Ironstone mining in Cleveland and North Yorkshire occurred on a sizeable scale from the 1830s to the 1960s in present day eastern parts of North Yorkshire but has been recorded as far back as Roman times in mostly a small-scale and intended for local use. This Cleveland is not to be confused with a smaller area covered by the county of Cleveland from 1974-96.
Around the year 1850, large seams of ironstone were discovered in the Cleveland Hills, later also in and around Rosedale and Eskdale. Mining of these seams accelerated an industry around the River Tees's south eastern banks and around the River Tyne, where many new ironworks were built. Settlements around the Tees and Tyne, especially the Cleveland town of Middlesbrough (on the Tees) as iron and steel processing centres. These received large amounts of ironstone, first by ship and later by railway. The industry experienced a meteoric rise, in the space of twenty years (by 1870), ironstone from the Cleveland part of Yorkshire was supplying 38% of the steel and iron requirements of Britain.
Ironstone workings in Yorkshire's Cleveland declined from the 1930s onwards, imported iron ore was able to be shipped in vast quantities to the quaysides at Middlesbrough and on the Tyne. The last commercially operated ironstone mine was near Skelton-in-Cleveland, the North Skelton Mine, closed in January 1964. Restoration programmes have remediated some mine sites and they have been opened to public access, mine water has polluted some watercourses in the area.
History
Table of output (1857–1880) The list covers all the ironstone mines in the Cleveland Ironstone Formation, and as such, extends into parts of North Yorkshire that were not traditionally designated as being in Cleveland. The list only covers areas of productive ironstone mining, and so does not include test areas (ie Goldsborough on the North Yorkshire coast where drilling was undertaken for three years from 1912). Ironstone production helped fuel the industrial revolution with smelters and ironworks in Middlesbrough accounting for 33% of iron and steel production in Britain in 1865. By 1870, Britain was supplying about half of all the iron and steel across the world; 38% of that, was made from iron mined in the Cleveland Hills and North Yorkshire. The table below shows the combined production of ironstone from the Cleveland Hills between 1857 and 1880.
Early history
Evidence of iron working in the area dates back as far as the Roman times, with an ironworks at Levisham working iron believed to have been sourced from Rosedale. The iron from the Cleveland seams is known to have been worked in Eskdale prior to 1750. A farm at Danby was marked on mapping as Furnace Farm and had evidence of scoria heaps (slag). Other slag heaps have been found in Glaisdale (that pre-date the Victorian ironworks) and Fryup Dale too. Other workings south of Goathland, known as the Killing Pits also show evidence of having been worked in the post-Medieval period, but before the 19th century industrial extraction of ironstone in the area.
Nodules of ironstone were quarried from the beaches and cliffs between Staithes and Kettleness since the 1830s, but this was at the mercy of the weather and the tides as the ironstone was transported by sea. Most of the ironstone collected on the Yorkshire Coast was shipped to ironworks in, and around, the Newcastle area, using sea and river transport for a large part of its journey. When large-scale mining was introduced, most of the mining areas were connected to the railway network either by their own lines or via a narrow gauge railway which connected to main railway network. A small number used direct sea transportation, but in the end, they closed down or converted to railway operation. The growth of the railway system in North Yorkshire actually led to the discovery of ironstone in the area, when the Whitby and Pickering Railway reached Grosmont in 1835, with shipping of ironstone from Grosmont, via the railway, then ship from Whitby harbour, in 1836.