The Lost Copper Mines Of The Lake District | Time Team | Timeline

hi everybody and welcome to this documentary on timeline my name is Dan snow and I will tell you about history hit TV it's like the Netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians we've got an exclusive offer available to fans of timeline if you go to history hit TV you can either follow the information below this video or just Google history hit TV and use the code timeline you get a special introductory offer go and check it out in the meantime enjoy this video these are the once-mighty colistin copper works one of the deepest and most extensive copper mines in england some of these shafts were started 400 years ago in the time of Queen Elizabeth the first history tells us that a brave band of Tudor miners lived and died here to extract the Earth's precious metal nobody really knows what this place looked like back then in fact archaeologists hardly know anything about Elizabethan mines at all so we've come here to look for the origins of Queen Elizabeth's mine and to unearth the story of the men and women whose blood sweat and tears helped build modern Britain it's a quest which will take us higher and deeper than we've ever done before [Music] battling some of the most extreme conditions we've faced in 20 years of time team [Music] time team is in the Lake District our destination the mountains of Coniston and their copper mines we're about to embark on one of the most physically demanding digs we've ever attempted in the wettest summer for a hundred years in charge is site director Francis Pryor and his right-hand man Phil Harding a veteran of over 200 time team digs and they're willing to brave the mountain because we're here to investigate a Tudor copper mine something few have ever dug before I was thinking you know if you were a shooter miner you had to get up here even before you start a day's work imagine doing this with horses Phil this is as rough a road as I've ever been I think yeah yeah yeah you haven't been to Wiltjer yeah they think good about doing at the a303 lately you know [Laughter] sorry Phil there's still a long way to go we're heading to a rocky outcrop almost one and a half thousand feet above sea level to a huge opencast mine on the slopes of Coniston old man it sits overlooking a small mountain lake called Leivers water which acts as a reservoir for the village below see you later Oh still raining Oh but heavy rain overnight has turned the reservoirs gentle we're into a torrential waterfall so we've ripped up a wire to help us get the kit and a team of 40 archaeologists cavers and cameraman across there's a real kick to this river you feel exactly would be pushed right over there if you're not careful can we're not there yet [Music] almost two hours later and everyone's made it there are nearly two dozen abandoned mines scattered across these mountains it's possible the people have been digging for copper here for thousands of years but the first known commercial operation started during the late 1500s later generations of mining were thought to have obliterated most of the early tudor structures that went with it such as workshops scaffolding and water powered machines but a few years ago the Lake District National Park Authority asked for a detailed survey around one mine in particular and it appeared to reveal a tantalizing glimpse into life 400 years ago shall we dig half and we leave in half and we come out to their beautiful yep hey Francis fantastic view well these are the sort of key mystery up here we think they may be miners huts they could be for living they could be restoring tools we honestly don't know but what they often have on one of these funny alcoves on the outside which this thing here yeah exactly now that that seems to be part of the dressing process of the or actually preparing it so I'm hoping that Phil will actually be able to show us that this was a looser Beason our two buildings sit on top of a rocky outcrop just a few metres away from a massive copper mine which we know was being worked in the late 1500s our first challenge is to find out when they were built so we start by opening a trench inside both our second task is to work out what the buildings were used for there are a lot of unusual stones around here and we think they might have been used in the buildings to process raw copper when the bright green mineral from the mine was broken up into smaller pieces by hand or crushed it looks like a lump of rock but it's got this dip in it here this was used for grinding or up with a bit like we're using kitchens today we have a mortal and Pettifer ground in food in these conditions we're only gonna get a few hours digging and everything has to be done by hand and as the morning wears on a thick cloud descends across the mountain believe it or not there's actually a huge lake down there but we've hardly seen a glimmer of it all day the cloud keeps coming in starting to disappear coming in again it's practically lunchtime only these lunch time actually what I feel has only been able to to clear this much of turf what do you think you've got Phil well I'm very very optimistic about what we can see here because you can actually see that the surface