Mining on the Brendon Hills

The Brendon Hills are a range of hills in western Somerset, England. The hills merge level into the eastern side of Exmoor and are included within the Exmoor National Park. Iron ore and other minerals have been extracted for industrial purposes, primarily by the Brendon Hills Iron Ore Company in the later half of the 19th century.

The Brendon Hills are largely formed from the Morte Slates, a thick faulted and folded sequence of Devonian age sedimentary rocks. An east-west aligned anticline/syncline pair known as the Brendon Anticline and Brendon Syncline folds these rocks. The fold couplet is itself offset by displacement of the rocks on the NNW-SSE aligned Timberscombe Fault System. Over the centuries they have been mined for minerals, notably ironstone from which iron is extracted for making steel.

Where lodes of iron ore reached the surface they were worked using bell pits from Roman times.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the proprietors of the Ebbw Vale Iron Works acquired an interest in iron ore deposits in the Brendon Hills. Iron ore had been known there for centuries but not exploited industrially until the Brendon Hills Iron Ore Company was formed in 1853. Initially goethite/hematite was extracted and later unoxidised siderite.

At an altitude of over 1,000 feet (300 m) and remote from usable roads, the deposits needed a form of transport to get the ore to South Wales. The West Somerset Mineral Railway, which included a 0.75 miles (1.21 km) long gravity worked incline on a gradient of 1 in 4, was built to take the ore to Watchet Harbour where it was loaded onto ships to be sent to Ebbw Vale for smelting. At Burrow Farm Mine a 25 inches (640 mm) Cornish beam engine was installed around 1868 to pump water out of the mine. The mines provided employment for an average of 245 people between 1873 and 1882. Accommodation was also built for the mine workers.

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