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Whitesmith Mine, Strontian, Fort William and Ardnamurchan, Highland, Scotland, UKi

Regional Level Types
Whitesmith Mine	Mine
Strontian	Village
Fort William and Ardnamurchan	Ward
Highland	Council Area
Scotland	Country
UK	Country

An open-cut barite-lead-zinc-silver mine owned by Minworth Ltd.'s subsidiary Strontian Minerals.

At Whitesmith Mine, the Strontian Main Vein is developed within an east-west trending 'crush zone' in the Ardgour Granite Gneiss. The crush zone also hosts a suite of metasomatised Permo-Carboniferous dykes which predate the mineral veins. These altered dykes and the veins are cut, often at a high angle, by a suite of later mafic dykes of early Tertiary age.

Whitesmith Mine is named for John Whitesmith, who worked at Strontian in the first half of the eighteenth century. The mine is wrongly identified on Ordnance Survey maps, which position it near to the ruined baryte mine processing plant. A review of eighteenth and nineteenth-century plans and surveys of the area shows that this is not the case.

Whitesmith Mine worked the Strontian Main Vein via a shallow adit driven from the east (the entrance, now obliterated, was at ca. NM 8287 6588) and a series of shafts. The deepest of these, Whim Shaft (NM 8231 6595) at the west end of the sett, is in excess of 100 fathoms according to Russell (1919). The eastern workings of Whitesmith Mine were obliterated in the 1980s by the baryte mining operation, but the western workings remain much as they were abandoned in the nineteenth century. The position of the Old Sump Crosscut (NM 8249 6593), Whin Dyke Shaft (NM 8251 6593) and Hugh's Shaft (NM 8239 6594), which are marked on Ball's (1807) estate plan can still be identified along an opencut that runs east-west for about 300 m.

The mineralisation comprises major calcite and baryte with significant quantities of the base metal sulphides galena and sphalerite. These are typically deposited in a rhythmic sequence parallel to the vein walls, often producing a well defined symmetrical filling where the veins are narrow (where the veins are wider the textures are often much more complex). In some areas, the north wall of the vein is made up of brecciated clasts of gneiss, the interstices of which are coated in drusy brown brewsterite. Brewsterite also occurs in cavities and fractures in the vein, where it is sometimes associated with radiating groups of crystalline strontianite. Harmotome is relatively rare, although it occasionally occurs as characteristic white blocky crystals in cavities and fractures. The zeolite-group minerals and most of the strontianite are part of a late-stage fracture assemblage that post-dates the major vein mineralisation. At Whitesmith Mine, this assemblage also includes ancylite-(Ce), chamosite, minor calcite and kainosite-(Y) (described recently by Green and McCallum, 2005) and heulandite.

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References

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