Interpreting the mining history of Middlehopeshield

March 2026

Blog by Steve Capsey, designer with Maltings Heritage

Our design studio, Maltings Heritage, has been working alongside the North Pennines National Landscape team to create a series of information panels that interpret the heritage of many mining sites in the area as part of the Land of Lead and Silver project. The first of these was at the ruins of a crushing mill at Middlehopeshield. Our aim was to deliver enough information to help people’s understanding of the site, but leave enough room to include plenty of photographs and illustrations – as the old saying goes “a picture is worth a thousand words”.

It was decided to create three separate panels for this site, in order to explain the industrial heritage, the area’s geology and also the natural habitat that is unique to these sites. The area next to Middlehope burn was a hub of industry in the past, and we wanted to bring this to life by producing a reconstruction illustration depicting the crushing mill site in its heyday. It crushed material from a lead mine, known as White’s Level, before passing it to the washing floor where it was processed to separate the lead ore. All these processes are depicted in the illustration, which was produced in a traditional way of hand drawing and inking, before finally ‘painting’ digitally.

Of course the area’s rich industrial past is strongly linked to the area’s geology, which is mainly made up of rocks which formed around 350 to 300 million years ago and carry valuable mineral deposits. The geology panel was designed to tell the story of the connection between the rocks and the mines using informative illustrations.

Our final panel highlighted the plants you see growing around the site, that reflect the mining industry’s environmental legacy. Plants such as spring sandwort and alpine pennycress can be seen here, amongst other plants that have adapted to the heavy-metal ground conditions.

We hope that our work here will be enjoyed by visitors for years to come, and will give them a glimpse into the past of this remote site. We will be delivering similar information panels across several other mining sites in the area, and we will of course continue to be grateful for the opportunity to spend time in this glorious countryside.