that were standing on the the inside if you like of the building if that's what it is is actually higher than the land surface around it the reason is that the building is full up with this very small dressing debris now that is good from my point of view because it means that this stuff has been brought in and there is an increased likelihood that objects which will date all this activity have also been brought in you know I'm starting to think about already half of our people have gone down to lunch we're gong to have to go down pretty soon if we're gonna have anything we've hardly done any archaeology at all the weather is dreadful the stones are really hard to shift are we going to be able to do the amount of archaeology we need to do I don't think we'll be able to do as much archaeology as we normally do in other words I don't think we'll get as many trenches or big trenches but I think nevertheless we will do good archaeology yeah you always know you write copper mining as an industry was virtually non-existent in England until Tudor times but in 1564 a small enterprising operation was set up in nearby Kazik followed 30 years later by the one in Coniston we've set up camp inside the local mountaineering club where I catch up with historian Susie Lipscomb who decided on this notion that there should be a tutor business in copper extraction up in the Lake District he was actually Elizabeth the first and we have this Charter here from her with her name and big letters at the top and she asked over to people to set it up for her Daniel Hostetter and Thomas Fernand no Thomas Erland was an Englishman but Daniel Hostetter as it says here was a german-born at this time the Germans were the foremost in the world when it came to mining whether it's tin or lead or copper they knew how to dig deep well shafts they knew how to smelt copper ore they knew what they were doing why was digging up copper in Cumberland important to Queen Elizabeth well copper itself was quite useful out of copper you could make printing plates clocks a strong items or bits of jewelry but above all copper plus tin equaled bronze and bronze was important because you could make cannon out of it so Henry the eighth that great warship when the Mary Rose that went down went down with bronze cannons on it when this document was drawn up which was 1564 it wasn't really a great time as threats but by the time they came to dig in Coniston actually which is what the late part of the sixteenth century of course you've had the Spanish Armada so Elizabeth needed all the weaponry that she could get and what she needed in Bothwell was not to depend on foreign imports but to depend on her own lands so by $15.99 a hundred and fifty miners had arrived here in Coniston most of them skilled Germans from what is today the Austrian Tyrol we think that the big mind they started is too dangerous to dig but we do want to have a look at it so we've brought in some experts of our own the local caving Society who by chance have come across our first find it is actually pretty dangerous doing archaeology down a place like this isn't it it is and I certainly wouldn't have been roped up certainly in Elizabethan times so what's the dangers nowadays the dangers at the moment are that were standing on rubble which could be on the collar false lock so you can just go wolf down we could so show us this find you've got what's that it's a piece of slate we don't know the date of this yeah but that suggests that potentially the buildings up above us or at you roofed with slate Oh so actually that that is quite useful music 500 yards come on have a look alright yeah see I always think of a mine as a tunnel or something opencast but it is just a gash in the rock isn't it it is and the sunk down from surface and then worked it out yeah but then probably lifted all the material up above you're on a day like this you really can't imagine how awful it must have been for the Elizabethan miners but in winter it was to be an even worse and all of it would be done by hand it would there's a beatings with the hammer and chisel every piece in here had to be lifted out by hand no machine reused at all and it's incredibly difficult when these mines were started the idea of using machines or explosives like today hadn't even been thought of we started the day by thinking that our buildings were for the next stage in the process when the rot was broken up or crushed and anything that didn't contain copper was thrown away but Francis has another idea heck of a lot of sort of burnt stuff in here don't you think I mean I think that's been really heated up I think that it sort of got sort of bubbles in the surface you know what I'm think is that this might be I don't know a smelting fireplace furnace something like that workshop area but but but big temperatures [Music] this still looks more or less to me like a great big pile of rock but you guys I've been getting quite excited about what we're getting very excited about it Tony because there is actually structure here and there is evidence for more than one period this is actually a very complicated building I can see no hint of structure what have we got into structure I draw your picture so what we have is a building