A flickering pinpoint of naked flame leads the way through the low and narrow passage: dank and pitch black, where the smell of candle grease mingles with that of freshly turned earth and slimy rock.Suddenly, there it is; a thin greyish streak running horizontally through the Stiperstones rock. An anticlimax to the man in the street who has painfully struggled the length of the 100-yard shaft to catch a glimpse of a lead seam.
But to Norman Evans and Tom Rowson, who between them work Burgam Lead Mine, between Snailbeach and The Bog, south-west of Shrewsbury, this seam means bread and butter and something else. It means that their six year search for renewed prosperity in the last remaining mine in the Stiperstones can continue.
The Shropshire Mining and Caving Club website has a What the Papers Said section of articles from the local press. The earliest of them date from the 18th century.
The one above is from the Express & Star of 4 April 1959 and gives a good picture of what the attempts to continue lead mining in Shropshire into the 20th century were like. The mines had been profitable through the second half of the 19th century, but the deposits were limited and had been more or less worked out by 1900.
I have been a little way into Burgam Mine myself. As late as the mid-1990s, its entrance stood unguarded beside the road near Stiperstones village and, along with some of the more intrepid members of the Malcolm Saville Society, I once followed the adit a little way into the hillside.
When, years later, I looked for the entrance, the area had been landscaped and I could find no trace of it. But it will have been somewhere near where I took this photo.
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