The rocky ravine, with its bluffs and tumbled boulders, is more dry desert than a slice through the green North Pennines. Its stream, shrunk to a few languid pools, has become an orange-stained barranco that we pick our way along. This is the Nent River, and the last time I was here it was to walk – and crawl – deep into the passages of the abandoned lead mine.
Nenthead was a major centre of lead mining in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the area round the mines and Smelt Mill is heaped with substantial dumps of spoil, long studied for its minerals and fossils. The upheaval from the workings also revealed a complex geology. I’ve joined the earth sciences group of the Natural History Society of Northumbria for a walk led by the geologist Karl Egeland-Eriksen and Brenda Turnbull.