that's either subdivided of two buildings next door to each other focused and use in those boulders as one edge of it definitely got the building we've got this lovely lintel here that's my favorite bit what might that be about well originally we thought well that's got to be a fireplace and we started finding a load of ashy material in it but as IANS taken it back the ashy material is extended right across the floor and if that was a fireplace - where's the floor yes right we just don't know big question mark every big question mark million-dollar question is it Elizabeth well there's nothing yet to suggest that it isn't turning so a rare Elizabethan Forge a workshop for breaking up or or something else entirely [Music] tomorrow Francis takes our hunt for Queen Elizabeth's Mines to the other side of the mountain looking for a lost Tudor mining machine Cassy tries out life as a 16th century copper miner and the brave GF is team descend into the mine itself beginning of day two here in the Lake District where we're hunting for an Elizabethan copper mine yesterday we found two buildings at the top of this mountain which might be workshops but Francis our site director thinks they're far too small to have been used on an industrial scale so this morning he's leading part of the team elsewhere he's taken the decision to open a second site stretching our resources to the limit what's this crazy plan all about it's not so crazy Tony I never do anything crazy it's well advised we know they've got mines over there yeah right now mines aren't producing copper out of the ground they're producing all and the whole process that happens once the materials out of the ground is about smashing up the ore so that you can eventually smelt it now this is the area where we think the mills were that did this crusher there's a power source in the stream I think there's every chance of finding what we call a stamp mill down there Stuart what is a stamping mill well I could describe in great detail but could also show you a drawing that's beautiful this is actually taken from a late 16th century book it's a chose the techniques being applied in Central Europe at the time and we know we've got German mines on this site so we'd have an expectation of something similar to this so this is Elizabethan at least it's the Elizabethan period in it is indeed yeah what we've got is a shoot here which will bring water to drive a waterwheel the waterwheel turns an axle and as the axle turns it drives these vertical posts which have got iron shoes on the bottom and then they pound they are and what they're trying to do is break they waste rock off and end up with sighs about big walnut sighs so if we find bits of or about that walnut size will that be sufficiently diagnostic to tell us that what we've got is an Elizabethan stamping method right yeah absolutely because later on as the technology improves they can grind them into smaller and smaller pieces so we're going to put in a trench just like we would anywhere else well yeah sort of tiny I mean the big problem is that I don't think anyone have they steward has ever Duggar established not in this part of the world notnot so beautiful stamped little no Matt you're going to excavate the site the like of which no one has ever done before so here's the plan for day two we're going to be looking for a stamp mill which we know from the records stood at a place called cobblers level it's quite a gamble because it's more than half a kilometer from site one where we've barely scratched the surface here we've got two Huff's the larger of which might be an open fronted workshop that's kind of Forge the frogs this clearly can't be in two places at once so he's got to delegate some authority to a manager well as a manager I resign with me I'm resigning I'm definitely resigned egg they say some have greatness thrust upon them and as Francis sets off a newly promoted Phil Harding heads over to trench one to look at a piece of clay pipe our first find of the day yeah just come out from where Tom and rich have been working yeah plate but judging by the actual diameter of the hole here in the stem I think it's probably later okay so tobacco's brought in in the Elizabethan period but you don't think well that's an Elizabethan post and I think it's probably a bit later than that hungry a couple of hundred years later than that the sheer fact that we've got one object which we can probably put a date to is really important sitting up here on top of a cold wet mountain of - of tobacco to smoke well I said I mean you know let's be honest let's be honest probably the only comfort you're likely to get up here on a cruel day is a pipe yeah so we know our buildings were built at least as far back as the late 1600s but what were they used for we called in Jerry MacDonald one of the country's leading experts on ancient metalworking and he's not impressed by our Forge idea he thinks we've mistaken natural black rock for burnt material but Jerry's much more excited by our mortar stones this is not why I was expecting Phil sorry but when you said mortar stones that especially something real yeah because of the period we've talked about some really pretty large because you precious in quite a lot