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Turning the pages of history
Meet Martin Lynch, the man who set out to chart the world of mining through the ages. Ralph Mills reports.

Sometimes, on the footpaths in the north of England or along the Cornish coast, or on dusty trails in Canada and the western US, I have pondered how different these places would have been a century or two ago. Where skylarks now skirl above sheep dotted hills, or seagulls wheel around cliff edges, or eagles glide over arid pasture, the landscapes then would have been industrial, pockmarked with innumerable shafts and quarries, scored by tracks and tramways, criss-crossed by adits and pipes and ropeways and aqueducts.

Amidst the tranquillity of today, the observant can still make out some of the scars left by mining, though they are mellowing back into the earth to become the raw material of industrial archaeologists. It is left to historians to record and bring to life the lives of the miners, prospectors, engineers, financiers and politicians and how they came together to shape the industry in which they worked.

Martin Lynch is someone who has a special feeling for mining's messy, exciting, often violent, sometimes chaotic past. He's written a book - Mining in World History - in which he's set out to clarify the often complex relationship between man and the resources that lie in the rocks below - in his own words, "to recount and explain the story of metal mining and smelting as it has unfolded over the last 500 years".



Turning the pages of history Meet Martin Lynch, the man who set out to chart the world of mining through the ages. Ralph Mills reports. Sometimes, on the footpaths in the north of England or along the Cornish coast, or on dusty trails in Canada and the western US, I have pondered how different these places would have been a century or two ago. Where skylarks now skirl above sheep dotted hills, or seagulls wheel around cliff edges, or eagles glide over arid pasture, the landscapes then would have been industrial, pockmarked with innumerable shafts and quarries, scored by tracks and tramways, criss-crossed by adits and pipes and ropeways and aqueducts. Amidst the tranquillity of today, the observant can still make out some of the scars left by mining, though they are mellowing back into the earth to become the raw material of industrial archaeologists. It is left to historians to record and bring to life the lives of the miners, prospectors, engineers, financiers and politicians and how they came together to shape the industry in which they worked. Martin Lynch is someone who has a special feeling for mining's messy, exciting, often violent, sometimes chaotic past. He's written a book - Mining in World History - in which he's set out to clarify the often complex relationship between man and the resources that lie in the rocks below - in his own words, "to recount and explain the story of metal mining and smelting as it has unfolded over the last 500 years".
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