wanlockhead were being blown with bellows. In the century which followed the ore hearth became more sophisticated in construction, and another to refine the slags was added to the mill.

Smelting was an operation requiring not only skill on the part of the smelter, but also his care and integrity if optimum results were to be achieved. A bargain made in 1743 stipulated, "if they smelt ill they shall forfeit this bargain"; but it was difficult to evaluate the quality of the cast bars a smelter produced. The smelters were also in trouble if they damaged the bellows. The leather bellows were easily burned and in 1807 two cast iron cylinders were bought from Carron Company of Falkirk for a blowing engine for the Leadhills smelter.

An alternative to the ore hearth was the enclosed reverberatory, or air, furnace such as was used for other metallurgical processes. A high chimney induced sufficient draught, so there was no need for an expensive waterwheel and bellows. Reverberatory furnaces were tried at both mining grounds; before moving to Leadhills James Stirling visited Chester to "view their manner of working"; but they were not seen as suited to local conditions.

It was a finding with which the French metallurgist, Gabriel Jars, disagreed when he visited Leadhills in 1766. He thought the reverberatory furnaces there must have been worked "very ineptly", and criticised the whole operation of washing and smelting. On the other hand Thomas Pennant, who visited the mines a few years later, observed that 70 lbs (32 kg) of lead could be obtained from 112 lbs (51 kg) of ore, a recovery of 62.5%, which would have been an exceptionally good result at that time.

The smelting hearths worked intermittently since too hot a fire meant much lead was lost in the fume. The hearths were fuelled with peat, cut from the moors and preferably dried for two summers, and as many as 6000 loads might been needed in a single year. Recovering lead from the slag needed a hotter fire so the slag hearth used forge cinders: "smithy culm". The cinders and the lime used as a flux had brought from distant forges and kilns.

Silver was obtained by melting and remelting the lead to refine a concentrate which was then oxidised to leave the silver, valued at about 5/4 (27p) an ounce in the 1820s. Until the mid nineteenth century, only ores capable of producing at least 8 oz of silver per ton of lead could be worked economically, and only at Wanlockhead was the ore sufficiently rich to justify carrying out the complete process at the mines. Improvements in refining in the nineteenth century extended the recovery to leaner ores, but Wanlockhead had a head start, and at Leadhills bars deemed to be silver-rich were sent to Tyneside to recover the precious metal.

A great deal of lead was lost in the slag and fume from the early hearths , and technical improvements meant old slags and residues could be profitably re-worked. Long flues to recover lead from the fumes were a technical advance in the nineteenth century, and after the Leadhills smelter was moved to Waterhead in 1806, flues were added to the hearths.

There are no traces of the early smelters at Leadhills and little remains of that at Waterhead, but at Wanlockhead part of the eighteenth century smelter at Pates Knowes has been re-build, and the lines of a flue complex that included condensing chambers can still be seen above the ruins of the Meadowfoot smelter complex . The fume dust could contain 10% of arsenic, so removing it was a hazardous operation, and eventually the dust was sluiced out by turning water down the flues.

Dressing and smelting were the major causes of pollution. In the 1780s the minister at Leadhills wrote that "arsenic, sulphur, and zinc poisons the water", and it was later remarked that the fume from the smelter chimneys made the grass "sweet", and was not only a hazard to domestic animals but also to wild creatures.

Moving lead could be nearly as troublesome as getting it out of the ground, and in 1768 ore from the outlying Pennine mines was carried by pack horses "each with two pokes (containing) one hundred weight of ore". Pack horses may once have carried ore down Glengonnar, but by the early eighteenth century carts took the smelted lead to Leith, and the roads to the port were said to have been "more carefully repaired than might otherwise have happened". However, the carts were hired from the farmers en route, leading to a situation where, it was claimed, they "impose on the (mining) companies in the carrying of lead".

Records from 1789 show the carts themselves usually measured 4 ft to 4.1/2 ft by 3 ft wide, and five bars was a normal load. The cost to Leith was 30/-(£1.5) a load, and there was a further charge of £3 in £100 for commission and shipping. Biggar, or sometimes Douglas Mill, were the principal staging posts, and by the 1770s the cartage from Leadhills to the former was 10/-(50p) a load and, in the 1840s, transport to Douglas Mill was rated at 4 pence (2p) per bar. The bars in transit were left at the road side, "their weight being their security".

