The 1870 Watt Whim House at The Magpie Mine
Location: The 1870 Watt Whim House Ruin, The Magpie Mine, Sheldon, Derbyshire, England, UK
Date of Photograph: pm 15 November 2003
OS Grid Reference: SK171681
Co-ordinates:53:12:37N: 1:44:41W
Elevation: 317 meters
This late component of a complex, evolutionary site was built to house a steam winding engine, set at right angles to the main cables’ azimuth further East. It sits surrounded by mine spoil heaps amidst sheep pastures South of Sheldon village.
The Magpie Mine is the most complete, exemplary and evocative of Britain’s remaining upland mining monuments outwith Cornwall. It is also the most photographed, presenting in all lights and weathers a wistful and melancholy White Peak beauty, instantly appealing to laymen as well as specialists.
The mine was worked for lead and latterly also zinc. The lead is not commercially argentiferous and negligible spar was raised at this site. Working commenced sometime in the seventeenth century and ceased in 1958. The Mining Records Office logged some 995.4 short tons of galena brought to grass between 1872 and 1911, together with 25 tons of blende in 1883. The Magpie Mine is on The King’s Field.
A magpie is a saprophagous corvine bird, about 0.3 meters in span, with lovely black and white plumage that diffracts a bottle-green sheen in sunlight. It is endemic to Mercia and in Saxon folklore is a bird of ill omen.
The Magpie Mine, visible for miles on a deserted skyline, is the site of several murders and reputedly cursed and haunted. At any event, despite its long history, it has been one of the least prolific of Derbyshire’s great mines, bankrupting all who nicked its stowes.
Romantic and quintessentially English, approached in declining light the scenic group presents a mysterious, even lurid, aspect rather reminiscent of the painted tableau on old-fashioned fairground ghost train rides, or perhaps pre-war Hollywood backdrops of the blasted heaths of Britain.
From the standpoints of the archaeologist, the field lecturer, and the landscape artist, the Magpie is veritably the mine that has everything.
The surface assemblage examples nearly every feature of Georgian and Victorian metal mining. Besides the whim house is a ruinous Cornish pumping engine house with a lean-to boiler house and Cornish chimney, erected by the innovating agent John Taylor in 1867; a further nineteenth-century winding house, roofed complete with drum and rusting cables; a corrugated-iron post-war diesel winding shed ( one of three Listed metal buildings in the UK ); a 1950’s steel headstock complete with cable and cage; a complete Agent’s House with detached privy and attached Smithy; a complete 1840 square dry-stone winder chimney with ruinous horizontal flue; a powder house; a reconstructed horse whim; a belland yard; slime pits; a crushing circle; a reservoir and numerous heaps and ancillary buildings. Attentive students, who nevertheless wander slightly away, will discern a rotting jigger, a length of cast-iron snore, two crushing stones, a ruined shaft coe and a number of cast-iron domestic baths.
Below, a major sough was driven between 1873 and 1881, where pneumatic jackhammers and dynamite were used for the first time in Derbyshire. During his agency of the 1860’s, Cornishman John Taylor introduced cast-steel borers, steel cable and safety helmets.
The Founder Shaft is seventeenth-century and the currently-mounted Main Engine Shaft was sunk to 728 feet in 1823. Service was by road throughout the mine’s working life. The mine, sited at the intersection of the Butts, Bole and Shuttlebark veins was last worked in 1958 by New Zealander firm Waiki Limited: They lost £80,000. In 1962 The Magpie Mine was purchased by The Peak District Mines Historical Society Limited and is a Scheduled Ancient Monument. There is unrestricted pedestrian access.