I originally went to look at a pump house, but it was empty so I downloaded a few maps, skimmed the Historic England listing and spent the rest of the day looking at the remains of the lead mines that surround it. Photos are mostly phone. Presser Pump House. The original pump house dewatered the mines below using a double acting hydraulic engine. Thanks in part to improvements by Armstrong these were competitive with steam engines in terms of power and a lot cheaper to run if there was enough water. The current building, which incorporates part of the older structure, was constructed in 1906 by the Consett Water Company as an emergency water supply from the now flooded mines below. Walking round the outside. The pumping shaft is behind the fence - the beam from the steam engine would have come out of the bricked up opening. Former boiler room, empty except for some recent scraps. The entire ground floor of the pump room is taken up by a large lump of masonry, the filled-in remains of the original structure, so you have to go up some stairs to get to where the steam engine lived. This would make a nice house if you got rid of the large lump on the pumping side - indeed planning permission for residential conversion was granted, but has lapsed. Derwent Mines. Like most mining areas the history is long and complicated and is treated at length in an NMRS monograph (#70). The main feature from an exploring point of view is that these were shaft mines with ore being raised from well below the valley floor so there was unlikely to be much accessible underground. Starting from the pump house I did an anticlockwise tour, heading first to the dotted yellow line, which is the remains of a cut and cover tunnel for pumping rods. At the end of the tunnel is the capped shaft and some rubble from the steam engine chimney. Moving down to check out some levels (red dots), there was no getting into the first one (Shilford Haugh Level). The next one, Deborah Level, looked more promising but was gated - a couple of large subsidences further up the hill suggest it may be collapsed further in. Down by the stream is a culvert coming from under the site of an ore processing mill - it doesn’t go far, with a couple of other waterways joining. continued
The pump house is circled in red below, with the four main mining areas in white (Jeffery or Presser, Ramshaw, Whiteheaps, Sikehead).
The name presser is said to be a corruption of pressure, as in hydraulic pressure engine.
It originally contained a steam engine, then an electrical pump and has been disused for decades.
Nothing up here except boxes of borehole samples and the remains of one of those smelly Valour paraffin stoves.
Soot stains from the boilers can still be seen above bricked up openings.
However there were potentially explorable adits/levels intersecting the shafts, used mainly for access and haulage.
The shaft at the end (Taylor’s shaft) was pumped by a waterwheel down in the valley via these rods (‘flatrods’) before a steam engine was installed.
I hadn’t realised such long runs of rods were practical; the pairs of little posts carried rollers on which the rods moved back and forth.
This level connected to the Presser shaft, so the hydraulic engine would have been installed near the junction with the water running out here.
The stream, Bolt’s Burn, powered the machinery before steam engines arrived and is culverted at various points up the valley - the last picture shows a downstream culvert.
