Most museums about industry settle for displaying the tools. Killhope went further: when the original underground workings turned out to be too collapsed for visitors, the museum built a new mine. The rock walls of the artificial workings are fibreglass casts, taken not just from Killhope but also from the mines at nearby Nenthead, then assembled into a tunnel that looks and feels - in the cold underground dark - exactly like the real thing. It is the kind of curatorial decision that only makes sense when you understand that the real thing was made by people walking miles every day in the rain to break ore from a Pennine hillside.
The North of England Lead Mining Museum stands at the head of Weardale, alongside the Killhope Burn about four kilometres upstream of Cowshill in County Durham. It is reached by the A689, the road that climbs west out of Stanhope and then drops down the other side toward Alston in Cumbria - a route that crosses some of the bleakest moorland in England. The museum is in the heart of the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which in 2003 became the first UNESCO Geopark in Great Britain in recognition of its geological significance. The museum is open every day from 1 April to 31 October, then closes for winter, when the weather here can make a visit unsafe. A summer bus service runs up Weardale to Cowshill and, on request, the last few miles to Killhope itself.
From 1818, mining in upper Weardale was controlled by W. B. Lead Co, a company established by the Blacketts - a prominent Newcastle family who had leased the mining rights from the Bishop of Durham. In 1853 W. B. Lead began driving the Park Level Mine, the tunnel around which the modern museum is built. As they pushed in, they intersected eleven separate mineral veins. The surface buildings expanded to match. In 1858 a "mineshop" was built so miners could sleep on site rather than walking miles in and out each day from villages down the dale. In 1862 came the storage bays - the "bouse teams" - where raw lead ore (called "bouse") was kept, along with the washing rakes that separated ore from waste using running water. In 1878, just after the mine struck its richest vein, the Park Level Mill was brought into operation to speed up the washing. At the centre of the mill was a single great piece of engineering: the Killhope Wheel.
The Killhope Wheel is a 33-foot-diameter cast-iron waterwheel - the visual signature of the museum, now restored and working again. In its prime, it powered the crushing and washing machinery that processed the ore from eleven veins. The timing of its installation was disastrous. Almost as soon as the Park Level Mill came online, the price of lead plummeted, undercut by cheaper imports from abroad. In 1883 W. B. Lead closed all its operations in the district. Weardale Lead took over Park Level and kept it running until 1910, when production ceased. The mine was briefly reopened in 1916 during the First World War, then abandoned. For more than sixty years it lay derelict. The buildings crumbled. Anything portable was salvaged for scrap. The Killhope Wheel rusted in the dale.
When restoration began, the plan was to reopen the original Park Level workings to visitors. The first 100 metres of tunnel were sound enough to be used as an access route, but beyond that the rock was badly collapsed and unsafe. The decision was made to build a new mine instead - a chamber excavated from the surface, lined with fibreglass casts taken from real rock surfaces at Killhope and at Nenthead, faithfully reproducing the textures and appearance of the original. Combined with the restored Killhope Wheel, the bouse teams, the washing floors, and the mineshop, the result is a working interpretation of how a Victorian lead mine actually operated. The museum opened in 1984. In 2004 it won the inaugural Guardian Family-Friendly Museum Award. In 2008 it was named the North East's Small Visitor Attraction of the Year. Killhope sits in a chain of North Pennines mining heritage sites that runs from Allenheads in Northumberland to Nenthead in Cumbria - a high, remote arc of country that once produced a quarter of the world's lead, and now shows how it did so to anyone willing to drive up Weardale.
Coordinates 54.783 N, 2.273 W, at the head of Weardale at around 1,500 feet above sea level. The museum's restored 33-foot Killhope Wheel and the long line of stone buildings beside the Killhope Burn are recognisable from low altitude in good light. Best viewed at 3,000-4,000 feet AGL. Nearest ICAO airport: EGNT (Newcastle), about 30 nm to the north-east; EGNC (Carlisle Lake District) is about 30 nm to the north-west.