ANDREW SWIFT – JULY v2.qxp_Layout 2 20/06/2022 11:12 Page 1
Waldegrave Pond
Aquatic
bliss
“Whether you come in search of industrial archaeology or of flora and fauna – or simply of great views – there can be few sites which are so unlikely to disappoint”, says Andrew Swift. Here, he delves into the fascinating history of Priddy Pools – a geological Site of Special Scientific Interest in the Mendip Hills...
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ne reason the Romans were keen to invade Britain in AD 43 was so that they could get their hands on its mineral deposits. Lead, in particular, was highly prized. The Romans used lead for making water pipes and cisterns, lining baths and aqueducts, and, less advisedly, making cooking and storage vessels. Even more alarmingly, they used it to produce lead acetate, with which they sweetened food and wine. Almost as soon as the Romans arrived in Britain, the Second Legion was ordered westward to establish a fort on Mendip, where lead was abundant. Lead had been mined here on a small scale for centuries, possibly since the late Bronze Age, but the Romans swiftly ramped up production. They established a town, which grew to be bigger than Roman Bath, with an amphitheatre to keep the workers entertained, and built roads to ports on the south coast and the Bristol Channel. The area covered by their mine workings extended over several miles, and lead ingots from Mendip were soon being sent to the farthest reaches of the empire. When the Romans departed, over 350 years later, leaving vast mounds of slag behind, the industry collapsed as Britain entered the Dark Ages. By the 12th century, however, lead was being mined again, albeit on a far more modest scale. The area where lead was most plentiful was now controlled by four major landowners – the Lords of the Manors of Harptree, Chewton and Charterhouse and the Bishop of Bath and Wells. They issued licences to free miners, took 10% of the ore they dug from the ground and administered minery courts. Most of the mining was small scale, with miners working alone or in partnership. A decent living could be made, though, by men prepared to put up with the hard and hazardous work, and the industry thrived. By the late 18th century, however, with seams near the surface worked out, it was in decline. Digging deeper would only 38 THE BRISTOL MAGAZINE
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JULY 2022
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No 212
have been possible if steam engines had been installed to pump out the water that would flood in. This, though, would have needed a major injection of capital, and none was forthcoming. Revival was, however, to come from an unexpected source. The legacy of over two thousand years of mining was a slew of colossal slag heaps. In 1807, when some of them were assayed, they were found to have a high lead content. Mining technology had moved on and what earlier smelters had abandoned as worthless could now be profitably resmelted. And so, in the 1820s, two resmelting works were built – at Charterhouse and the old Chewton Minery near Priddy. Another was later set up at Smitham, above East Harptree. The most ambitious resmelting project, though, was at Priddy, on land formerly held by the Bishop of Bath and Wells. In 1857, a Cornish mining engineer called Nicholas Ennor acquired the rights of the Priddy Minery and set about building a state-of-the-art resmelting works. Almost immediately, he ran into trouble. The nearby Chewton Works sabotaged the operation by robbing Ennor of the water he needed for resmelting. The courts eventually ordered the supply to be restored, but no sooner was Ennor’s operation up and running than the owners of Wookey Hole Mill sued him for polluting the water they used for making paper. Faced with these setbacks, in 1862 Ennor sold his rights to the newly-formed St Cuthbert Lead Smelting Company, under the direction of the improbably named Horatio Nelson Hornblower. The prospectus boasted that the company had been established ‘for the purpose of working the rich deposits of Lead Ore and Slag occurring at the Priddy Minery … where an accumulation of leadproducing debris, estimated at 600,000 tons, has been discovered and which is calculated to contain at least £900,000 worth of that metal’. Shares were snapped up, five furnaces were built and over 40 men hired to work them, but only five years later the price of lead slumped and the company went into liquidation.
