Boulby Alum Works

Tees Valley Wildlife Trust are guiding walkers around some of the many old alum works in this region, below are some of the photographs I took on three of these walks.

(The last photograph shows the fossilised vertebrae of a Jurassic sea creature)

Sandend Alum Works : Kettleness Alum Works

Saltwick Nab Alum Works and Jet Mines

Music for the three videos K. Macloed

Lingberry Alum Works

The Lofthouse (Lingberry) alum works, (the part that hasn't fallen into the sea,) is much the same as it was when the works closed 150 years ago, its like the surface of the moon. Very very slowly the ling that gave the alum works its name is returning.

Horses Work

The Middlesbrough News. Friday 7th September 1866.
Boulby is a small village about ten miles further up the coast south from Redcar. Alum works have been established there this two hundred year. Persons going to inspect these works on Rawcliffe have being struck with the strange garb of the men working at the alum pits and with the dangerous nature of the avocation of the alum miners. At the end of the alum pits is a small shed and a large wheel is whizzing round at a rapid rate, and drawing water from neighbouring reservoirs to the pits. In the summer we have seen two woman turning the wheel, and dressed in a manner quite "shocking" to our modern idea of propriety. The laborious nature of their work necessitated them to work in a half-nude state, and even in that condition the sweat stood upon them in great drops like peas. Here surely was woman degraded, and doing not man's work but "horses work." Joseph Richardson

Kings and Queens and Alum Gems