of all these are pathetically small they're good they're good because I think one message is small-scale okay now the two interpretations of that are either very early working I Eve got a small-scale local farmer the Saxon period or I need a Roman period the only other thing is yes they're associated with the later workings but they use for a saying so what you do is you put up piled a bit of charcoal in there lit it and put in some way door and with a little blowpipe you could reduce that copper autumn metal so you'd weigh the copper or before it went in weigh the metal that came out and then you know how good the quality of your is so it could be yeah Elizabethan or later but firstly you've got Oh analyzing yeah well have a go analyzing them so we don't have a forge but perhaps we've got a workshop for a saying when small bits of copper ore were tested for their quality Jerry's going to test both the stones and our trench with a sophisticated bit of kit an x-ray gun which can sniff out any traces of enriched copper but it seems that large-scale or crushing was happening elsewhere and over at cobblers level Francis is looking for a water-powered machine which did this called a stamp mill we certainly know that the German miners built a stamp mill here because it became rather unpopular it is quite extraordinary isn't it there in this this beautiful setting there would have been what must have been a fairly major industrial process yeah and it's an industrial process that produces industrial waste we've got this court case perhaps the first recorded court case of environmental pollution it's against Daniel Hostetter who's managing this site and it involves john fleming who's a local gentleman and the tenant farmers and what he's saying is that because of the stamp house the copper ore coming out of it is making the water here so money and corrupt that it's over flowing over the land leaving the ground full of corruption and leaving the crops utterly decayed and wasted they've lost two-thirds of their previous year's crops did the farmers win they did Daniel Hostetter had to pay a hundred and forty five pounds in compensation to them which would have been a heck of a lot of money in those days it certainly wasn't it's really interesting isn't it the fact that we've got environmental pollution and industrial processes happening here a long time before the Industrial Revolution it's really exciting to think that we could be digging the remains of a forgotten industrial revolution but over on site one we've had a bit of a setback we're starting to find a lot of Victorian rubble which looks like it's been drilled by machine and Jerry can't tell if our building was used for a saying so your sapper can tell us what's in the rock yeah what it's doing is it's firing a beam of x-rays into the rock and those x-rays excite the atoms that are present in the rock and they respond effectively by sending out an x-ray characteristic of that element and we detect that but we're only really concentrating on we called the metals copper tin lead etc so really what I was looking for was to see whether we got enhanced copper left over from the or crushing in here the answer is no because probably the weathering over the years so as we reach our halfway point it's beginning to look like we've seriously underestimated the complexity of the archeology here could this be one dig when three days really isn't long enough afternoon day two here in the Lake District and although we were working here all day yesterday this is the first time any of us have seen that lovely little Lake which is called leavers water because the cloud cover was so heavy what has just come up though is this extraordinary find it's a flying mask or a flying helmet from the first half of the 20th century and what it's doing here we don't know except there was some kind of air crash over there in the Second World War so maybe it's something to do with that we just don't know but that kind of epitomizes the problem that we've been having we've got all sorts of interesting bits and bobs but no evidence that can date these structures to Elizabethan times which is what we're trying to do [Music] we'll probably never know if the flying hat belonged to the crew of the Halifax bomber which crashed here in 1944 but it's a poignant reminder of the dangers of these mountains after a morning spent looking for an Elizabethan stamp mill Francis has arrived back on site Phil has made an alarming discovery and he wants the boss to take a look Phil this morning I said I'd come and check up on you well that's what I'm doing tell me what have you found well what we've had to do is dig through all this this through this rubble and what we've been able to find is that that is all probably Marie eighteen to 19th century what's this feel it it looks for all the world like a charged whole it is Frances it's where somebody has actually drilled a hole in the rock to fill up with dynamite and blow the rock apart to actually get the copper ore now that piece with the drill hole came off of that spoil tip over there we've found similar drill holes and spoil tips over there it is consistent with all these spoil tips one thing which is certain is that that idea that