Garlock Hits the Road [Part 3]: Swaledale's Heavy History

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)It's green and pastoral along the river in Swaledale, where my Coast to Coast walk took me last Tuesday, but in the blasted hills above, it's a very different, and far uglier story. Lead has been mined here since before the Roman times, but the real "gold rush" came during the Industrial Revolution, when the introduction of gunpowder blasting led to dramatic increases in lead mining's productivity. Lead was widely used for many years in plumbing, ship-building, roofing, as well as glass, pottery and paint. By the mid-19th century, Britain was producing over half the world's lead and a full 10% of that came from the Yorkshire mines. But most of the men who blasted and dug the lead out of the earth saw little return for their backbreaking labor. They worked deep underground for days, sometimes weeks, in cramped, damp, unsanitary and hazardous conditions that increasingly injured and killed them. Many of the workers did not even own their own tools, forced to rent them from company agents. Then, over the space of about a decade at the end of the 19th century, the industry collapsed, as the lead ran out and cheap foreign imports undercut the domestic industry. The workers left for the coal mines around Durban, or went to London and North America in search of jobs. The region survives now on farming and tourism, but the crumbling ruins of lead smelting mines, populated now only by sheep and rabbits, still dot the hills of Swaledale, and the hills -- barren moonscapes of blasted rock -- still bear the raw scars of this brutal history. Union City Managing Editor Chris Garlock and his wife Lisa are nearing the end of their 200-mile Coast to Coast walk across England , celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary and raising funds for the CSA (Union Cities Mobilizer's 200-mi UK Walk to Raise Funds for CSA's Emergency Assistance Fund UC 4/17/2013) - report/photos by Chris Garlock; based on reports in "A Coast To Coast Walk" by Alfred Wainwright and "Coast to Coast Path" by Henry Stedman