Details for The Tom Leonard Mining Museum

Our unique Museum offers visitors an opportunity to discover the skills and customs that built Cleveland's Ironstone heritage. Ironstone mining played a key part in the industrial development of Cleveland.

It is the only Museum in the UK which tells the Tom Leonard story of ironstone mining, a key part of the local history of the social and industrial development of Cleveland and Teesside.

The Museum today offers visitors an opportunity to experience the underground world of a real ironstone mine and to explore the skills, customs and life of the Cleveland miner. It was these miners that helped make Cleveland the most important Ironstone mining district in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

One of the Museum's strengths lies in its knowledgeable and enthusiastic guides, who accompany visitors around the site:

- through the discovery of rock in the area
- through the cavernous ventilation spaces
- into the North Drift of the old Loftus Mine

It was through this drift that much of the 6.2 million tons of ironstone extracted from Skinningrove was hauled.

Visitors have the opportunity to hear the story of a Trappy Lad on his first day at work underground in the darkness and the friends that he made there.

Finally the tour finishes with the chance to explore an underground working place and see how the stone was drilled, charged with explosives and FIRED!

While visitors are waiting for the next...