Combe Martin on the north Devon coast is known for its history of silver mining. The earliest documented mining activity was in 1292 and there was sporadic working in every century up to the nineteenth, including a short-lived bonanza during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The ore that was mined was mainly galena (lead sulphide) with an unusually high silver content. After the ore was brought to the surface it was smelted and refined to yield lead and silver.
The largest silver-lead mine in the area, and probably the oldest, was Old Combmartin Mine. It was located around and under the village, a little further up the valley than the church (see the map below). The second important mine was the Knap Down Mine, which was located further east at the high end of Corner Lane, where the remains of an engine-house are still visible today. Other mines in the Combe Martin area were on a much smaller scale than these two. The mines have not been worked since the nineteenth century.
Old Combmartin Mine
The most significant period of activity in the long history of Old Combmartin Mine was between 1835 and 1848, when it was operated by the Combmartin and North Devon Mining Company. This was the only period in which steam power was used, supplied by a fifty-inch cylinder engine located at Mine Tenement. Sometime around 1838, the miners found a large deposit of silver-lead ore very close to the village, and the discovery gave the company real prosperity for a few years (ore sales in a twelve-month period in 1842-3 exceeded £10,000, roughly equivalent to a million pounds today). But by 1847 this rich deposit had been entirely worked out, and failing to make any further ore discoveries, the company closed in 1848.
There was talk of reopening the mine almost immediately, but the only serious attempt to do so came in the late 1870s. This venture was confined to the extreme northern end of the mine, which was the only part that could be worked without the aid of steam-powered pumps. Little ore was raised, and when the attempt ended in 1880, Old Combmartin Mine closed for the last time.
Sheet 2 of the Devon in 1840 series, A Map of Combe Martin in 1840, features a map of the village and its surroundings at the scale of sixteen inches to one mile (1:4000), based on the parish tithe map. It shows the area of Old Combmartin Mine at a time when the mine’s production was at its peak. When I was creating this map, I was keen for it to show as much detail of the mine as possible, because of the mine’s economic and social importance to Combe Martin as well as its impact on the landscape at the time. However, the tithe map itself only showed the mine’s buildings and a pond. It did not show other mining details because they were not relevant; the tithe map had nothing to do with mining. I had to look for other sources of information for my map.
Reconstructing the Mine’s Layout
Unfortunately, much information has been lost since Old Combmartin Mine was abandoned. Almost all the workings are now blocked or flooded. All the shafts were back-filled with rubble soon after the closure in 1848, and in some places the spoil heaps that remained above ground were spread out to restore a more level surface. The shafts have disappeared without trace and their positions forgotten, except for two shafts that have been found and excavated (to a limited depth) since the 1980s by the Combe Martin Silver Mines Research and Preservation Society. Furthermore, all the records belonging to the Combmartin and North Devon Mining Company disappeared when the company closed. This means that there is an absence of original maps and diagrams of the mine’s layout below ground, except for the small area at the northern end that was reopened in the 1870s.
That is not to say that there are no records from Old Combmartin Mine’s most productive period, only that the records are quite difficult to interpret from a topographical point of view. The Combmartin and North Devon Mining Company usually held its annual general meeting in August, and after each meeting a report was printed and distributed to shareholders. In some years, an edited version was also published in the Mining Journal. Luckily, there is an almost complete run of company reports from 1835 to 1848, with only the 1838 report missing. Each report included a quite detailed summary of the work that had been done underground in that year.
Building on earlier research by Peter Claughton, I was able to combine information from the company reports with evidence from the tithe map (and some other sources) to locate the main shafts of Old Combmartin Mine. In doing this, I found that I could also reconstruct the layout of the mine below ground, which was far more information than I had originally wanted! The findings were set out in detail in an article published in Mining History, and I have included a shorter account in a text box, accompanied by diagrams, on A Map of Combe Martin in 1840.
More about the Combe Martin map
Further Reading
Peter Claughton, 1997, ‘Lead and silver mining’, in Michael Atkinson (ed.), Exmoor’s Industrial Archaeology, 73-102.
Martin Ebdon, 2019, ‘Maps and sections of a silver-lead mine at Combe Martin, Devon’, Mining History: The Bulletin of the Peak District Mines Historical Society, vol. 20, no. 5, 23-37.