That the copper mines were worked by the Romans and the Saxons is only a surmise. Dr. A. C. Gibson, F.S.A., writing in 1866, said:—"Recent operations have from time to time disclosed old workings which have obviously been made at a very early period, by the primitive method of lighting great fires upon the veins containing ore and, when sufficiently heated, pouring cold water upon the rock, and so, by the sudden abstraction of caloric, rending, cracking and making a circumscribed portion workable by the rude implements then in use, specimens of which are still found occasionally in the very ancient parts of the mines, especially small quadrangular wedges perforated for the reception of a handle."

The mines of Cumberland were worked throughout the Middle Ages, and it is not impossible that these rich veins in the Coniston Fells were tried for ore; but we have no proof of the local assertion that they have been worked continuously since the days of the Romans. On the contrary, there seem to have been only two periods, of about a century each, during which mining was actively pushed. In the time of Queen Elizabeth we reach firm ground of history.

In 1561 a company was formed by several lords and London merchants to work the minerals of the kingdom under a patent from the Crown. They invited two German mining experts, Thomas Thurland and Daniel Hechstetter, who coming to England opened mines, and built smelting works at Keswick in 1565; and in spite of strong local opposition soon made a great success. (Their proceedings are described in a paper by J. Fisher Crosthwaite, F.S.A., in Transactions of the now defunct Cumberland Association, viii.)

They also took over the Coniston mines, and worked them with energy and profit. They opened out no less than nine new workings beside the old mine—the New or White Work, Tongue Brow (in Front of Kernel Crag), Thurlhead, Hencrag, Semy Work, Brimfell, Gray Crag, the Wide Work, and the Three Kings in Tilberthwaite; employing about 140 men. The ore was raised at a cost of 2s. 6d. to 8s. a kibble, each kibble being about a horse load, for it was carried on pack-horses to Keswick for smelting. To avoid this they proposed building a smelting house at Coniston, which was, they said, well supplied with wood and peat, and an iron forge was already there. It would be easy to boat the manufactured copper down the water, and ship it at Penny Bridge.

But in the civil wars the Corporation of "Governors, Assistants, and Commonalty of the Mines Royal" came to an end. The Parliament soldiers wrecked the works at Keswick, and operations at Coniston were stopped.

After the civil wars, Sir Daniel Fleming was several times approached on the subject of reopening the mines. He seems to have been willing. He notes on January 21st, 1658, "given unto the miller of Conistone for going along with me on to the fell, 1s.;" and on March 22nd, "given to Parce Corratts when hee came to looke at the blacke lead mine at Conistone, 2/6." This turned out a disappointment, for on May 2nd, 1665, he says, "given unto a Newlands man who came to look at the supposed wadd-mine at Coniston, 5/-." And so nothing seems to have been done.

In 1684 Roger Fleming at the Hall sent his brother, Sir Daniel, a report of the mines "which were first wrought by the Dutchmen" (Keswick Germans) and others discovered more recently. Only three of the old workmen were living, but from their evidence we get the details given above. On May 25th, 1686, John Blackwall wrote from Patterdale to Sir Daniel that he had examined the ground at Coniston and studied the evidence of the three old miners, and was prepared with a company to open the mines, if they could agree upon terms.

Sir Daniel died in 1701; and the Rev. Thomas Robinson's Natural History of Cumberland, &c., published in 1709, mentions that copper had been formerly got at Cunningston, by the Germans, and taken to Keswick, but says nothing about a revival of the industry. It was, however, prosecuted in a small way throughout the eighteenth century. A Company of Miners at Ulpha is mentioned in George Bownass' account for tools in 1772. West says, in 1774, merely, "the fells of Coniston have produced great quantities of copper ore," nothing of mining in his time; and the smith's accounts from 1770 to 1774 do not mention it. There must have been a revival shortly afterwards. Captain Budworth, about 1790, tells the story of the devil and the miner, retold by Dr. Gibson from local tradition, to the effect that Simon the miner found a paying vein in the crag—it is called Simon Nick to this day, and the cleft he made is seen yet on the left hand as you go up to Leverswater; but one night at the Black Bull he boasted of his luck, and said the fairies, or the devil, were his partners, upon which he found no more copper, and lost his life soon after in blasting.

In 1802 the mines were going. In 1820 the Lonsdale Magazine says that they had been worked at intervals for many centuries, and had lately been in the hands of "spirited adventurers," but were then discontinued.

