Butcombe Evening Group were given a fascinating insight into the mining of
lead and other minerals in the hills around Butcombe from Chris Richard of
Weston Museum. We started at Charterhouse which was mined for lead ore
since Roman times, AD49 until 1885. A Roman road was built from
Charterhouse to a port near Southampton, from where goods were shipped.
Exeter and Bristol Universities have undertaken excavations.

Originally the mining was under military supervision, and they found a
Roman Fort which watched over the workings. Apart from high quality
crockery, they also discovered a crude amphitheatre and a settlement. In
the middle of the nineteenth century Cornish miners with better equipment
sunk deeper shafts to 300 feet, but found no more ore. The earlier miners
knew the seams would peter out.

We saw slides of a lead smelting works near Priddy Pool which continued to
operate until 1910.

In the middle of the sixteenth century Queen Elizabeth was badly in need of
brass to make cannon so she sent her mining engineers out to look for ore.
Calamine zinc ore was found near Worle. It was then taken down the Banwell
River and floated across to Tintern for smelting.

Further calamine was found at Downside, Redhill, Wrington, Shipham, Winscombe
and Rowberrow. There are still signs of shafts and underground workings at
many of these places.

With the use of gunpowder in the seventeenth century the extractions speeded
up.

Rowberrow became a boom town and many little cottages sprang up for
squatters. Some can still be seen, derelict. Shafts driven down at Banwell
and Hutton in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries broke into vast
underground chambers, where bones of bison, reindeer, wolf and elephant
were found.

Clerics spread the word that these were the victims of Noah's flood. In
fact they date from the Ice Age. Many of the galleries in the underground
workings are visited by potholers but you need to be very slim!

In Hutton they found yellow ochre which was widely used for paint. At
Winford it was red ochre. "Winford Red", used as a dye , was known all over
the world. A straight Roman road ran from Nempnett to the redding pits, the
road we now know as the one through Ridghill. And then we came to Butcombe
where iron ore had been found during the excavations at Row of Ashes back
in the '70s.

There are also old shafts on Ruslin Farm. A final thought on the Winford
Red: it is an all pervasive colour, turning the sheep slightly pink. The
miners, even after two baths, exuded the pigment, tingeing their bodies and
leaving a red impression on the sheets.