We will welcome our local expert on Greenside Mines to come and walk up to the Mines with us and give us a tales and history of the mines en route to Brown Cove.  Nic will lead a Nordic Walk up into the Glenridding Valley, taking a look at the dams that burst in Brown Cove, little walked! For those fitter participants, we may, if time allows have a little jaunt out onto Raise above the dam in Kepple cove in the afternoon… this is optional.

Why is Warren such a fountain of knowledge on the mines… he wrote to tell me why:

“My Great Great Grandfather on my mother’s side came to Patterdale in the mid 1850’s from Coniston where his family worked in the copper mines and slate quarries and his sons went to work at Greenside, so mining is in the blood.

I was born the same year as Greenside closed in 1962 and with my brother and sister, we stopped most weekends at my Grandmother’s house in Glenridding. I still remember the day as an eight year old, Mum taking me to show me where her family had worked, which included her as she also worked at the mine as the wages clerk.

Picking up a Quartz crystal at the mine, I was hooked and from then on the mine has been my favourite place. As a ten perhaps twelve year old, Mum would drop me off at the mine and pick me up a few hours later, which started a 50 year interest in mining.

I am currently chairman of the Cumbria Amenity Trust Mining History Society which researches and explores mines all over the country but mainly in Cumbria. In 1992, we got permission to reopen the main entrance to Greenside and then spent six years digging through several roof falls underground which was proper mining.

Between 1999 and 2003, a friend and I put on exhibitions in Glenridding village hall showing the mine and what life was like in the parish when it was working. My Grandmother arranged for me to visit people most who I had never met and they lent their photographs which is now apparently one of the finest collections of a single parish in the country.

Grandmother moved in to her house in Glenridding in 1918, which Mum still has and so the connection with the parish is now some 165 years. Jenkins Field which is  the large field on the lake shore by the steamer pier gets its name from my Great Great Grandfather.”

To book your place click here