About 1835 a new era of prosperity began, in which Mr. John Barratt became the leader. His skill and energy brought about such success that in 1849 they employed 400 men, and yielded 250 tons of ore monthly. In 1855 the monthly wage list amounted to £2,000. In 1866 Dr. Gibson said:—"For many years their shipments averaged 300 tons per month, and employed from five to six hundred people," but "the number of hands employed do not now exceed two hundred."

Up to this time the ore had been boated down the lake, and carted to Greenodd. Now the Coppermining Company promoted a railway connecting Coniston with Broughton and the Furness line. It was a separate concern when it was opened in 1859, but absorbed into the Furness system in 1862.

The mines, as they were in his days, are described at length by Dr. Gibson in The Old Man, or Ravings and Ramblings around Conistone. Alexander Craig Gibson, M.R.C.S., F.S.A., was born at Harrington, 1813, the son of a ship's captain, who died early. He was taken by his mother to her home at Lockerbie, and brought up there; afterwards apprenticed to a surgeon at Whitehaven. In 1844 he came to Coniston as medical officer to the mining company, and lived for seven years at Yewdale Bridge, where he wrote his "Ravings and Ramblings" as articles for the Kendal Mercury, afterwards collected into a volume, and subsequently republished with considerable revision. He left Coniston in January, 1851, and remained at Hawkshead for some years; then removed southward, and finally settled at Bebington in Cheshire, where he died in 1874. A collection of sketches in prose and verse, The Folk-speech of Cumberland, &c. (Coward, Carlisle, 1869; ed. ii., 1872), shows him to be master of the dialect of the north-west in various forms—Furness, Cumbrian, and Dumfriesshire; and his book on Coniston remains a valuable contribution to local anecdote. (I owe the data of his life to the Rev. T. Ellwood.)

After the middle of the nineteenth century the copper mines became less and less profitable, owing to the competition of foreign imports. During the "eighties," they were only just kept open, until the Coniston Mining Syndicate, under the energetic management of Mr. Thomas Warsop, tried to put new life into the old business. Mr. Warsop attempted to introduce a new system of smelting, but this smelting house was blown away by the storm of December 22nd, 1894. He took the watercourse from Leverswater to work a turbine, which superseded the old waterwheels for pumping, and also supplied power for boring in the mines, and for crushing and mixing the material from the old rubbish heaps, with which he made excellent concrete slabs, much in demand for pavements. But the development came to an end with Mr. Warsop's removal in 1905, and when the mines were offered for sale there was no purchaser.

Iron.

In our tour of the lake we have noticed that there are remains of old iron works along its margin, now difficult to trace.

In High Furness, the district of which Coniston Lake is the centre, and the most northern part of Lancashire, there are about thirty known sites where iron was smelted in the ancient way with charcoal, producing a bloom—the lump of metal made by blowing in the furnace—whence the name bloomeries. Of these sites about half are in the valley of Coniston, and eight are actually on the shore of the lake:—

All these have been bloomeries of a somewhat similar kind, and on Peel Island some iron works have been carried on of a rather different type, and perhaps at a different period. Small bloomeries have also been in blast at Tom-gill (the beck coming down from the Monk Coniston Tarns, often called Glen Mary), and at Stable Harvey in Blawith. One is said to be at the limekiln in Yewdale. There were two bloomeries of the later and larger type at Coniston Forge (up stream from the church) and at Low Nibthwaite, and two others further down the Crake, making sixteen in all the valley now known. There are, of course, many beside in the Lake District, as in other parts of the country.

That there were iron works before the Conquest in Furness appears from the place-name of "Ouregrave" in Domesday, which must be identical with Orgrave. At this place, early in the thirteenth century, Roger of Orgrave gave Furness Abbey the mine "cum ... aquÆ cursu ad illam scil. mineriam lavandum," a grant confirmed by his son Hamo in 1235 (Coucher Book of Furness, p. 229). About 1230 Thomas le Fleming gave them iron mines in Elliscales. By 1292 a great part of their income was derived from iron works.

Canon Atkinson, in his introduction to the Coucher Book of Furness, c. xviii., reckoned that they must have had some forty hearths to produce the iron they made. When the wood near the mines was exhausted, it became easier to carry the ore to the place where charcoal was burned than to bring the charcoal—so much greater in bulk—to the ore. An acre of forest was not enough to supply charcoal for smelting two tons of metal, and so the woods were gradually devastated over a wider and wider area.

