xSkinningrove occupies a unique place in the history of ironstone mining. It was here on August 7th 1848, that the very first mine in Cleveland was opened by Messrs Roseby, producing ironstone for shipment by sea to Bolckow and Vaughan’s Witton Park ironworks in County Durham.
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Over the next 20 years men flocked to Cleveland from the four corners of the United Kingdom, as one after another a further 80 mines opened – coalminers from Durham, Northumberland & Scotland, leadminers from the Derbyshire Peak District, tin miners from Cornwall and farm labourers from Norfolk joined forces to make Cleveland the most important ironstone mining district in Victorian & Edwardian England.
The last of those mines closed in 1964, but today the Cleveland Ironstone Mining Museum in Skiningrove, on the site of t
he former Loftus Mine, offers visitors a unique insight into the working lives of those miners & their families whose labours provided the foundation for the industrial development of modern Teesside.