Birch Tor and Vitifer mine was a

tin Tin is a chemical element; it has symbol Sn () and atomic number 50. A silvery-colored metal, tin is soft enough to be cut with little force, and a bar of tin can be bent by hand with little effort. When bent, a bar of tin makes a sound, the ...

mine Mine, mines, miners or mining may refer to: Extraction or digging *Miner, a person engaged in mining or digging *Mining, extraction of mineral resources from the ground through a mine Grammar *Mine, a first-person English possessive pronoun M ...

Dartmoor Dartmoor is an upland area in southern Devon, South West England. The moorland and surrounding land has been protected by National Park status since 1951. Dartmoor National Park covers . The granite that forms the uplands dates from the Carb ...

Devon Devon ( ; historically also known as Devonshire , ) is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is bordered by the Bristol Channel to the north, Somerset and Dorset to the east, the English Channel to the south, and Cornwall to the west ...

, England. Located in the valley of the Redwater Brook, to the east of the B3212

Moretonhampstead Moretonhampstead is a market town, parish and ancient manor in Devon, situated on the north-eastern edge of Dartmoor, within the Dartmoor National Park. The parish now includes the hamlet of Doccombe (), and it is surrounded clockwise from the ...

Princetown Princetown is a villageDespite its name, Princetown is not classed as a town today – it is not included in the County Council's list of the 29 towns in Devon: located within Dartmoor national park in the English county of Devon. It is the ...

road, below the

Warren House Inn The Warren House Inn is a remote and isolated public house in the heart of Dartmoor, Devon, England. It is the highest pub in southern England at 1,425 feet (434 m) Above mean sea level, above sea level, and is the second highest pub in ...

, the mine was worked between the mid–18th century and 1925.

History

In medieval times, or even before, the area later occupied by this mine was at the centre of the most extensive surface mining operations on Dartmoor, and today it is still scarred by the waste heaps left by stream working and numerous gullies of

open cast mining Open-pit mining, also known as open-cast or open-cut mining and in larger contexts mega-mining, is a surface mining technique that extracts rock or minerals from the earth. Open-pit mines are used when deposits of commercially useful ore or ro ...

.Greeves 2001, pp.21–24 Strictly speaking, Birch Tor mine on the eastern side of the Redwater Brook valley and Vitifer mine on the west were separate mines, but for most of their working lives they were operated under the same management, so they are usually considered together. The first documentary reference to "Vitifer Mine" was in 1750, and to "Burch Tor Bounds" in 1757. By the 1780s Vitifer was being operated by the Dartmoor Mining and Smelting Company, and in 1796 it was said to be employing 40 men. A few years later it was reported that the mine had a 36 ft (11 m) water wheel for pumping water out of the mine, and it had a half-mile long

adit An adit (from Latin ''aditus'', entrance) or stulm is a horizontal or nearly horizontal passage to an underground mine. Miners can use adits for access, drainage, ventilation, and extracting minerals at the lowest convenient level. Adits are a ...

that had taken nearly four years to drive up the valley. At this time the ore from the mine was sent to Cornwall for

smelting Smelting is a process of applying heat and a chemical reducing agent to an ore to extract a desired base metal product. It is a form of extractive metallurgy that is used to obtain many metals such as iron-making, iron, copper extraction, copper ...

, but by the 1820s it was being smelted at

Eylesbarrow mine Eylesbarrow mine was a tin mine on Dartmoor, Devon, England that was active during the first half of the 19th century. In its early years it was one of the largest and most prosperous of the Dartmoor tin mines, along with Whiteworks and the Birc ...

, also on Dartmoor. In 1834 the mine was reported to be "large and profitable", but the conditions for the more than 100 employees, including women and children, were very poor and many of the miners there were said to be refugees from other districts on account of petty crimes they had committed. At this time, one of the men who worked underground at Birch Tor said that the quality of the air down the mine was so bad that "it killed scores of miners". In 1838 Birch Tor mine had two 40 ft waterwheels and one of 32 ft and it was said to be the only mine of any size working on Dartmoor. The two mines were amalgamated in 1845 and the underground workings were then being drained by two waterwheels of 45 ft diameter. It was around this time that it was discovered that the deeper excavations were not producing the quality of ore that had been expected,Hamilton Jenkin 1974, pp.103–105 unlike many of the mines in Cornwall which proved to be richer in tin at depth. By the 1850s the mine had only about 20 men working, but by 1863 it had revived and had about 150 employees. The next year was its peak, when it sold 150 tons of

black tin Black tin is the raw ore of tin, usually cassiterite, as sold by a tin mine to a smelting company. After mining, the ore must be concentrated by several processes to reduce the amount of gangue it contains before it can be sold. It contrasts wi ...

. In 1870 it was still employing 102 people, but it was abandoned in 1882. From 1887 to 1903 a small amount of work continued at the mine under Moses Bawden, who had been involved with the mine since the 1860s; and from 1903 to 1913 new owners Phelips and Padfield kept just over 20 miners employed each year. This was the last underground work done at the mine, but the dumps were reworked until 1925, and although some further work on the dumps was undertaken in 1938–9, there is no record of any production from this period.

References

Sources

* * * {{refend History of Dartmoor Tin mines in Devon Geology of Devon Industrial archaeological sites in Devon