In 1240 the abbey, which owned the eastern side of the lake, but not the lake itself, got leave from the baron of Kendal to put boats on the lake of Coniston for fishing and carrying. The carrying was chiefly of timber for building, but the tops and branches were no doubt used for charcoal. That on the other shore the smelting works were creeping up the valley is seen from the grant, before 1282, of William de Lancaster to Conishead Priory of the dead wood in Blawith for charcoal to supply the canons' bloomeries—for it was not only Furness Abbey that dealt in iron; and, indeed, more bloomeries exist on the side that did not belong to the abbey than on the shore that did. Thus in the thirteenth century we infer that smelting went on by Coniston Lake shore well up the west side.

On the east side there is a remarkable coincidence between the sites of Furness Abbey "parks" (or early clearings for sheep farms) and the bloomeries we find there. Near Selside Beck, where slag has been found, is Waterpark—anciently Water-side-park, apparently the earliest of the abbey sheep farms. Above Parkamoor Beck bloomery is Parkamoor—the sheep farm on the moor. Above Beck-leven bloomery is Lawson Park, the latest of the Furness Abbey sheep farms. I think the inference is that when the land was cleared they put sheep on it, and went up the lake to the next beck for the site of their bloomery. What we know for certain is that in early times the valley of Coniston was thickly wooded, but by the time of the dissolution of the monastery, High Furness had been nearly denuded of timber.

After the dissolution of the monastery, the commissioners of Henry VIII. let part of the woods of Furness Fells to William Sandys and John Sawrey, to maintain three smithies, or combined smelting and hammering works, for which the rent was £20. Less than thirty years later, in 1564-5, these were suppressed, because it was represented that the woods were being wasted, and the £20 rent was thenceforward paid to the lord of the manor by the customary tenants as "bloomsmithy rent."

The tenants of High Furness were allowed to make iron for themselves with the loppings and underwood, which may account for some of the small bloomeries. But by this time an improved and larger furnace was beginning to come into fashion, and in the seventeenth century we find that one such existed at Coniston at the Forge, between the Black Bull and Dixon Ground. It is mentioned in 1650 by the German miners, and by Sir Daniel Fleming in 1675. In 1750 it was turning out eighty tons of bar iron a year, and in 1771 Thomas Tyson is mentioned as the ironmaster (George Bownass' accounts). This would suffice for the needs of the neighbourhood, while at the same time the Deerpark, which we know was stocked in the seventeenth century and probably was preserved in the sixteenth, would make impossible the carrying on of smelting at Waterpark bloomery, which is within it, and at Springs, close to it. The relics from Peel Island, associated with iron works, seem to be mediÆval, and the isolation of a forge on an island, as at Rampsholme in Derwentwater, implies that protection was sought, which would hardly be needed in Elizabethan and later times hereabouts. The conclusion seems to be that many of the little bloomeries are mediÆval; that at Stable Harvey, perhaps the work of Conishead Priory after the grant of 1282, and those in Monk Coniston, the work of Furness Abbey.

The iron ore came from Low Furness, but there was an iron mine at the Red-dell head under Weatherlam. The Rev. Thomas Robinson, in his Natural History of Westmorland and Cumberland, 1709, says "Langdale & Cunningston mountains do abound most with iron veins; which supplies with Ore & keeps constantly going a Furnace in Langdale, where great plenty of good and malleable iron is made, not much inferior to that of Dantzick."

Slate.

Roofing slabs have been found in the ruins of Calder Abbey and the Well Chapel at Gosforth, both mediÆval; in the mansion on Lord's Island, Derwentwater, destroyed before the end of the seventeenth century, we found green Borrowdale roofing slates. Purple Skiddaw roofing slates were also found in the ruins of a seventeenth and eighteenth century cottage at Causeway Head near Keswick. But it was not until the eighteenth century that quarrying began to develop. Mr. H. S. Cowper, in his History of Hawkshead, says that the Swainsons, from about 1720, worked a quarry in the Coniston flag formation near the Monk Coniston Tarns, and sent out their flags even as far as Ulverston Church. Fifty years later George Bownass, the Coniston blacksmith, was the great purveyor and repairer of tools, and from his ledger the names of his customers, gathered by Mr. Herbert Bownass, throw light on the history of the industry in the second half of the eighteenth century.