Professor Smout finds that the lead carts made about 4000 journeys a year in the 1740s; each carried over 85 Km. but the journey was made in several stages. Scant record has come to light of the considerable organisation required, and the absence of reference in the Mine Journals suggests the carting contracts were made directly by the agent. Whatever its arrangement, this considerable movement of carts not only greatly alleviated the isolation of the two villages but also, as Robert Heron pointed out in 1792, it "signally contributed to the improvement of the whole countryside"; and in 1835 it was remarked that the farmers in Dolphinton paid their rents by "driving lead to Leith".

To begin with most of the exported lead seems to have been shipped from Leith, but some also went from Dumfries and Glasgow, and by the mid nineteenth century the rail links with Abington and Sanquhar offered access to alternative markets. The railway not only broke the monopoly of the Forth merchants but also meant many farmers were deprived of lucrative business.

There was an attempt to make small shot at Leadhills in the 1830s, probably by using an old shaft as a shot-pit for a fall of at least 55 metres was required, but no other secondary manufacture seems to have been attempted at the mines.

A smelt mill could involve considerable capital outlay, but so long as a vein could be mined above the water table expenditure could bring an immediate return. Work in the deeper ore bodies meant there could be problems with ventilation and with water. When Arthur Hatchett visited Leadhills in 1796, he was told the workings in Susanna vein were 167 fathoms, 300 metres, deep, and by the early nineteenth century the shaft on Brow vein at Minehill was around 240 metres. It was a considerable depth, but by that time some Cornish miners had sunk their workings over 550 metres.

Changes in atmospheric pressure will pump air in and out of mines and caves, but the exertions of the miners, the fumes from their candles and, in particular, the use of explosives, all created problems with ventilation. The shafts which connected the levels and stopes with the surface or each other provided a circulation of air, but there are many references in the mining records to "work going slowly as the air is so bad the candles will scare burn." Where oxygen was deficient a candle might burn if it was inclined, and the degree was a measure of the foulness of the air.

A contrivance used to ventilate deep workings was the "sucking water blast" or trompe, and there were two at Leadhills in 1782, designed by Stirling himself for he presented a paper about them to the Royal Society. They were no more than pipes placed in a shaft and down which a stream of water fell, carrying air with it. The water escaped along the adit and the air could be conveyed along the workings by wooden ducts or channels -sollars- in the floor. It was a simple device but the engineer John Rennie was so impressed by the application at Leadhills that he made a sketch of "Mr Stirling's Ventilating Engine" in one of his note books.

Bad air might not necessarily prevent the men working but, as with a leaking ship, if the water was not pumped out then the success of the whole operation was in jeopardy. Hand pumps were a ubiquitous method of lifting water and were used through the centuries. The Earl of Hopetoun was employing "20 water men" in 1742, and about the same time Alexander Telfer had "Near 80 men constantly employed, day and night, in drawing water" at Wanlockhead.

The notion of men pumping in the darkness of a mine has an emotive quality, but it had a practical application where small quantities had to be raised to no great height. Record of a pumping trial, made at Leadhills by James Watt in 1770, shows a "pumper" would lift about 600 gallons (2750 litres) an hour but would have to "stop frequently to draw breath". The practice continued until the end of the last century when portable pumps, driven by compressed air or electric power, became available.

Hand pumps might serve in summer time or when making a trial, but some form of mechanical power was needed for any major operation. Windmills were used on various Scottish collieries and Anthony Tessington tried one on Mine Hill in 1767. But the most satisfactory device, and one which was used into the present century, was the bob gin, an engine comprising a water-wheel driving pumps via cranks and beams. It not only needed investment in the machinery and cast iron pumps and pipes, but also in digging leats, lades as they were known in Scotland, to bring water to the wheel. However, unlike steam engines, water wheels could be left to run without close supervision, a notion much in keeping with the way the mines were managed.

