Eylesbarrow Mine

Eylesbarrow Mine lies on southern Dartmoor in Devon, beside the upper River Plym. The site sits less than two kilometres north-east of Drizzlecombe, on the slopes of Eylesbarrow under two Bronze Age burial mounds. Tin was worked here from the early 1800s, when the mine became one of the largest on the moor. Granite forms the country rock, cut by vertical tin-bearing lodes up to 0.73 metres wide. The miners followed three main lodes, digging relatively shallow shafts into the altered granite where kaolinite made excavation easier. The mine’s most productive years came between 1822 and 1831, when over 1,220 hundredweight of tin was recorded at Tavistock. In 1825 alone 403 blocks were coined, worth nearly £30,000 at the time. A smelting house built on site in 1822 was the only one operating on Dartmoor. By 1831 more than sixty men worked the mine, yet within a decade falling tin prices and exhausted ore ended production. Several companies tried to revive the site, including a final attempt in 1851 under the name Wheal Ruth. Today the remains stretch across a large area of open moorland. Twenty-five shaftheads line the main lode, the largest measuring sixteen metres across. Original masonry collars survive on some shafts, each with a spoil heap shaped like a crescent. Old streamworks, leats and prospecting pits mark earlier centuries of tin streaming. The Bronze Age barrows on the hilltop overlook the industrial landscape below.