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Main image: Photo: Graham Horn, Wikimedia Commons
Historic England's scheduling record (list entry 1020098) describes a tinwork on the slopes of Holne Ridge, above the valley of the River Dart, with earthworks and structures that show the range of prospecting and extraction methods used over time. It lies in the parish of Holne, about 2 km south of Combestone Tor and 2.6 km west of Michelcombe.
The earliest are streamwork earthworks, low linear dumps mostly parallel in a broad gully, made by using water to wash the heavy tin from silts, sands and gravels. When the streamwork was abandoned the tinners turned to the lode tin. They first prospected with many pits dug by hand and trenches cut with shovels and running water, brought by leat and held in reservoirs. The lodes were then worked in several ways: openworks, deep steep-sided gullies running about west to east (one cuts through earlier streamwork); series of deep lode-back pits, each with its own spoil dump, which were abandoned when digging got hard and a new one opened along the lode; and finally four very large pits called shafts and two adits, dug to reach ore below the depth the openworks and lode-back pits could manage.
A rectangular building next to the eastern shaft is the site of an engine house, used to power drainage and lifting. Ore raised there went by tramway to the dressing floor, built on the earlier streamwork, which has two large settling pits, two rectangular buddles, a building, a wheelpit and a series of channels. The black tin made there would then be taken elsewhere for smelting. One large rectangular building at SX 67647009 probably gave shelter, storage and office space for the tinwork. It has at least five rooms, 26.5 metres by 4.5 metres inside, with walls up to 0.8 metres high. The boundary stones inside the monument are excluded, though the ground beneath them is included.
Sources: Historic England list entry 1020098, which cites the 1997 Holne Moor survey plan at 1:2500. Guy Wareham has added photographs of the building at SX 6764 7009 and a shaft at SX 6754 6987 in a comment on the Historic England page; I have not used them.
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