In 1770 appear William Jackson & Co. and Edward Jackson, no doubt of Tilberthwaite. In 1771, the Company of Slate-getters at Pennyrigg, Saddlestones, Cove and Hodge Close; Zachias Walker & Co., at Cove; George Tyson & Co., quarry owners; William Atkinson & Co., at Scoadcop Quarry; John Masacks & Co., at Cove; John Atkinson, slate merchant, Torver Fell Quarry; Wm. Fleming and Thomas Callan, Stang End Quarry; Matthew Carter, Stang End Quarry; also George Thompson and Wm. Vickers at a quarry with an unreadable name, and John Johnson, Jonathan Youdale, Wm. Wilson, Anthony Rigg and Wm. Stopart, slate-getters. In 1772, William Atkinson, Broadscop Quarry; John Speding & Co., quarry owners; slate-getters at Bove Beck or Gatecrag Quarries; Wm. Parker, slate merchant, Langdale; Wm. Fleming, Bessy Crag Quarry; Wm. Johnson, Pennyrigg Quarry; and John Vickers, Thomas and Rowland Wilson, John Casson, and George Bownass, slate-getters.

Of the quarries here mentioned as working 130 years ago Stang End and Bessy Crag are in Little Langdale, Pennyrigg and Hodge Close on opposite sides of the Tilberthwaite valley; Cove is on the flank of the Old Man above Gaitswater; Scoadcop and Broadscop look like variants of the name Goldscope, the quarry opposite Cove, and near Blind Tarn, to the right hand as you go up Walna Scar; Torverfell Quarry may be Ashgill; Saddlestones is the quarry seen on the way up the Old Man (page 3).

Father West in 1774 said that "the most considerable slate quarries in the kingdom" were in the Coniston Fells; the slate was shipped from Penny Bridge "for differents parts of the kingdom." In 1780, Green saw the quarry near the top of the Old Man "in high working condition." W. Rigge & Son of Hawkshead, who worked some of them, exported 1,100 tons and upward a year, and the carriage to Penny Bridge was 6s. 10d. to 7s. 10d. a ton. The slate was shipped at Kirkby Quay upon sailing boats, of which there were enough upon the water in 1819 to furnish the subject of a paragraph in Green's Guide describing a scene of "bustle and animation."

From papers given by Mr. John Gunson of Ulpha to the Coniston Museum, we can gather a few particulars of the slate trade in the early part of the nineteenth century. John Atkinson of Ivytree, Blawith, in 1803 was interested in the Tilberthwaite Quarries, and in 1804 applied for leave to redeem the Land Tax on the ground they covered, the annual sum being £2 13s. 4d. From 1820 we find John Atkinson & Co. working seven quarries—Ashgill (to the left hand as you go up Walna Scar) the most important, occupying usually about a dozen men, and worked at considerable profit until 1830, when it began to show a deficit; Tilberthwaite, after 1820 giving employment to about seven men, with fair profit until 1826, when the men seem to have been withdrawn to work a quarry at Wood in Tilberthwaite for a year and a half; Goldscope, employing from nine to fifteen men between 1821 and 1826, when the Cove Quarry seems to have been run with no great profit or energy until 1832; and Mosshead, on the north-east side of the Old Man, at the head of Scrow Moss, was worked in 1829 and at a loss. The Outcast Quarry, near Slater's Bridge (now Little Langdale Quarries), is mentioned only in 1830. The best workmen were paid 3s. 6d. a day; lads seem to have started at 6d. There are notes of indentures, in Atkinson's account-book, from which it seems that apprentices at the riving and dressing began at 1s. or 1s. 6d., with a yearly rise to 2s. 6d., before they were out of their time. The profits were fluctuating—Goldscope in two years (1821-23) produced £1,072 17s. worth of slates, and paid £719 18s. 10d. in wages; Ashgill in 1826 made £381 less powder, tools, candles, &c.; but these were good years. The royalties to Lady le Fleming on Cove and Mosshead for 1827-32 amounted to £33 6s.

