Summer Lodge lead smelt mill. N.B. Narrative and pictures are as of the times when the pictures were originally added (mostly 1997 to 2004). In 2021, things may look different; conditions, tracks and rights of way may have changed. Click on the Home button for more explanation. The Summer Lodge lead smelt mill is included here in this series of webpages about lead smelt mills in the Yorkshire Dales only because it is so easily come across. Most people will probably not find it worth a deliberate effort purely to go to see it. Frankly, it looks like an insignificant heap of rubble in a wired off area, to be found a few metres only, from the road between Askrigg and Healaugh. However, if you are travelling the road from Askrigg to Healaugh or vice versa, you cannot but help but to see it and you might be interested to know what it has been.If coming from Healaugh, then before you get to the ruin, you will have suffered the loss of view of the dale on your right because of a long high stone wall. The wall eventually curves away down the dale. Soon after this, there is a sharp bend in the road where it goes around the head of Summer Lodge Dale. The rubble which was once the Summer Lodge lead smelter is on the inside of the bend, that is on the right, just before the bend to the right, when going South towards Askrigg. As a double check, you should see the head of Summer Lodge Gill as it pours under the road just after the right hand bend. Summer Lodge Smelt Mill has been a totally collapsed ruin for a very long period. Without protection, many more may soon be reduced to this state. Of the main building of Summer Lodge smelter, only the foundations and rubble remain. The Summer Lodge Vein. The Summer Lodge lead smelter was built to smelt ore from mines along the Summer Lodge Mines along Summer Lodge vein. The vein runs for about three kilometres. Hollows left by many bell pits follow its line. However, we understand that trials on the deeper parts of the seem showed poor prospects. Closing date. When the known prospects had been exhausted, the Summer Lodge Mines worked out and the smelt mill which had specialised in smelting their ore had no more work. We understand that the smelter closed between 1850 and 1854. We are not aware of any documentation on the smelter's plans. I found no evidence of a wheel pit outside of the smelter. The smelter is away from and higher than the beck. Therefore, the waterwheel needed to drive the mill's bellowsmay have been an overshot wheel, possibly on the inside of the building. If so, water would have been carried to it on an aqueduct on overhead trestles from higher up Summer lodge Beck, where there is the site of a dam. No flue? We did not find remains of a flue of a flue. Perhaps then, as in some other the early smelt millss, the lead and sulphur laden fumes may have been vented in a very unhealthy manner, from the hearths into a chimney directly on top of the smelter. Such an arrangement can be seen at Marrick High Mill. A mystery to us. Is it a millstone or a counterweight or a what? Of interest at the site is a circular stone, a few feet across. It has a hole through its centre, perhapsto form a hub. The stone is lying in the centre of a square depression at the right (heading for Askrigg) side of the road with the water from the head of Summer Lodge Gill running through it. It has all the appearance of a millstone except that its surface is neither level enough to be one nor notched or grated like a grind stone. The area immediately surrounding it was dug square, so square that it seemed unlikely to have been done by nature and also it appeared as if it had been done recently. Thoughts and speculation. Lack of any “notching” could be the effect of 150 years of weathering. Assuming that this was a millstone connected with the smelter in some way, there was the question of what it did grind. As the mill appears to have had no slag hearth, then one possibilty, i.e. that ore hearth slag was ground to re-smelt, seems unlikely. Perhaps the mill had its own final separating table to purify galena. Was the stone a counter-weight for a jigger on an ore crusher? The job of such a counter weight would have been to make the jigger drop rapidly onto the ore to be crushed when allowed to do so by an eccentric beneath it. The hole in the middle would then have enabled secure fixing. In the Dales the eccentrics on crushers were driven by water wheels and Summer Lodge Gill still runs down and through the site. Doubtless some knows the true answer and will one day dispel our speculation as false preconceptions and replace them with facts completely different from anything we expected. Link to the page on the Surrender Smelt Mill >>>