The Quaker Company built a bob gin, one of the first in Scotland, at Wanlockhead circa 1710, and at Leadhills there was one on the Meadowhead mine and others at Broadfloors and Backraik. The Scots Mines Company acquired the Meadowhead engine in 1740, and they built others underground, so nearer the pumps, in the Susanna mine.

The arrangement and construction of pumping machinery demanded considerable engineering skills. In January 1836 the overseer recorded he was arranging for repairs to the wheel of "Symington's Engine" in Susanna, so one had been built by a member of that family of engineers, perhaps the inventor himself. All the wheels at Leadhills were powered by lengthy leats from the Shortcleuch Burn. Their routes, and those of the pipelines that succeeded them, can still be traced around the hillsides.

Alternatives to the bob gins were water-balance devices. One which needed little attention was the water bucket beam engine and an example can still be seen at Wanlockhead. It was powered by a container of water which, by alternatively filling and emptying, moved the beam and worked a small pump in the mine. Another balance device was known as a "Tom and Jerry". Instead of a beam it a large pulley and over it a rope with buckets on either end. One bucket was filled with water and it descended a shaft to the drainage adit, drawing up water or ore from far below. The Tom and Jerry had the advantage that it could be easily arranged, but one built on the Raik vein at Leadhills needed three men to keep it working continuously.

Water wheels and balances were largely constructed of wood and could be made at the mines. The early pumps had wooden barrels, but by the eighteenth century cast iron was a superior alternative. In 1771 pumps for Leadhills were being brought from London foundries, but around that time castings from Carron of Falkirk were a local alternative.

In spite of the high rainfall in the district, the mines at Leadhills and Wanlockhead were ill-served with a constant supply of surface water. As a Wanlockhead overseer put it "In winter the great rains so fill the mines the pumps cannot cope, while in summer the day water is so scarce the wheels will not turn". Leats from the head of the Shortcleuch burn provided the main supply for the Leadhills mines; but there were others on Laverockhall, and "Mr Bulmer's water" crossed the moors near Bailgill. Research shows the Shortcleuch leats had an average gradient of 1/150 to 1/200, steeper than many in England, but a fast flow may have been needed to reduce the possibility- of freezing.

Wanlockhead was less fortunate in its topography, and to enable distant streams to be used, Gilbert Meason had a water level driven under the 'Hass to capture water from the Mennock streams for the pumping engines on the Straitsteps mine. Work on it began in 1764 and it took 11 years to complete the 1.15 KM. Leats were carried along the hillsides to augment the supply and later another tunnel brought additional water from Glenclach.

Given a lack of surface water for driving pumps, steam engines might be used. In 1778 Gilbert Meason purchased what was the second Watt engine to work in Scotland, but it took the Englishman, Alexander Popham to pioneer the first steam engine at Leadhills.

The Watt engines came from the Soho works in Birmingham, and in addition to the purchase price, Watt and his partner insisted on annual premium payments. The engine Popham bought in 1786 was second hand and had originally pumped the White Grit mine in Shropshire. Even so there was still a premium and Popham contrived to pay this, like his mine tack, in lead bars. In addition to the costs in premiums and fuel, technical problems with Watt's engines demonstrated the difficulties in the erection and maintenance of what was, at that time, a complex piece of machinery. Encouraged by a quarrel between Meason and Watt, William Symington set out to achieve a simpler design, and the parts for the engines he built on the Bay and Humby mines were made by Carron Company.

Moving engine parts into place was a huge undertaking, and the men of the Scots Mines Company turned out to get the cylinder for the Humby engine up to the mine through deep snow in January 1793. Their "zeal and activity" earned them an extra days wages.

Steam engines needed water for their condensers, and Popham's engine on Minehill worked a second pump for this purpose. The expense of carrying coal to the moorland villages tied steam pumping to profitable operations. But it is doubtful if Symington's engine on the Humby mine repaid the investment since subterranean springs meant the shaft did not reach the planned depth.

A century later the oil engine provided a convenient source of power. There were at least two at Wanlockhead and in 1909 a Crossley engine drove an air compressor at Leadhills.

