Plan to save historic upland sites in North East
Mar 16 2009 by Tony Henderson, The Journal
WORK is planned to help preserve two historic upland sites in the North East.
The measures will protect the remains of Low Slit lead mine in Weardale and Rowantree Stob bastle house in Allendale in Northumberland.
The North Pennines buildings represent the changing fortunes of the North East from the hazards of Border farming in the 17th Century to the lead mining heyday of the 19th Century.
Natural England is funding the essential repair work needed to prevent further deterioration to the two important regional heritage sites and is working with the farmers who own the sites, and English Heritage.
Low Slit Mine near Westgate, a scheduled ancient monument, was active in medieval times and was last in operation in the 19th Century.
Features which survive include the stone base for one of Lord Armstrongs hydraulic engines which served as a winding engine for the mine shaft, a pit which held an earlier water wheel, a row of bouseteams or bays where miners stored their ore, and an ore washing and dressing floor where water was used to separate the heavy lead ore from lighter waste minerals.
There are also the remains of the mine lodging shop and other buildings.
The mine reservoir also survives above the site.
As well as being a nationally important industrial heritage site, the mine is also part of a site of special scientific interest, designated partly for its unusual lead tolerant plants, such as spring sandwort.
Natural Englands historic environment advisor Tom Gledhill, who lives in Rookhope, said that sandwort was also called leadwort by miners because its habit of growing on lead veins highlighted where to dig.
Rowantree Stob is a picturesque ruin near Spartylea in Allendale and has many of the features of a bastle house, the thick-walled defensive farm houses with living spaces above a byre, which were a feature of the Border region in the 16th and 17th Centuries.
The letters TR are carved into the doorway and these are probably the initials of a relation of Margaret Rowle who is recorded as a tenant at Rowndetreestob in 1608.
