Mining at Cloneytrace

Mining in Ireland has been going on since the Bronze age but the first records for our site begin in the 19th Century. Yorkshireman Lieutenant Robert Boteler was tasked with carrying out geographical surveys in April 1833 who first drew attention to the presence of valuable underground potential in the area, a results of the areas rich volcanic history.

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Victorian Investors didn’t sit up and take notice for another generation but the Industrial Revolution triggered a mining boom across Northern Ireland, with many abandoned mines still visible today. On this site the Antrim Iron Ore company began mining iron ore on this site in 1872, having opened a bauxite mine just across the river Artogues in the previous year.

This drove many changes to the local area, a source of income for farmers and justification for the ‘new’ Cloneytrace Road that we still have today, built on much older paths and tracks. Around this same time was even talk of a tramway from Broughshane to transport the ore to market.

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The mines started on this site, with a total of three adits or openings, the last of which was closed up for health and safety reasons in the 1990s. You can still see where one of them would have been. From there the tunnels crossed under the road and proceeded north following the road for a distance of around a mile. Records show air holes about a mile distant. When the house was built we used piled foundations in the event that there was any shafts below the footprint of the house but in the event we believe we are on solid ground.

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Mining in Cloneytrace wound down in 1914. The ore was considered high quality but the lack of infrastructure, (that tramway never did get built), meant the cost of the ‘cartage’ in horse and carts made the ore price uneconomic. A narrow guage railway serving the larger group of mines across the hills in Loughguile and Cargan to a sea port in Red Bay, and onward to Scotland, meant they lasted longer. Even so, by World War 2 the mining era in Northern Ireland had drawn to a halt.

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And now, after a century of the site being given over to farmland, what has the future in store?