Pumping engines built on the surface needed long rods to connect them to the pumps far below. Having the engine underground, so as to be close to the pump, offered many advantages and, first water wheels, and in the nineteenth century steam engines, were placed in the mine. The former had a particular disadvantage in that they were unable to use the high heads of water available via the mine shafts. A more satisfactory alternative was the underground water-pressure engine, a reciprocating machine something like a steam engine but worked by the pressure of a column of water. One, built by Dean & Co of Hexham, was installed at Wanlockhead in 1832, and another from the same engineer was erected on the Belltrees shaft at Leadhills in 1837. The piping had to be well joined to stand the high pressure required and hundreds of bolts for the pipework flanges were screwed at the mine workshop for 1/- (5p) a dozen.

An alternative to pumping was to drive a drainage adit, known as a "sough" in England, to cut the vein deeper than the existing workings. Such an adit could take many years to drive at enormous expense, but if ore was found en route, then part of the cost might be defrayed. At Leadhills an early cross cut known as Poutshiel was driven to Susanna, and was then continued along the adjacent veins. It was superseded by Gripps Level which was begun by Earl of Hopetoun's miners in 1768. (Although essentially adits, Poutshiel and Gripps were always referred to as levels.) It too was intended to drain the valuable Susanna mine as well as Portobello and Glennery Scar, and the Scots Mines Company took it over in 1772. In 1790 the miners cut into a rich body of ore in the Humby vein, and then went on to Glennery Scar and reached the Susanna vein in 1795. They had taken 23 years to drive about 1.5 Km., a measure of the slow progress made with hand tools and gunpowder in forcing a way through hard rock. The adit was gradually continued in the century which followed until it drained the entire ore field through an estimated 8 Km. of tunnels. This was also eclipsed in Cornwall where the Poldice adit eventually extended more than 40 Km. and drained 50 mines.

At Wanlockhead the Quakers began an adit in 1710 which was driven up the valley to cut the mines, and was perhaps the first true drainage adit in the area. Later, an adit called Milligan’s drained the Straitsteps, Bay, and Beltongrain mines and, to the south, the Glencrieff Level drained those works.

The leats and drainage adits were part of an essential infra-structure, and it was a requirement of every lessee to maintain the former and continue the latter. In 1915 an ambitious project was proposed for de-watering both the Wanlockhead and Leadhills mines through levels 10 Km. long, driven from a point near Enterkinfoot to intersect the workings at about 300 metres below the surface. It was hoped a co-operative venture would have received Government backing and when this was not forth-coming the scheme was dropped.

The water flowing from an adit was a source of power unaffected by summer droughts or winter frosts, and Arkwright built his first mill at Comford in Derbyshire so as to utilise the constant supply drained from the adjacent lead mines. This need for a regular supply of water was also the reason why the smelt mills at both Leadhills and Wanlockhead were eventually moved away from the villages, the one using water from Gripps level, the other taking water via a leat from Glencrieff. That the pollution created by the noxious fume from their chimneys were also removed was in reality a happy coincidence.

There are few references to the investment needed to extract ore and smelt lead in the eighteenth century, and the figures which are available have to be interpreted with caution. The Quaker Company spent £15000 on mines, pumps, and the smelt mill, over the first nine years of their operations at Wanlockhead. It is not known what investment was made in smelt mills at Leadhills, but Raistrick quotes £900 for building a three hearth mill at Nenthead in 1738. Downs-Rose finds that £2009-14s was spent driving the Mennock Hass water level between 1763 and 1768, during which the miners cut 471 fathoms, 860 metres. So in this instance the cost was £2.3 per metre. Levels could be driven on the vein and ore immediately produced, but the mills needed to smelt it must always have been a major outlay.

Steam engines were not only enormously expensive, but there was the annual premium as well. In 1791 James Watt quoted for an engine with a 53 inch cylinder for the Humby mine. The cylinder and gear would cost £900, the boiler £220, and timber for the beam etc. £250. In all £1370, a figure which did not include "items that could be obtained locally", or the engine house and foundations. The total could well have been over £2000, and in addition Watt looked for an annual premium of £250. In the event the Scots Mines Company decided that one of William Symington's engines, supplied by Carron Company, would be "the most proper" to pump the mine. The castings for the engine and pumps cost £944-3-0 and it was set to work in 1793.

