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Welcome to Shropshire (and its industrial history) Shropshire is now a large and rural county blessed with some wonderful scenery and not too many people. It is underpinned by a wide variety of geology and actually has 10 of the 12 geological time zones but it is the mineral wealth and the easily navigable river Severn that made the county the heart of the industrial revolution. Mining in Shropshire goes back a long way as it is thought that there may have been bronze age activity at Llanymynech and Clee Hill. Certainly, the Romans were actively mining here as pigs of lead marked with the seal of the Emperor Hadrian have been found in the metal mining field (you can see a copy of one of these in the visitor centre at the Snailbeach Mine). Also, in the 1960s, a bag of roman coins was found deep inside the Llanymynech Ogof, a cave extended by mining, shortly after it had been surveyed by the Shropshire Mining Club! Mineral extraction took place in various different parts of the county; because of the variety of the geology, there was - and still is - widespread quarrying of hard rock and building stone, and major limestone deposits were exploited for burning to make fertiliser or used in iron smelting. Sand and gravel are also worked and it was in one of these pits that the remains of a mammoth were found in 1986. Lead mining occurred in a small area centred on the village of Shelve and was at its height during the nineteenth century. Barytes was mined on the Stiperstones and a little further to the east until 1948 and, as well as at Llanymynech, there were copper mines scattered across the sandstone outcrops north of Shrewsbury. Clive Mine, on the same strata as the Alderley Edge mines, was the largest of these and was re-worked a number of times. Shallow coal deposits occurred in several places such as Morda and Shrewsbury, two of the smaller, now forgotten, coalfields that are celebrated at this conference. Deeper coal reserves at St Martins and in the east of the county kept pits running until 1979. There were two major sites where key materials for industry were easily won; ironstone, coal, limestone and clay outcropped on Clee Hill and at Ironbridge. Clee Hill has remains from prehistoric times and was so important it is marked on the 14^th Century Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral. Mining is documented from this time with iron making well established but the presence of easy (cheap) river transport and the technological improvements developed around Ironbridge made this the ‘silicon valley’ of the 18^th century. (highlighted sites feature in the trip programme)