This was an experiment to see if a mid-week daytime walk would attract any participants.  It did, 11 on the walk (could have been more, a further 2 missed the start point and one had to cancel).

It was also an experiment from the leader’s perspective, claiming limited knowledge and welcoming corrections and additions from the participants.  That aspect worked out OK too.

It was a pleasant woodland walk of about 7km featuring, as well as some items of lead-processing interest and extractive industries, other natural resources and non mining historical features dating as far back as 2-3000 BC.

A map and full details are available on this web site to logged-in members as a PDF.

The Society is pleased to announce that one of the Heritage Open Day events in the Derbyshire Peak District will be held at the Magpie lead mine, near Sheldon, on Sunday 16th September 2018.

The day’s events will include:
– guided tours of the buildings and other surface features of the mine. Tours take place on the hour from 11.00am to 4.00pm, with the last tour starting at 4.00pm. (Tours last about 1 hour). No booking required – just turn up on the day.
– light refreshments including tea and coffee

There is no charge for entry or for the guided tours but donations to PDMHS to help fund the upkeep of the site are most welcome. Continue reading →

The PDMHS web site was offline for 10 hours on 11 July. The webmaster spotted the problem within a few minutes and raised a support ticket with our web host CWCS.  They found that a cluster of servers was affected. Rebuilding and restoring from backups then took about 10 hours. To put it in context this represents 99.9% availability on an annual basis against a target of 99.99%. Although regrettable, even business critical computer systems do experience occasional technical issues and reliability remains far better than, for example, TSBs recent 5 day outage.

Emails sent to PDMHS addresses will have been delayed until the server recovered.

CWCS maintains backup copies of all web sites they host but in addition we take our own daily off-site copy of the PDMHS site.  This places us in the position that, should the need arise, we could restore the web site to a different hosting service.

Dr Ivor Brown was a pioneer in the documentation of Yorkshire’s coal mining heritage.  He wrote or contributed to numerous articles in PDMHS Bulletin of Mining History.

The Friends of The Ironbridge Gorge Museums and the Shropshire Caving & Mining Club are holding a day of talks and films in memory of Dr Ivor Brown, Saturday 27th October 2018 in the Glass Classroom, Ironbridge Gorge Museum Offices, Coalbrookdale. Details here.