Qualla: Dartmoor Tin Mining

Dartmoor Tin Mining: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smalljim, CC BY 3.0. Stand at Crockern Tor on a clear day and you are standing on the floor of a parliament. In 1494 the tin miners of Devon began meeting here in the open air, on the bare granite at 1,300 feet of elevation, to make laws that applied to no one but themselves and their industry. They had been doing some version of this since the 12th century. They had royal recognition from Edward I, who in 1305 established formal stannaries at Tavistock, Ashburton, and Chagford. They had their own gaol at Lydford for anyone who crossed them. And they had reason to believe their work mattered: the cassiterite buried in the granite under their feet had been pulled, smelted, and traded out of Dartmoor since before the Romans arrived.

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Image: Smalljim | CC BY 3.0

Dartmoor Tin Mining: How the Granite Made the Tin

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter S, CC BY-SA 2.0. Tin is locked inside cassiterite, a mineral that crystallizes in hydrothermal veins running through granite. Dartmoor is granite - 954 square kilometers of it, emplaced during the Carboniferous period and slowly eroded ever since. The lodes generally trend east-northeast to west-...

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Image: Peter S | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dartmoor Tin Mining: Streaming the Valleys

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RobThinks, CC BY-SA 4.0. The earliest method left the most visible scars on the moor. Tinners would identify a valley with cassiterite in its gravels, divert a stream of water down through it by means of a leat, and dig a trench called a tye at the lowest end to let the fine gangue wash away. Then they w...

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Image: RobThinks | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dartmoor Tin Mining: Beamworks and Wheal Fortune

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the 15th century the easy stream tin was running out, and miners began following the lodes themselves - down from the surface in massive open-cut gullies called beamworks, openworks, or gerts. Some still bear their old names: Gibby Beam, Willabeam, Scudley Beam. When the Indus...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Dartmoor Tin Mining: Crushing, Crazing, Knacking

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smalljim, CC BY 3.0. Once the ore was out of the ground it had to be broken down. Streamworkers used a hand mortar and pestle for the relatively pure gravels. As lode mining grew, the tinners built crazing mills - two flat circular stones, the upper rotating against the lower like a quern, fed ore th...

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Image: Smalljim | CC BY 3.0

Dartmoor Tin Mining: The Last Mine and the Three Hares

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smalljim, CC BY 3.0. The discovery of vast tin deposits in British Malaya in the late 19th century drained Dartmoor's miners toward Asia, and the moor's commercial tin mining ground to a halt. Golden Dagger Mine, the last to work the ore directly, closed in November 1930. Some work continued during t...

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Image: Smalljim | CC BY 3.0