all these brown spoil tips might be Elizabethan is a bit of a red herring so what we still don't actually know yet is when these buildings were put up so there is a lot to answer in the book just over a day mining at Coniston became much more intensive during the 1800s when new owners took over but until now we thought the Victorians had largely ignored our mine but it's clear they were drilling holes with machines and detonating large amounts of explosives using our buildings to safely contain all the rubble this generated mining is by its very nature a hugely destructive activity could it have obliterated the Tudor archaeology Tudor miners didn't drill holes or use gunpowder they preferred old-fashioned methods Kassie's going to try out some of the tools they used on the local granite so if you want to choose your weapon okay I think I'm gonna go for the shop and just working yeah I really flex up you can tell immediately it's just jumping straight back at you I don't get so you gotta remember they're working into the night up there is only quite a lot closer because you're actually standing quite far back having exposed the mineral we can perhaps get a chisel into have a go at trying to expand a crack heavy but it's quite as people so you've got your lump of all now asking for another 12 it took an Elizabethan pic man a week to drive forwards just one foot and they were paid between two and eight shillings of bucket depending on the quality of the ore it was a dangerous business men used brute force in near total darkness and our mine Simon's Nick is named after a miner who died working in it our biggest fear about digging here has always been that the mine has a rotten wooden floor hidden beneath all this rubble so we've asked the brave geophysics team to check how safe it is you both okay down there fine yep there's a short section on this first bit that we could do maybe sort of five or six meters if there is a false floor here the team should pick it up with their ground-penetrating radar but there seems to be a change we have seen here which may just be a facet of this pile that yeah that's a stock map let's just hope it doesn't end up being renamed Jimmy or Emma's Nick it's now late afternoon and over at cobblers level matt has just uncovered a curious cobbled floor and as I asked landscape investigator Stewart Ainsworth to take a look to see how things are going pretty good actually you can see that we've taken off the turf here and almost directly underneath is this cobbled surface and of course the first question is could that be the floor of the stamping well I mean the thing with the stamp mill you've got this big frame with these stamps going up on form you can't do it on where it's fragile or or flaky material so this sort of surface is the kind of surface you would expect yeah I think next thing I'm gonna do here is take off some of these cobbles and so have we got the stamp mill we'll only know for sure if Francis's Gamble has paid off tomorrow still perhaps our luck is beginning to change oh that's the real thing that's copper tell me yeah I see yeah right standing there doing nothing that is the green probably of malachite which is a cup of carbonate but also the other colors might well be child pyrite so that's not copper on its own no no this is the or this is the stuff they're searching for right and this is the first case that has come out of an archaeological context at last our first evidence for copper mining it's a huge relief and as we head down the mountain for a well-earned drink we're beginning to understand what's going on here Francie's up until the time we came here I think it's fair to say the general assumption was the awful lot of the workings where we're now exploring were Elizabethan all we got to do was to put in our trenches and interpret them and Bob's your uncle but it hasn't quite worked out like that is it no I mean to be quite honest I think that was all in cloud cookie what you mean yeah no it really was you know I mean virtually everything up the top of that hill that we've been looking at turns out to be Victorian is that true the structure that you've been working it's true everywhere on the top of our Hill Tony I mean the fact is that the whole site is masked by that Victorian mine in debris what are you gonna do to get some grips with all this tomorrow we will get to the bottom of one of those buildings and see if we can get some dating evidence we do have some secure Elizabethan dating don't we this poem because this is in fact 400 years old yeah and there's a great story attached to this as well you know you've been digging up at Simon's Nick original chap called Simon apparently was so successful in mining that everybody suspected something and they brought him down here got him drunk on this stuff to find out the secret and he said actually the secret was he'd given his soul to the fairies or to the devil depending on the account and the very next day up at the mine an explosion went off and he died as a result so you better be careful [Laughter] the morning at day three and no one feels like talking there's a problem we weren't expecting there's a water pipe that runs all the way down this track from the reservoir to Coniston