"UK showing location of Stanhope (Red Dot)"

"Area Map of Stanhope"   Stanhope is the `capital' of Weardale and its Anglo-Saxon name, meaning `stony valley', is a good description of the Wear and the burns in the area.   Like many towns in the North Pennine dales, Stanhope grew most significantly in the nineteenth century as a lead mining centre, but is unmistakably a dalestown.

Relics of lead mining can be found in all the `lead dales' but the most imposing reminder, is the great lead crushing mill known as Kilhope wheel, on the remote Killhope Burn in Upper Weardale.  Killhope wheel, wrought in iron and forty feet in diameter, is now part of a lead mining museum and is the most complete lead mining site in Britain.   The museum includes a lead mine and a `mine shop' where there is a reconstruction of the lead miner's sleeping quarters.

Miners would have slept in these quarters for the whole of the working week and would only have returned to their homes further down the dale, at weekends.   Other important relics of Lead mining in the region can be found in the Weardale side valley of the Rookhope Burn.   Here we may trace the course and remains of the two mile long Rookhope Chimney.   This was a massive stone flue which carried dangerous toxic fumes across the moors away from the lead smelter at Lintzgarth near Rookhope village.   A great stone arch can be seen nearby, which once supported the chimney, it resembles a ruined stone bridge that leads to nowhere and crosses nothing at all.

While the eastern part of County Durham was part of the Great Northern coalfield, the dales in the western part of the county were once just as important for their lead.  Since Roman times, this lead had been exploited in Weardale and the northern Pennines and perhaps it is worth noting that Hadrian's Wall divides the northern fringe of the North Pennine lead field, from the less mineral rich Northumbrian hills to the north.   From the thirteenth century lead mining in the Durham dales was encouraged by the Prince Bishops who profited from the mining of the ore.

The heyday of lead mining in the region was not however until the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth centuries, when the North Pennine lead field was arguably the most important in the world.  The North Pennine lead field was bordered in the east by the Durham coalfield, in the south by the Stainmore Gap and in the north by the Tyne Gap.   The main valleys of this area were Teesdale, South Tynedale, the Allendales, Derwentdale and at the centre, Weardale, collectively they were known as the `Lead Dales'.

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