Wanlockhead
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Wanlockhead is a village in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland nestling in the Lowther Hills, which form part of the Southern Uplands. It is Scotland's highest village at 467 m or 1531 ft and the highest point of the Southern Upland Way, a walking trail that traditionally starts at Portpatrick on the west coast, in Dumfries & Galloway, and finishes some 212 miles or 341 km away at Cockburnspath on the east coast, in the Scottish Borders.
The village was called Winlocke until 1566, from the Gaelic Cuingealach, meaning narrowness, or narrow place.
Wanlockhead owes its existence to the lead and other mineral deposits in the surrounding hills. These deposits were first exploited by the Romans, and from the 13th century they began to be worked again in the summer. The village was founded permanently in 1680 when the Duke of Buccleuch built a lead smelting plant and workers' cottages.
Lead, zinc, copper and silver were mined nearby, as well as some of the world's purest gold at 22.8 carats, which was used to make the Scottish Crown. Wanlockhead became known as "God's treasure house" from the richness of its mineral resources.
Despite a branch railway (see Leadhills & Wanlockhead Railway), also the highest in Scotland, serving the village from 1901 to 1939, lead mining declined in the 20th century and finished in the 1950s. The village now features a lead mining museum and industrial equipment from the 18th century and is a popular tourist destination.
Wanlockhead is also the home of the highest pub in Scotland, the Wanlockhead Inn which opened in 2003; an earlier pub situated on a track rising from the other side of the main road through the village was considerably higher, but closed in the late 1990s.
[edit] The Beam Engine
The Beam Engine and waterbucket pumps were introduced into Wanlockhead in 1745. The history on the beam engine is not certain, but accounts of similar engines have being recorded on a coal mine at Canonbie, Dumfriesshire in the 1790s.
The Wanlockhead Beam Engine was built, supposedly, in the middle of the 19th century and is the only lasting example of a waterbucket pumping engine to be seen on a mine in the UK today.
The beam engine allowed miners to continue working in the Straitsteps mine.
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