Tilberthwaite was the old possession of the Jacksons. Their ancestor had come from Gosforth, Cumberland, about 1690, and is said to have acquired it by marriage from the Walkers, who held the land in freehold, not, as usual hereabouts, in customary tenure under a lord of the manor. The Jacksons held most of Tilberthwaite, Holm Ground, and Yewdale until their estates were bought by Mr. James Garth Marshall, and it was by marriage with an Elizabeth Jackson that John Woodburn of Kirkby Quarries came to have an interest in the slate trade here. His name appears in John Atkinson's account books after 1832, and he seems to have taken over the actual working of the quarries. In 1904 the total output of the Coniston quarries (Cove, High Fellside, Mossrigg and Klondyke, Parrock, Saddlestone, and Walna Scar) was 3438 tons; value at the quarries, £12,251.

Wood.

In spite of local production, iron was not plentiful in the eighteenth century. Iron nails were too valuable for common use, though they are found in quantities at the old furnaces on Peel Island and elsewhere, which must date from an earlier period. Wooden pegs were substituted in making kists and other furniture, house roofs, doors and boats. The trade in woodwork of many kinds flourished in Coniston and its neighbourhood.

We have already mentioned the sixteenth century "Cowpers and Turners, with makyng of Coles," and the Baptist tanner of Monk Coniston in the seventeenth century; his tannery was, no doubt, that at Bank Ground. Another old tannery was at Dixon Ground in Church Coniston. Bark peeling and charcoal burning are among the most ancient and continuous industries; the round huts of the charcoal burners and their circular pitsteads can be traced, though overgrown and so nearly obliterated as to resemble prehistoric remains, in many of the woods, or places which once were wooded.

In George Bownass' ledger, already quoted, John Bell & Co. are named as wood-mongers in 1771, and in 1772 the same smith repaired the "coal boate" owned by the executors of William Ford.

In 1820 the old Lonsdale Magazine says that the woods were cut every fifteen or sixteen years, and brought in the same value as if the land had been under cultivation. The wood was used for charcoal in smelting (and later in gunpowder making), for poles, hoops, and birch besoms; bird-lime was made from the bark of the holly, and exported to the West Indies.

As the Lancashire spinning increased there was a great demand for bobbins, and large quantities of small copse wood went to the turning mills. There was one near the Forge at Coniston, and a later bobbin mill farther down stream at Low Beck. Others were worked at Hawkshead Hill by W. F. Walker, and more recently at Sunnybank in Torver. But this industry has now died out.

An agreement in possession of Mr. H. Bownass, dated February 13th, 1798, between John Jackson of Bank Ground, gent. (landlord), and Robert Townson of the Gill, yeoman (tenant), of the one part, and T. Mackreth of Bank Ground, tanner, and John Gaskerth of Mattson Ground, Windermere, woollen manufacturer, of the other, authorises the building of a watermill for spinning and carding on the land called the Becks and Lowlands in Church Coniston. The carding mill near Holywath was owned early in the nineteenth century by Mr. Gandy of Kendal, and managed by Mrs. Robinson of the Black Bull.

The rise of Coniston trade is shown pretty accurately by the returns of population in this period. In 1801 Church Coniston contained 338 persons; in 1811, 460; in 1821, 566; and in 1831, 587. At this last date there were 101 houses inhabited and 9 empty, none building; and there were 102 families of which 25 were employed in agriculture, 65 in trade, mining, &c., and 12 beside. In Monk Coniston with Skelwith the population in 1801 was 286; in 1811, 386; in 1821, 426; and in 1831 it had dropped to 397. There were then 78 houses occupied and 12 empty; 36 families lived by agriculture, 2 by trade or manufacture, and 41 otherwise. This means that the village was always the home of the miners and quarrymen, while "at the back of the water" there was a gradually increasing settlement of gentlefolk attracted to the place by its scenery. In the later half of the century the population of Church Coniston, after reaching 1324 in 1861, fell to 1106 in 1871, 965 in 1881, and 964 in 1891; showing the decline of the once flourishing industrial enterprises. During the next decade the slate trade increased, and in 1901 the population had risen to 1111, whence the new rows of houses which, if not picturesque, were much needed. It is no longer possible to crowd the cottages as in mid-Victorian days when, it is said, the miners coming down from their work took the beds warm from the men on the other shift. And yet, granting the necessity, one cannot help regretting the meanness and ugliness of much recent building in the village. A pleasant exception is the new office for the Bank of Liverpool at the bridge, which is a clever adaptation of the old cottage, making a pretty effect without pretentiousness; and perhaps, with this example, local enterprise may still create—what is far from impossible—a little town among the mountains worthy of its environment.