Laxey Wheel
Interesting facts
- Lady Isabella is a backshot wheel: water from a hillside cistern is piped up her tower as an inverted siphon and makes her turn backwards.
- A water wheel was chosen because the Isle of Man has no coal of its own to fire steam pumping engines.
- The wheel drives a long wooden rod that runs about 200 metres along a viaduct to the pumping shaft, where a rocker turns the motion into pumping.
- Lady Isabella is about 1.8 metres wide and turns roughly three times a minute, built mostly of wood with metal parts at key stress points.
- The Great Laxey Mine holds the record for the largest sulphide crystal ever found, a 118-kilogram galena specimen now in London's Natural History Museum.
- Laxey ore was so rich in silver that the mine's shares rose from about 34 pounds in the late 1820s to over 1,500 pounds by 1833.
- In 1901 a shortage of water to drive the wheel let the mine flood to about 1,000 feet, and draining it needed specially built steam pumps.
- The Manx Government bought the wheel and its site in 1965 and restored it after mining had ended.
- The wheel appears on the reverse of the twenty-pound note issued by the Isle of Man Government.
Why it is worth it
Everyone calls her Lady Isabella, and the name was not a marketing flourish — the Victorians who built her in 1854 named the wheel after the wife of the island's governor, Charles Hope, the way you'd christen a ship. At over 22 metres across, she is still the largest working water wheel anywhere in the world, and she was never built for spectacle: she was built because the Great Laxey Mine was drowning.
By the 1850s the mine's zinc and lead seams ran deep enough that groundwater threatened to shut the whole operation down. Engineer Robert Casement's answer was pure Victorian overkill — a wheel powerful enough to pump 250 gallons of water a minute up from 370 metres underground, deeper than most mines of the era ever reached. It worked well enough that the Great Laxey Mine went on to produce more zinc than any other mine in the British Isles, with ore hauled up from nearly 600 metres below ground by the time production peaked around 1900.
The wheel outlived the industry it served. Mining struggled through the early twentieth century and the mine finally closed in 1929, but Lady Isabella had already become a tourist draw in her own right — visitors were climbing her external staircase for the view long before the last miners packed up. Nearly two centuries on, she's still the single most visited attraction on the Isle of Man, kept running today by Manx National Heritage as much as a working engineering monument as a museum piece.
Getting there
11 km from Douglas. Isle of Man Airport (IOM) is about 22 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Laxey Wheel is built into the hillside above the village of Laxey in the Isle of Man. It is the largest surviving original working waterwheel in the world. Designed by Robert Casement, the wheel has a 72-foot-6-inch (22.1 m) diameter, is 6 feet (1.8 m) wide and revolves approximately three times per minute.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
54.23853, -4.40739per Wikidata