This mine may well have been worked in Elizabethan times, but recorded history is restricted to the 19th century when the mine was opened in 1853 by Mathew Francis.
In the following years the mine was run by a company headed by the somewhat notorious John Barton Balcombe, a man who had a sort of Midas touch in reverse and was jailed for fraud in 1873, although over matter nothing to do with mining.
An interesting fact about this mine was that it was the site of an underground steam engine, situated in the engine shaft and originally purchased from the Castle Hotel in Aberystwyth.
Installed in 1870, Balcombe falsely asserted that it was the first underground application of steam in the country, in fact one had been installed by George Green at Talybont a year earlier, only a couple of miles away!
It’s possible that this engine may still be there, buried under tons of rock.