and unfortunate because of the adverse weather conditions and us driving up and down all the time the big stones are moving on the track and the drivers are starting to get worried that we might smash the pipe and if we do then Coniston will run out of water and with every journey the track becomes more dangerous so the decisions taken to send a lot of the team up by foot it's a punishing start to our final day we're trying to build up a picture of Coniston stood a copper mines and to be frank it's not what we expected at all almost everything we've discovered at the top of the mountain appears to be Victorian here we've got two stone huts one with perhaps only three sides we still don't know what they were for or when they were built but we do know that in the mid-1800s they were filled with rubble during this period Coniston was one of the most productive copper mines in Britain generating huge amounts of rubble which needed to be contained to stop at cascading down the mountain yesterday geophys surveyed the mine with radar and they've discovered a similar story basically if I can understand what you're saying you can see the depth of material it's on top of this floor surface but you can't actually see a void below yeah if we look at the raw data I mean we can see there's real variation in the depth of reflections and that seems to be showing how much material is being dumped back into the mine after it went out of use it doesn't mean that the Tudors weren't mining here but it's clear that the 19th century exploitation of this mine was far more destructive than anyone thought but further down on site 2 we think we might have found an Elizabethan machine called a stamp mill which would have crushed the raw copper ore coming from our mind yesterday Mat found a cobbled floor and this morning he's prized up the stones for a closer look well the red dots on the tops marked the top of the cobbles because they're actually a lot deeper than they are wide right so they're really really strong and that's what we think might be it might have been the base for the stamp mill and underneath it we've got all this stuff which is the fine-grained waste which is just the kind of stuff you'd get from a stamp now have you got anything juicy if you like out of there by way of fine yes we've had one find it's not really an artifact as such but look can you see the green there oh yeah look at that so that's the malachite which they have been looking for when they were crushing the or obviously missed a bit and that ended up in the waste but that rather pretty well proves that we've got we're dealing with stamp mill waste there aren't we yeah that's good enough for me yeah the 17th century stamp mill is a major discovery this timber machine would have toiled away crushing the raw copper mineral from probably several mines across the mountain before it could be sent off for smelting we've asked the local caving society to drain the mine closest to the mill using a pump to see if there's anything Elizabethan in there as well the function of this tunnel this tunnel was driven to the vein purely as a drainage tunnel to drain the working is above yeah and also to bring the or out to the stump mill that we think we found outside yeah and the other interesting thing since we drained the tunnel yeah is that we start to see timber in the floor still in situ yeah yeah and what we think the pad is to get the material out of here we think that we'll borrowed it job 24 hours a day and now if you just look in front of you you can start to see the shape of a coffin okay that's what these were known as when they were known as coffin levels battle for your head white lady fish all there's none or your feet as here II so just welcome to the end here yeah the Duchess branches off this right hand branch you can see how it's the VAX you started to work the work the rock and these chippings in the floor is actually from when they were actually working this this mine by this time it was sixteen seventeen this is what I love they talk about evidence of 500 years ago this is almost like snake skin it's so worked while those take some tools isn't it you know it's follow the wheel run back the effort it took to drive this mine 80 yards into the rock is almost unimaginable but this wasn't the only hardship the miners had to endure what if the local people think of all these Germans arriving on their doorstep they weren't so keen there's an account here it talks about the unwillingness of the people in the area because they don't feel they're getting sufficient recompense of their lands and for the damage that's being done and it gets worse the man who sets this all out Daniel hosts better talks especially about one naughty man called Visser nought he's actually quite a serious word in the Elizabethan period and the villainous murdering of Leonarda stalls who's a German who defended himself it says a long space against 20 of them and then they all fell upon him and piteously murdered him so did they stay the Germans or did they shoot other poems as quickly as they could incredibly no they didn't and we know this because we've got parish registers and we can find German names so we've got one Barbary sock mantel here we've got