Ironstone chimney on the North York Moors is testament to those indomitable Victorian entrepreneurs who made Britain great'

WHEN the Warren Moor ironstone mine, in the North York Moors, is made accessible to the public, it will offer more to discover than industrial archaeology.

For the mine was the scene of extraordinary goings on. Prompted not by success but chronic failure, these give the mine an interest almost in inverse proportion to its scanty remains, obscurely located in a fold of the hills near Kildale.

The chief surviving feature is the mine’s intact chimney. Though this can be glimpsed from the moor road between Kildale and Commondale, few notice it against the moorland background. But it intrigues walkers, who pass close by on a path from Kildale to Baysdale.

When the late John Owen, a skilled industrial archaeologist, of Redcar, investigated the mine in 1979-80 he described the chimney as “the finest surviving example of an 1860-period chimney in the Teesside district."

The national park authority, now cooperating with the Kildale estate to open up the mine, has supercharged that to the more attention-grabbing “the only remaining Victorian ironstone mine chimney standing in the UK”.

Whatever, the attention to detail on the well-proportioned 69ft-tall square chimney, which rises from a sandstone plinth to a shapely flared-out top, with decorative stone banding relieving its brickwork, suggests high hopes for the venture.

This began in 1864 when, undeterred by a decision by Teesside ironfounders Bell Brothers not to proceed after an unpromising survey, a speculator named John Watson, son of a mine manager in neighbouring Eskdale, leased the entire Kildale estate for ironstone. With 1,500 acres at his disposal, a large mine was in prospect – had he found a plentiful supply of ore.

Having recruited backers for his enterprise in London, Watson, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, was certainly confident.

“I have succeeded beyond my most sanguine hopes,” he wrote. His only regret was the estate’s refusal to extend his agreed 60-year lease to 99.

Swiftly after Watson’s company was registered in May 1865, sites for furnaces, shafts, calcining kilns, a reservoir and a terrace of workers’ houses were selected. The Kildale estate’s agent, George Peirson, looked on bemused.

“I cannot but think that Watson’s plan savours a good deal of the visionary,” he wrote to an estate trustee.

Though drilling found the main ironstone seam, it was too thin, in two bands separated by shale, to be worth mining. But so-called Top Seam ironstone, outcropping on the Warren Moor hillside, was extracted by drift mining. It was calcined (burned to remove water content and thereby reduce duties payable to the landowner) in open clamps. A narrow gauge tramway, its route still evident, was laid for transporting the ore to the nearby Esk Valley railway.

But by early 1867 it was clear the mine was in trouble. George Peirson urged his employers to take swift action to recover unpaid rent – “or it is possible they may remove machinery or other property, horses in particular”.

The estate foreman, a man named West, was instructed to visit the mine at least twice daily – “or leave a man in sight, so that if anything is removed you have may immediate notice”.

Before long West reported: “I have been to the mine tonight. The portable engine is all taken to pieces. The men are all stopped. There isn’t yet anything taken away.”

In fact, the due rents were paid. But in July 1867 West reported that rails and other “transportable” items were being moved to the highway. Though Watson claimed this was not on his authority, his venture, which had never employed more than about six men, had collapsed.

At one point the estate solicitor, Thomas Sowerby, arrived to claim £427 in rent. He recorded: “I demanded this sum of John Brooks at the entrance to the works. Brooks said he was not authorised to pay, so I demanded possession, which he said he was not prepared to give. I then demanded payment at the door of the office and at the mouth of the shaft. Not receiving any answer, I demanded possession and declared the lease broken.”

But it took the estate months, into 1868, to regain possession.

Watson fled to Paris and his solicitor wrote: “I believe Watson to be hopelessly ruined. I cannot get myself a single farthing out of him.”

Abandoning a court case set down for York Assizes, the estate settled for recouping what it could by the sale of assets – £1,381 for “machinery and rails” for example.

But just four years later, in 1872, fresh speculators took over the mine – with much the same optimism as West. An estate letter notes how one investor, from Pimlico, had “renewed his clamour for the lease”.

However, the ink on that, taken out in September 1872, was scarcely dry before the iron trade fell into a prolonged slump, with Warren Moor an early victim in August 1874.

Meanwhile, however, its hopeful operators had built a long terrace of cottages. In 1919 these, together with a stable and a stone building that had housed a joiner’s shop and a forge, were dismantled and the stone reused to build Kildale’s village hall.

Oddly, at the mine head, centred on two shafts, only that impressive chimney had been fully built above ground.

When the mine was abandoned, vegetation soon obscured the rest, including the base of an engine house, a gear-wheel pit and massive plinths for a winding engine and a pumping engine. Highly dangerous, the site was securely fenced off. In recent years however, the estate and the national park have consolidated the chimney.

Now they intend to expose the other remains, install grilles for safety and divert the nearby path to the mine – all thus enabling public access.

The key reason the mine failed was that Kildale lies at the petering-out fringe of Cleveland’s great ironstone field. But final confirmation didn’t come until as late as 1913, when 19 test boreholes were sunk. The negative result would have cheered a late former owner of the estate, who had imposed a covenant forbidding mining. It had cost a successor £1,000 for a private Act of Parliament to set aside the restriction, paving the way for Watson.

Of him there is a startling footnote – “hopelessly ruined” or not, his name appears in 1874 on documents for a new ironstone mine in Farndale. That too failed: “Not enough iron to nail your boots,” a miner ruefully observed.

He could have said the same – perhaps even did – of Warren Moor.