The Clive engine house, Dyserth

The Clive engine house, Dyserth

The towering empty stone building adjacent to the Dyserth Falls Resort was built c.1860 to house a large Cornish pumping engine for the Talargoch mine. The mine produced lead, zinc and other metals.

At the top of the building was a large cast iron beam, pivoted at its centre. When the engine was at work, the beam moved up and down like the head of a “nodding donkey”. There was a shaft just to the north of the engine house, where rods from one side of the beam went down into the mine. The rods drove the pumps which kept the workings free from flooding. The other side of the beam was connected to a cylinder of 2.54 metres (100 inches) diameter. Steam fed into the cylinder from nearby boilers forced the beam to move up and down.

Significant engineering was needed to ensure the giant engine never ran out of water. A leat of c.1.5km in length was constructed, some of it in tunnel.

The engine stopped working in 1883, shortly before the mine closed, and found a new lease of life at a Wrexham colliery. In 2012 the engine house was repaired with funding from Cadw, the Welsh Government’s historic buildings arm, and WREN, a non-profit body distributing landfill-tax income to local projects. The work was co-ordinated by Denbighshire County Council and carried out by contractor Recclesia.

Where is this HiPoint?

Postcode: LL18 6DX 

Details of the restoration on Recclesia's website