Visit to Roughton Gill, August 2010

About a month ago, I went on a little quick trip to Roughton Gill, one of the UK's most famous mineral localities, with my good friends Tom and Asia from Spirifer Minerals in Poland. Unfortunately there is a heavy-handed policy by the Lake District National Parks Authority banning collecting from most of the important mineral sites within the Caldbeck Fells.

You can (and I have) get permission to access the so-called 'Green zones' which to be honest don't contain anything much nowdays. The important sites are either in the 'Amber' zones (very difficult to get permission to collect) or the 'Red' zone (where no-one can get access). Roughton Gill spans the amber and red zones, so collecting is, for us at least, off limits.

Now's not the time to have a political discussion on the rights and wrongs of this... well, maybe it is. Collectors do hardly any damage compared to the natural elements. If the Park Authority were protecting their most precious sites from the wind, rain and snow then I'd have more sympathy for their attitude. As it is, they are just letting it all crumble to dust...

Thankfully, most things of any real interest were saved from the mines and from the dumps in the many years prior to the new rulings, and plenty of specimens are available.

But we didn't want to cause trouble. So we set off without hammers and tools, just with our cameras and Tom's trusty umbrella.



As we walked along the path towards Roughton Gill, the cloud was low, and we wondered if we were going to get very lost, very wet, or both.



Some of the path is obviously made from mine dump material, here's a piece I picked up from the path (and put back!) showing copper secondary minerals in, probably, a baryte matrix.



The lack of collecting was made up for considerably by the wonderful scenery. Here's Asia taking photos.



As we finally arrive at the extensive old workings, the cloud is clearing and it looks like it's going to be a good day.



There are extensive mine tips at Roughton Gill, of course even though we are not allowed to collect, we can look at what's around, and there's plenty of signs of copper secondaries, malachite, etc, probably great potential still for micro material, if that's your thing. But, I wasn't really prepared to risk a fine for microminerals!



Here's Tom and Asia walking up towards the mine entrance, near the waterfall.



A view down the valley, the trip here was certainly worthwhile even without the ability to collect, simply because of the amazing views.



And then we moved on to the east, towards the old Mexico mine.



Here we are standing on the upper dumps of the Mexico mine, which looked pretty barren from my initial superficial check. Tom, however, found something non-mineralogical that he was able to craftily pick up with his umbrella.



While we were standing on the Mexico mine dump, we looked down to see a group of people collecting minerals on the Roughton Gill dumps! How dare they! Well they were members of the Russell Society (as I am), we met them at the car park and they did have the appropriate Amber permit to allow collecting there. We had a nice chat about minerals before heading off to Weardale, which is the subject of an article yet to come!

---

In order to leave comments to this article, you must be registered