Allenheads was founded around lead mining, which by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had made the North Pennines one of the most productive ore fields in Britain. The mine that defined the village was operated by the Beaumont family and worked some of the richest veins in the Northern Dales. Within two decades of being expanded into a major operation, however, it closed in 1896 - cheap imports had made British lead unprofitable - and a community that existed because of the mine was suddenly cut adrift. The closure devastated Allenheads. People left. Houses emptied. The infrastructure of a lead-mining village - the shops, the chapels, the engine houses - became surplus to a population that no longer needed them.

In the 1970s the British Steel Corporation reopened the workings as the Beaumont Mine, this time chasing fluorspar - the mineral fluorite, used as a flux in steelmaking. The venture did not last. It turned out to be cheaper to source fluorite elsewhere, and the mine closed again. Allenheads's industrial story is a textbook of remote-rural extraction: when the commodity is valuable enough to justify the haul up the dale, the village booms; when it is not, the silence returns. Today the local economy runs on agriculture and tourism. There is a café, a contemporary arts centre, and an inn. The arts centre is the unexpected one - Allenheads Contemporary Arts has been quietly bringing artists into residence in one of England's most remote villages for years.

The village's industrial heritage centre is built around a preserved Armstrong Whitworth hydraulic engine that once powered the mine's sawmill. The engine is significant beyond its local context: William Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong of Elswick on Tyneside, was one of the great Victorian engineers, the inventor whose hydraulic systems lifted bridges, opened lock gates, and aimed naval guns around the world. Several of his hydraulic engines were installed at the Allenheads mine, and drawings of the others survive. The preserved engine is now in a purpose-built exhibition hall in the village centre - the kind of small, specific museum that rewards visitors who are paying attention. In October 2017 the North Pennines Observatory opened at the village's Old School House, taking advantage of skies that almost nowhere in England can still match: clear, cold, and largely free of light pollution.

Every first Saturday in September, the village holds the Highforest Show. It is the kind of event that small, scattered communities use to reassert themselves: a quoits competition (Allenheads still plays the old Pennine bowling game), a dog show, children's stalls, a chance for the village to show what it can still do despite a permanent population that would not fill a London Underground carriage. Allenheads sits eight miles up the River East Allen from Allendale, the next village down the dale; the road up is steep, narrow, and prone to drifting closed in winter. The high moor that surrounds it is treeless, blanket-bog country, scarred with the spoil heaps and overgrown shafts of two centuries of mining. Walk a mile in any direction and you will find old workings, dressed stone, the iron-stained outflow of an abandoned level - all of it being slowly, patiently reabsorbed into the moor.