a nice German name up here we've got Margaret home so actually the Germans are staying settling down and remaining in the area the Germans may have stayed but our time here is running out back on site phil has closed down building number one apart from the 17th century clay pipe it's almost completely empty but he's widened his search in our remaining building and found a piece of timber which may be a door I think that's fantastic fill its proper structural timber woodworking timber with sword to it well I know one thing I end up here dentistry roof there's a big investment of labour bringing wood up here what do you know about radiocarbon dating Francis what of it could we get the radiocarbon date there was some like that if it's ordinary household timber then yes I think you get a radiocarbon date it'll certainly tell us if it's not cuter ah well then we better get on an exposure mall I think you better for in fact we did get the piece of wood tested and it turned out to be bang on the money radiocarbon dating confirms that the tree which the door was built from was cut down at least 400 years ago during the reign of Queen Elizabeth or perhaps even earlier so we've got a tude of building but did it belong to the copper miners well after almost three days of hard graft ian has finally found the floor surface for our second building oh it smells of copper you can you can smell it moles of copper yeah you have a sip that's weird you smell the dirt as well funny old tinny almost yeah I've always said Phil Harding can literally smell archaeology but his nose isn't proof enough that this is copper we need something a bit more 21st century it's time for Jerry and his ray gun this suspense is killing ya twenty percent twenty and that's an honest reading that's honest no no that was honest true that tells me you've got copper working yeah absolutely spot-on what it January tez n is that we can directly associate this building with the work in a copper or I would think so yeah yeah all the storage of copper all this pet has been processed or the people are dealing with a lot a couple I mean you know presumably it's a floor trampled or something like that and it's all on as you said earlier on it's all in their boots I tell you what well from his point of view it's been a hell of a lot of graft in it yeah it's been a lot this means we can finally tell the story of what went on here how to hats would probably use for storing raw copper or which had been dug out of the nearby mine a vital part of the Tudor industrial process the material stored here would have been broken up by hand before being sent down the mountain to our stamp mill for crushing a simple but efficient process that continued for hundreds of years and given this long history there's just one question left Francis why is it that we've had virtually no fines at all we have I mean we've had tons and tons of mining waste fines all right you know I mean domestic stuff the kind of thing that can help us date the side well you haven't had domestic fines because it was very little domestic life as such going on up here the miners were living in their huts on the top of the hill here and they probably had leather bottles wooden platters things that didn't break when taken into a hostile environment like this so they bring their stuff up with them at the beginning of the day and then when they went back down they take it down again yes it's quite ironic real isn't it it's just like us we got a thermos we've got a coffee but we take it back down again we will yeah and I mean frankly I'd look at you would be oddly if you were sitting next to me with a tea cup and the sauce drinking right that wouldn't be right what about money everybody drops money even poor people yes now we do actually have a historical record to the fact that the German miners weren't given coins but they didn't particularly you know get on with with the local population well they were just handed out their food and clothes and exactly precisely that so not even any coins not even crimes so as we head down the mountain for the final time we leave our sight as we know those brave German pioneers did taking everything with us [Music] and it's time for a celebration must be a tough old tick isn't it it has tiny but you know anything worthwhile doing is worthwhile making an effort do you know what for me is the biggest irony one of the things that we came here to try and do was find out what life would have been like for those German miners in Elizabethan times in a way hacking up to the top of the mountain every day back down again being deluged by the weather going in and out of those freezing cold mines well maybe we got a little feeling of what life must have been like for them and how appropriate is this in order to recreate a little bit of southern Germany here in the lakes once again ladies and gentlemen I have the privilege to introduce to you the behalf [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 119,080

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, lake district, mining documentary, copper mines, tony robinson, suzannah lipscombe, time team

Id: yLgRa0RZ24k

Length: 46min 55sec (2815 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2020