FOR today’s picture, our regular contributor Northern Perspectives has flown his drone from the top of Weardale over the border into Cumbria to highlight Nenthead, the best preserved lead-mining landscape in the North Pennines.
One thousand years of lead-mining history and all of its complicated processes are laid out before us.
Northern Perspectives' view of the leadmining landscape at Nenthead (Image: Northern Perspectives)
We can see how the ore was cobbed, crushed, sorted, jigged and buddled on the dressing floors, before being taken to the hearths and the furnaces for smelting, with the flues, chimneys and condensers taking away the foul air but ensuring not a glimmer of anything precious was lost.
Nenthead Mines, near Alston around 1880 (Image: Unknown)
We can also see the channels, the leats and the dams which show how much effort went into getting water in the right place – underground, it was a major problem but above the ground it was the major power source, driving the bellows and the jiggers.
The ore dressing plant at Nenthead, with the London Lead Company's village behind it (Image: Unknown)
For much of the 19th Century, Nenthead was operated by the London Lead Company, a Quaker concern that from 1825 built a model village for its workers.
There were hundreds of workers in this remote landscape, making it one of the highest and busiest industrial settlements in the country.
Volunteers lead a party of explorers underground at Nenthead (Image: Unknown)
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Now the site is managed by a charity and its volunteers who explain the landscape and then take visitors underground, where even a Northern Perspectives’ drone cannot reach.
(Image: Northern Perspectives)
However, on the Durham-based cameraman’s Facebook page, he has more aerial photography and videos explaining what is left of the lie of this remarkable land.
To find out more, just search “Northern Perspectives” on Facebook.