Following my exhausting cycle ride around Swaledale yesterday, I wisely opted not to stray far today. So instead, here is another photograph from that trip.
I was aware of Swaledale’s lead mining legacy, but stumbling upon this particular site was an unexpected delight. The Beldi Hill Smelt Mill sits awkwardly wedged into the hillside, just below a dainty little waterfall. Charming, if you overlook the industrial scars. It is a relic of 19th-century engineering, borne out of greed and acrimony.
The mill owes its existence to a tedious and bitter dispute over mineral rights beneath Beldi Hill. This debacle began in 1738, when the Trustees of the Duke of Wharton sold the manors of Healaugh and Muker to Thomas Smith. Naturally, the agreement was as clear as mud, leaving lead ore rights under enclosed and unenclosed land in contention. Cue Lord Pomfret, who decided to stake his claim to the minerals under the unenclosed land.
After decades of bickering, the matter was resolved in the 1770s in Smith’s favour but only after Pomfret appealed to the House of Lords. But by then, Smith had abandoned his earlier smelt mills at Barney Beck and Spout Gill, opting instead to build the Beldi Hill Smelt Mill in Swinner Gill in 1771. Smith’s new mill was a utilitarian effort with a single ore-hearth, and this modular design proved useful. Later the lessees, Thompson & Company, tacked on a second mill and a roasting furnace in a bid for greater productivity.
Of course, all things must crumble—Beldi Hill Smelt Mill included. By 1882, the mill appeared in the Mining Journal as a shadow of its former self. It managed to smelt its last batch of ore the following year. An inventory from 1878 suggests the equipment was already on its last legs, but no doubt that did little to deter the dogged persistence of 19th-century industrialists.
And there it sits today, a monument to ambition, squabbling, and the inevitability of decay.
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