Warren Moor Mine from Kildale

History

This short walk goes from Kildale station along quiet roads and tracks to Warren Moor Mine, a remote ironstone mine that the National Park Authority calls remarkably well preserved, with mine shafts, boiler and pump houses, railway lines and a tall square chimney. In the mid-19th century ironworks around Middlesbrough were expanding fast and ironstone was being sought across Cleveland and North Yorkshire. A survey of the Kildale Estate in 1857 found a thin seam of low iron content, and the prospecting company, Bell Brothers, declined a lease. Drift mining began there by April 1865 under John Watson and a group of southern investors, and in January 1866 Watson took a 42-year lease on 1,500 acres and formed the Warren Moor Mine company; two shafts were started and the boiler house chimney was finished by the end of 1866.

By June 1868 the company was in financial difficulty and the Kildale Estate took the site back. A second company, the Leven Vale Company, took a lease in September 1872 and built a row of cottages but made little progress on the shafts, and it went into receivership in 1874, which ended ironstone mining at Warren Moor. The cottages were pulled down by village volunteers in 1927 and their stone used for the village hall. The Authority's account draws on John Owen's excavation of the site in 1979 and his paper in the Cleveland Industrial Archaeologist in 1981, and its Land of Iron project, between 2016 and 2021, conserved the remains and put up interpretation.