© Copyright Peter McDermott and licensed for
reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.
A mile to the west of the remote village of Rookhope,
Co.Durham, there lies an eye-catching relic of our industrial heritage in the
form of a rugged stone archway. It sits quietly by the roadside and must leave
the uninitiated passer-by somewhat nonplussed. It is known as the Rookhope
Arch.
It is more accurately the Lintzgarth Arch, really, sited, as
it is, a few yards away from the site of the former smelting mill complex of
that name, a little above the Rookhope Burn. Lead being once mined hereabouts,
smelting mills were scattered across the Northern Pennines to turn the lead ore
into a purer form of the metal (bars, or ‘pigs’). One such mill was that at Lintzgarth.
Working with lead was a dangerous process, of course, and the
fumes from the blast furnace needed to be funnelled away to a distant hilltop.
At Lintzgarth this was done by constructing a six-arch, raised horizontal flue leading
from the works and over the nearby Rookhope Burn and road, then a 1½ mile-long
underground section to a hilltop chimney. In the picture above you can get an
idea of the series of archways, the road/burn and the lower reaches of the
underground tunnel.
The method of channelling the poisonous fumes out through a
long chimney had the added bonus of allowing tiny fragments of lead (and
silver) to stick to the inside of the structure – and these would of course be
periodically scraped off for recycling by working boys. Nasty job – but, you
know, waste not, want not.
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