The ore is waiting in the tub, the snow upon the fell,

Canny folk are sleeping yet, but lead is reet to sell.

Come me little washer lad, come let's away.

We're bound down for slavery for fourpence a day.

TRIPPING through Teesdale, you stumble across deep scars in the fellside and the tumbledown ruins of stone buildings. The scars are amazing as you imagine the human hands, scrabbling through the stones, that created them centuries ago.

The tumbledown ruins are perplexing. It is impossible to imagine why anyone would want to live so far from anywhere in such impossibly inhospitable surroundings.

Much is explained in a book by Norma Smith which is launched today in Middleton-in-Teesdale. In it, she traces her leadmining family tree back nine generations. They had rights to turbary - to dig peat at the haggs on the moor - to heat their homes, and they took time out from the mines to make hay - raking it into windrows, piling it into pikes and then bringing it home on a pike-bokey or a hay sledge.

Their words have now gone, underlined in error-riddled red on the computer screen, but a few scars and ruins remain of their days and ways.

The scars are the hushes. Cleats were dug at the top of the fell to direct water into a manmade dam. Beneath it, vegetation was pulled from the ground, and rocks were loosened. Then the dam was burst. Water came rushing out, scouring away the soil and the stone as it dashed down the dale.

Everyone had a good look. Some inspected at the fellside to see if a vein of lead had been exposed that was worth mining into; others picked at the rocks at the bottom to see what riches had been washed down.

The names of the mines where Norma's ancestors worked - Coldberry, High Skears, Lodge Syke, Dirt Pit - capture the bleakness of their inhospitable locations.

Because they worked so far from home, men stayed in lodging houses close to the pit. They arrived at the start of the week carrying their "wallets" - or "pillow bags" - which contained their food. They worked their shift, returned to their lodging, cooked their meal downstairs, and then climbed the ladder to bed.

The bed was horrible. A hessian mattress stuffed with straw, shared with another man and probably still warm from its previous occupants whose shifts were just beginning. Plus a boy slumped across the feet.

And the bedroom was horrible. No ventilation, 40 men and additional boys squeezed in, all doing what males do best during the night: coughing, snoring, scratching, belching... with the delicate smell of bacon wafting up from the fire below.

The boys were employed mainly as washers. They collected the "bouse" (material from the mine), smashed it into a regular size using a "spalling" hammer on a "knockstone". Then they separated the "galena" (lead ore) from the "gangue" (fluorspar) by swooshing it with water.

Their words have gone. Their way of life has gone. Only a few scars and ruins on the daleside are left to remind us of the times of a 12-year-old washerboy, soaking and freezing in one of nature's most remote outposts, looking forward only to a night at the toe-end of a stranger's bed...

My mother rises out of bed with tears on her cheeks.

Puts my wallet on my shoulder, which has come to serve a week.

It often fills her great big heart when she unto me say

I never thought thou would have worked for fourpence a day.

The Story of a Lead Mining Family by Norma Smith is launched today at 11am in Middleton-in-Teesdale Methodist Church, and is available from the publishers, Mosaic, on 01833-640893.