The iron ore came from Low Furness, but there was an iron mine at the Red-dell head under Weatherlam. The Rev. Thomas Robinson, in his _Natural History of Westmorland and Cumberland_, 1709, says "Langdale & Cunningston mountains do abound most with iron veins; which supplies with Ore & keeps constantly going a Furnace in Langdale, where great plenty of good and malleable iron is made, not much inferior to that of Dantzick." SLATE. Roofing slabs have been found in the ruins of Calder Abbey and the Well Chapel at Gosforth, both mediæval; in the mansion on Lord's Island, Derwentwater, destroyed before the end of the seventeenth century, we found green Borrowdale roofing slates. Purple Skiddaw roofing slates were also found in the ruins of a seventeenth and eighteenth century cottage at Causeway Head near Keswick. But it was not until the eighteenth century that quarrying began to develop. Mr. H. S. Cowper, in his _History of Hawkshead_, says that the Swainsons, from about 1720, worked a quarry in the Coniston flag formation near the Monk Coniston Tarns, and sent out their flags even as far as Ulverston Church. Fifty years later George Bownass, the Coniston blacksmith, was the great purveyor and repairer of tools, and from his ledger the names of his customers, gathered by Mr. Herbert Bownass, throw light on the history of the industry in the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1770 appear William Jackson & Co. and Edward Jackson, no doubt of Tilberthwaite. In 1771, the Company of Slate-getters at Pennyrigg, Saddlestones, Cove and Hodge Close; Zachias Walker & Co., at Cove; George Tyson & Co., quarry owners; William Atkinson & Co., at Scoadcop Quarry; John Masacks & Co., at Cove; John Atkinson, slate merchant, Torver Fell Quarry; Wm. Fleming and Thomas Callan, Stang End Quarry; Matthew Carter, Stang End Quarry; also George Thompson and Wm. Vickers at a quarry with an unreadable name, and John Johnson, Jonathan Youdale, Wm. Wilson, Anthony Rigg and Wm. Stopart, slate-getters. In 1772, William Atkinson, Broadscop Quarry; John Speding & Co., quarry owners; slate-getters at Bove Beck or Gatecrag Quarries; Wm. Parker, slate merchant, Langdale; Wm. Fleming, Bessy Crag Quarry; Wm. Johnson, Pennyrigg Quarry; and John Vickers, Thomas and Rowland Wilson, John Casson, and George Bownass, slate-getters. Of the quarries here mentioned as working 130 years ago Stang End and Bessy Crag are in Little Langdale, Pennyrigg and Hodge Close on opposite sides of the Tilberthwaite valley; Cove is on the flank of the Old Man above Gaitswater; Scoadcop and Broadscop look like variants of the name Goldscope, the quarry opposite Cove, and near Blind Tarn, to the right hand as you go up Walna Scar; Torverfell Quarry may be Ashgill; Saddlestones is the quarry seen on the way up the Old Man (page 3).