Ruined winding house and chimney, Old lead mines, Whitespots, Newtownards, Co Down

Ruined winding engine house and chimney, Whitespots, Newtownards, County Down, dating from approximately 1842 to 1850, built to serve the 'Bog' shaft of a lead mine and abandoned in the 1860s. The structure is recorded as derelict and of industrial archaeological interest.

The ruins stand in a hilly, overgrown landscape less than a mile to the north of Newtownards, the bleak and inhospitable character of the surrounding terrain being itself a direct consequence of former mining activity. Little survives of the engine house beyond largely overgrown remnants of bluestone rubble-built walls. The surviving wall faces to the south-east and south-west retain tall semicircular arched openings. The ground drops away to the north of the engine house, where some sections of walling remain at a lower level, though most of the structure has collapsed. The engine house was apparently originally three storeys in height, but so little remains that its original appearance is now very difficult to discern.

The chimney stands a short distance to the south-west of the engine house. It is square in plan, with a base measuring roughly 2.3 metres square, and rises to approximately 18.5 metres in height. It is built of battered bluestone rubble, with the upper quarter of the stack constructed in brick and stepping in slightly from the rubble below. The entrance to the shaft itself was located a short distance to the north-west of the engine house.

An inventory of the mine's buildings prepared in December 1864, shortly before the sale of the mine, records 'one double acting engine 24 in. cycl. 5ft stroke driven by one flue boiler 31ft. 6in. long and 6ft. diameter. This engine has winding and pumping gear and crusher attached'. The engine house appears to be shown on the revised Ordnance Survey map of 1858 to 1860, though the chimney is not readily apparent on that survey.

Lead mining at Whitespots began in 1780 with the formation of the Bangor and Newtownards Mining Company. The partners included Robert Ward of Castle Ward, the Reverend James Clewlow of Bangor, Sir John Blackwood of Ballyleidy (Clandeboy), James Millar, a mining engineer from Mayo, and Robert Stewart, the future Lord Londonderry. The land was leased from Stewart's father, Alexander. Mining commenced in October 1780 under Millar's supervision but, frustrated by the failure to find sufficiently rich veins, the partners abandoned the venture in September 1783.

In 1827 a Manx company trading as 'Newtownards Mines' secured a lease of Whitespots from the 3rd Marquis of Londonderry and recommenced mining on a much larger scale. An old windmill on the site was renovated and adapted to power various pieces of machinery, and a complex of mining-related structures was erected. By 1840, however, Londonderry had grown concerned about the relatively small royalties he was receiving from the Manx operators. He commissioned John Taylor, an engineer employed by the Ulster Mining Company at Conlig, just to the north of Whitespots, to survey the mines. In March 1842 Taylor produced a report criticising the mining methods in use at Whitespots, characterising the Manx owners' approach as a 'smash and grab' method in which ore was extracted in a haphazard and relatively expensive fashion while the full potential of the veins remained untapped. When a renewed lease was granted to the company in 1842 — by which time most of the original partners appear to have been forced to resign — it contained clauses actively discouraging the stripping of ore and encouraging more careful, and ultimately more profitable, mining methods. In response, the company greatly increased its expenditure on the venture, new veins were discovered, and the mine began to yield ore in greater quantities. A new shaft was sunk to the south, a new engine house was erected, and further buildings including a counting house with a dining room were constructed around the main shaft near the windmill. In 1850 the company also acquired the Conlig Mine, at which point the partnership became known as the Newtownards and Ulster Mining Company.

This success was short-lived. After 1853 yields at Whitespots began to decline. The partners were unprepared for the newly opened veins to run dry so quickly and, though richer veins may have existed at depth, they were unwilling to repeat their investment. The Conlig mine was abandoned in 1853, and by 1865 yields at Whitespots had fallen so dramatically that the company auctioned the lease of the mines in both townlands, together with all the mining equipment, in March of that year. The lease was purchased by Frederick Blackwood, Lord Dufferin, motivated chiefly by a desire to discourage future mining at Conlig, which he had long regarded as an eyesore adjoining his Clandeboy estate. Blackwood had little interest in retaining the Whitespots lease, and initially attempted to surrender it to the Marquis of Londonderry. Londonderry's agent, however, insisted that any leaseholder must adhere to the strict terms of 1842, which required active mining activity. To avoid this obligation — mining in the area having become uneconomical — Dufferin eventually purchased the title to the royalties outright. Attempts were made to reopen the mine in 1879 and again in 1912, but both came to nothing. The former mining area at Whitespots remains barren and largely uninhabited today, principally because of the quantities of waste lead left behind by the mining operations.