A Tinners Mill

If you love Dartmoor and have any interest at all in industrial archeology then the remains of tin mining is spread all over the moor for you to find. The best illustrated book of old mining techniques is "de re metallica" written by Georgius Agricola and publishes a year after his death in 1556 and still available from Amazon.

Today I visited the Outcombe Mine not far from Burrator, here there is loads of evidence to suggest that a small hut on the site was a Stamping Mill in which the tin ore was crushed prior to smelting. To crush the ore it was placed on a block of granite and placed under a stamping machine which is illustrated in the small illustration from Agricola's book. The continuous blows from the stamps wore a depression in the granite block which after a while was thrown away and replaced by a new block. The floor of this small hut is covered by the remains of used blocks and some are even build into a wall near by, there is no evidence I can find of a Blowing house, where the crushed ore was smelted but there is a shaft and an adit with a small length of rail track.

This interest in Tin Mining has taken me all over the moor trying to locate the sites of the various workings and to attempt to interpenetrate what you can still see on the ground.
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