Foxhole Mine and Doetor Brook tinworks

Historic England's scheduling record (list entry 1021214) describes Foxhole Mine, the core of the Doetor Brook alluvial tin streamwork, with openworks, reservoirs, prospecting trenches and pits, buildings and an adit, on either side of the upper reaches of the Doetor Brook. It lies across the parishes of Lydford and LCPs of Bridestowe and Sourton, about 0.9 km north-west of Chat Tor.

Foxhole Mine has a stamping mill, a group of buildings and a dressing floor. Water reached the wheel on a leat embankment and timber launder. The embankment survives as a revetted bank up to 1.7 metres high carrying a leat 0.9 metres wide and up to 0.7 metres deep, and the launder survives only as a buried feature. The stamping mill is a substantial wheelpit 8 metres long by 1.3 metres wide, with the machinery on a stone-faced platform on the east side. The stone-lined tailrace is 24 metres long, 1 metre wide and 0.7 metres deep. The crushed ore went to the dressing floor nearby, two circular buddles with channels and hollows on a terrace held up by a drystone revetment. West of it are two buildings. The larger, probably the Count House, has two rooms and an extension, with mortared granite walls up to 2.9 metres high still holding traces of plaster, fireplaces against each short wall and east-facing windows over the dressing floor. The second is a structure 3.3 metres by 2.2 metres marked by earthworks and drystone revetment, with a north-facing doorway. A tramway runs north from the mine, cutting through earlier streamwork earthworks, 2.6 metres wide, revetted in places and with a number of stone sleepers, crossing the Doetor Brook on a small clapper bridge of eight slabs. Ore was carried along it to the stamping mill. Foxhole Mine, also known as Wheal Frederick, was active in the middle of the 19th century, though no output figures are known.

North and south of the mine runs a substantial alluvial tin streamwork, formed by using water to separate heavy tin from lighter silts, sands and gravels, and probably the earliest phase of extraction here. When it was abandoned the tinners turned to smaller eluvial deposits. At least three areas of eluvial streamwork earthworks survive, the largest at SX 55208627, with many curved dumps lying parallel, and at the upper streamwork most of the dumps are revetted with large rocks and stand up to 1.2 metres high. After the deposits were worked out the tinners turned to the lodes: prospecting by pits, trenches and an adit, the pits and adit dug by hand and the trenches with shovels and running water brought by leat and stored in reservoirs, then opencast openworks, deep steep-sided gullies running about west to east. Small buildings nearby were probably tinners' shelters. The surface of the east-west trackway across the north of the monument is excluded, though the ground below it is included.

Sources: Historic England list entry 1021214, which cites fieldwork for the Monuments Protection Programme by S. Gerrard (2002).

• Period: Medieval
• Status: Scheduled monument (Historic England list entry 1021214)
• Grid reference: SX 5483 8585 (approximate, from the listing's coordinates)