I suspect that the majority of people who visit the beautiful English Lake District in Cumbria think of it as a "natural" landscape. In reality, though, what we see now is the product of many centuries of interaction between the land and its human and livestock inhabitants.
One severely under-noticed factor is the impact of mining. All around the region there are the remains of mines. This is especially so in the Coniston area where in addition to slate quarrying there were at least four hundred years of copper mining.
Earlier this week, after a visit to the Mining Museum in Keswick I went back to something I wrote two years ago, edited it a little, and posted it on the Around-England blog: Coniston Coppermines.
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