IT is with considerable sadness that we report this week on English Heritage's decision not to financially support the Yorkshire Dales Lead Mining Museum, which is curiously situated in Earby.

Anyone who has not visited the museum - and it does lie off the normal tourist trail - is missing a little gem. It sprang from the Earby Mines Research Group, formed in 1945, which explored the mine system and brought up many artefacts from the area's old mines. By the 1960s it had accumulated a considerable store and in 1970 the group took over the former Earby Grammar School building, founded in 1591, to convert it into the mines museum.

Times have moved on but the Earby Museum, run by volunteers, remains in our view easily the best place to get an idea of an industry which once dominated parts of the Dales. Alas, the old grammar school is falling into disrepair and neither the trustees nor the small group of volunteers has the money for refurbishment. Nor, it seems has English Heritage.

The preservation of a museum dedicated solely to an industry which once dominated the Dales - and has left its marks on the landscape for all time - seems just the sort of thing that the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust, which has the key to unlock major funding, should support - unless of course its constitution prevents it from handing out funds to an organisation which lies outside the Yorkshire Dales National Park boundaries.

Which leads us to a curious anomaly. The area of Yarnbury, high on the moor above the village of Grassington, is heavily scarred by the remains of the Duke of Devonshire's mines which employed thousands in the 19th century. Old structures abound and the area has a windswept atmosphere evocative of the days when the Dales were a place of work rather than beauty. However, there is no museum, only a few battered "interpretation boards".

So Earby has the museum and artefacts but no lead mines, Yarnbury has the location but little else. The time has come to consider a purpose-built lead mining museum above Grassington funded by the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust and administered by the Earby Lead Mining Group. That clearly would leave a question mark over the future of the former Earby Grammar School but it is a concept worth investigating.