The mines, as they were in his days, are described at length by Dr. Gibson in _The Old Man, or Ravings and Ramblings around Conistone_. Alexander Craig Gibson, M.R.C.S., F.S.A., was born at Harrington, 1813, the son of a ship's captain, who died early. He was taken by his mother to her home at Lockerbie, and brought up there; afterwards apprenticed to a surgeon at Whitehaven. In 1844 he came to Coniston as medical officer to the mining company, and lived for seven years at Yewdale Bridge, where he wrote his "Ravings and Ramblings" as articles for the _Kendal Mercury_, afterwards collected into a volume, and subsequently republished with considerable revision. He left Coniston in January, 1851, and remained at Hawkshead for some years; then removed southward, and finally settled at Bebington in Cheshire, where he died in 1874. A collection of sketches in prose and verse, _The Folk-speech of Cumberland_, &c. (Coward, Carlisle, 1869; ed. ii., 1872), shows him to be master of the dialect of the north-west in various forms--Furness, Cumbrian, and Dumfriesshire; and his book on Coniston remains a valuable contribution to local anecdote. (I owe the data of his life to the Rev. T. Ellwood.) After the middle of the nineteenth century the copper mines became less and less profitable, owing to the competition of foreign imports. During the "eighties," they were only just kept open, until the Coniston Mining Syndicate, under the energetic management of Mr. Thomas Warsop, tried to put new life into the old business. Mr. Warsop attempted to introduce a new system of smelting, but this smelting house was blown away by the storm of December 22nd, 1894. He took the watercourse from Leverswater to work a turbine, which superseded the old waterwheels for pumping, and also supplied power for boring in the mines, and for crushing and mixing the material from the old rubbish heaps, with which he made excellent concrete slabs, much in demand for pavements. But the development came to an end with Mr. Warsop's removal in 1905, and when the mines were offered for sale there was no purchaser. IRON. In our tour of the lake we have noticed that there are remains of old iron works along its margin, now difficult to trace. In High Furness, the district of which Coniston Lake is the centre, and the most northern part of Lancashire, there are about thirty known sites where iron was smelted in the ancient way with charcoal, producing a _bloom_--the lump of metal made by _blowing_ in the furnace--whence the name _bloomeries_. Of these sites about half are in the valley of Coniston, and eight are actually on the shore of the lake:--