Blowing engines for the smelt mills and pumping engines for the mines made the major demands for power, but, overall, the energy requirements in the eighteenth century were very small and manual working was the norm. Months could be spent laboriously erecting pumping machinery, and it was accepted that driving a crosscut or a drainage adit would take years.

A slow pace might be accepted in the mines, but their administration could be be-devilled by the problems of slow communications. Bargain working relieved a mining company of much of the day to day management, for it left the business of mining with the men themselves. But operations managed by English companies needed direction overall. The Quakers were among the first to recognise the need for an administrative structure which would deal with the sort of casual and haphazard mining which bargain working encouraged. They build an organisation to manage enterprises spread all over Britain, but these were too far flung, and by the mid century their efforts were flagging and their mines at Wanlockhead declined.

At Leadhills, James Stirling lived by the mines and managed his men with a "master miner", a couple of overseers and a clerk. In their instructions to him, the directors of the Scots Mines Company emphasised the importance of a good clerk who would devote his whole attention to their business.

As with many concerns, the Scots Mines Company's office was in the manager's house. Records show the books the Company once kept included: Debt Books, Daywage Books, Bar-lead Books, Cash Books, and General Accounts, as well as the Journals and Bargain books which still survive. The work-shops and stores were nearby, and by the late nineteenth century the whole had expanded into a complex of buildings around a central yard, and with a water turbine to power the machines. Their remains were completely demolished in 1984 but one of the workshops at Wanlockhead is now part of the Museum.

The overseers managed the daily supervision of the operations at Leadhills and Wanlockhead. The term was not widely used but the London Lead Company had local managers known as "overmen" in the nineteenth century. Other Pennine mines had "inspectors" but many lead mines adopted the Cornish system of a hierarchy of "captains".

Management was expected to be kept aware of all that was happening in the works. In Weardale the inspectors had to inform the agent of "all complaints and neglects", and at Leadhills, Matthew Wilson was told by Stirling that he was "to take notice of everything and make him acquainted with every irregularity". In 1753 it was required that the agent at Wanlockhead should himself visit the mines at least once a week. But such authority was not to be retrospective, and when the two Borrons accused their over-seer of "improperly" setting bargains at Wanlockhead in 1834, it was pointed out that, if this was the indeed case, then "it recoiled with double effect upon them, they not having had dis-covered it sooner".

In his study of Scottish coal mining, Baron Duckham points to the problems which that industry had in finding men of the right calibre to run the pits, and to the need to recruit English "Viewers". The situation at the leadmines in the eighteenth century was very similar, and even a century later the Duke of Breadalbane was employing German mining engineers at Tyndrum.

By the late eighteenth century a hierarchy of local men had been established at Leadhills and Wanlockhead, with Newbiggings and Weirs at the former and the Stewarts at the latter. Most came up through the ranks. James Stewart had been "a common miner" at Wanlockhead prior to his appointment as overseer at Leadhills in 1831, and Thomas Weir, who succeeded him, had been an engineer. Matthew Wilson, under-manager at Leadhills in 1745, may have had no technical background for he records in his diary how he had been practising surveying with a "dyall". He spend much time observing the work of the smelters and ore washers, but does not seem to have spent any time underground with the miners.

Technical direction was left to the overseers but there was little forward planning or any attempt to anticipate the danger in unsafe workings. On the whole, the overseers seem to have done little more than keep the men busy, measure and record the bargains, and account for the ore and lead produced. They were also expected to be able to survey correctly, and James Stewart, was sacked from Leadhills in 1834 when a crosscut was found to be 20 fathoms off course.

The extent to which the overseers could enforce discipline is uncertain. It was Stirling who gave orders to discharge the Leadhills miner who had been accused of not paying his labourers, and Gilbert Meason himself sacked men who were absent from work at Wanlockhead.

There is little evidence of exploratory surveys to measure the location and potential of ore bodies. It was the colour of the vein, the nature and "appetite" of the "vein stuff" within it, and, in particular, the presence or otherwise of water, that lured the lead miner on or made him turn aside to try elsewhere. Even in 1894 the chairman of the Leadhills Silver Lead Mining & Smelting Company encouraged shareholders with the remark "where you have water in the forehead, it is a sure sign of a productive lode".