Qualla: Eylesbarrow Mine

Eylesbarrow Mine: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. The owner liked to entertain. William Crossing recorded the detail in his Dartmoor book: a man named Deacon, proprietor of the Eylesbarrow tin mine in the 1820s, kept a small boat on the mine's reservoir and rowed visitors out across the water for an afternoon's amusement. Below them, in three roughly parallel lodes running east-northeast through the granite, a few dozen miners chased cassiterite by candlelight. Above them, on the rounded summit of the hill called Eylesbarrow itself, two Bronze Age barrows had been holding their dead for some three thousand years. The mine took its name from those barrows. Everything in this corner of southern Dartmoor sits on top of something older.

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Eylesbarrow Mine: Three Lodes in Soft Granite

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. Eylesbarrow's country rock is the standard Dartmoor granite, but the tin lodes here came with a useful bonus. As the mineralizing fluids forced their way through, they triggered extensive metasomatism in the surrounding rock - chemical alteration that turned much of the plagiocla...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Eylesbarrow Mine: The Old Men and the New

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Own Herby talk thyme, CC BY-SA 4.0. Long before the 19th-century shafts went in, generations of earlier tinners had worked the same ground. The valley floor of the upper Plym and its tributaries is torn open by streamworks, the parallel ridges of overturned gravel that mark centuries of washing the riverbeds for ca...

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Image: Own Herby talk thyme | CC BY-SA 4.0

Eylesbarrow Mine: Adits and the Wheel of 1849

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Myself - Herby talk thyme, CC BY-SA 4.0. Four adits - horizontal drainage tunnels - are named in the mine documents. Shallow Adit and Deep Adit both date from about 1815. Shallow Adit is blocked now, its position marked only by a stream that issues from the hillside south of the main track. Deep Adit is still open, its ...

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Image: Myself - Herby talk thyme | CC BY-SA 4.0

Eylesbarrow Mine: Power Sent Sideways

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Myself - Herby talk thyme, CC BY-SA 4.0. A waterwheel works best when bolted directly to the pump it drives. The Eylesbarrow geography did not permit it. The wheel had to sit lower on the hillside where the water was, and the pump had to sit at the shaft head where the mine was, and these were thirty meters apart. The 1...

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Image: Myself - Herby talk thyme | CC BY-SA 4.0

Eylesbarrow Mine: A Mine Without a Map

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Partonez, CC BY-SA 4.0. Eylesbarrow ran in several different shapes through the first half of the 19th century, and by the late 1840s it was running out of money. The lodes had thinned at depth, in the way most Dartmoor lodes did. A company called Aylesborough tried again in 1848 with a few men and a de...

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Image: Partonez | CC BY-SA 4.0