Coal Mining

On a wet and windy morning I set off in the dark for Foxfield Colliery and a charter photo shoot organised at the start of the Foxfield Railway autumn gala. It stayed dark and the rain only occasionally eased off, but the results were ok. Here Giesel ejector fitted Bagnall, Florence No.2, sets off from the yard with a rake of mineral wagons. The upcast headstocks of the former Foxfield Colliery stand to the left.

Coal mining on the southern side of Macclesfield Common was concentrated around Blakelow via a number of shafts to the north-east of the current boundary of Macclesfield Golf Club. The Macclesfield Copper Company leased the Blakelow workings in the later eighteenth century and was extracting the coal from the two Holcombe Brook Seams using pillar and stall workings drained by a sough driven from lower down the hill towards Macclesfield town. The seams were thin and sometimes less than 2ft thick, but the quality was good enough to make it worthwhile extracting them. In this view over the town the remains of the northern shaft of Blakelow Colliery can be seen on the lower left with two trees growing out of the spoil mound.

Another view from the 1964 demolition of Sandhole Colliery. The concrete headgear over No.2 Pit dated from 1935. No.1 Pit headgear is to the right and the remains of the No.3 Pit headgear and winding drum are centre and in front of the chimney.

Originally closed in 1966 the Barnsley Main pit was reopened to transfer workers from the Barrow pit, which closed in 1985 owing to geological problems. It finally closed in 1991 and the headgear and engine house are now preserved in the 'care' of the local council.

The trouble with the passenger trains on the Pingdingshan Coal Railway is that the windows do not open and are covered by a protective mesh on the outside. This does not make for easy photography which is a great pity as there is much to see on the line running westwards to Baofeng and on to the mines at Hanzhuangzhan. Everywhere you look on this journey you can see collieries, or limekilns, or coke ovens, or brickworks, or the whole lot at once. Small mines abound and in this view through the grime smeared pane there are four headgears to be seen.

I have installed a new scanner and am astonished at the improvement achieved in scannning old negatives. This one is from a 1982 trip to the woods not far from Silverdale Colliery in North Staffordshire. There were several private mines around Bank Top, one of which boasted this fine winding house working drifts in three directions. All gone now.

The pithead area at Welbeck was well screened from this side by Leylandii.

Kriegslok shunting the loading bunkers at the Dubrave coal mine in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The last rays of the sun catch Clayton's chimney on Windmill Lane, Kerridge, after one the the finest October days I can remember.

The land on the slope of Ecton Hill in Rainow and Commonside in Macclesfield is riddled with old coal workings. On the far side of the Buxton New Road is Eddisbury Hill on which can be clearly seen the remains of the spoil mound of Brocklehurst's Eddisbury Hill Colliery which operated after the First World War and was abandoned in 1925. The workings in the foreground are much older and date from some time after the enclosure of the Rainow Wastes in the 1620s. At that time Laurence Hooley (Hulley) of the One House, who already had coal under his land, was granted additional acreage on Eddisbury. These pits are both small and numerous and do not appear to have been worked with a horse gin. I reckon they employed a simple hand windlass (locally known as a 'Pit Turn' ) to raise the baskets of coal. They were largely worked out by the end of the eighteenth century. As an aside, I have searched the OS maps of the Macclesfield area for mention of Ecton Hill and cannot find the name on any of them.

At the loading point for the 900 mm gauge electric railway connecting the Vreoci opencast coal mines to the washery operated by the state-owned Kolubara group which was established in the mid-1950s. There are 17 locomotives in service with the oldest dating back to 1942. The maximum speed of all electric locomotives is 30 km/h. The trains consist of 17 self-discharging wagons and the weight of a loaded train is 800 tons of which 500 tons are coal. Locomotive No.6 on the left was built by Haine St. Pierre/BBC in 1952 whilst No.14 is a product of LEW in c1970.

I started scanning some slides from the Tarchives today and found a box of colliery images. This pit was actually called Bridgewater Colliery but was always referred to as Sandhole. It was sunk in 1865 and eventually became an important part of the Manchester Collieries Ltd empire. High costs associated with geological problems led to closure in 1962 and the colliery was demolished in 1964 apart from the washery that continued to operate until 1968. This view is during the demolition process.

Surface arrangements at a small mine at Leycett, Staffordshire at a time when such things were still to be found around the Potteries.

Work to remodel the New Haden Colliery at Cheadle commenced in January 1927. The work included widening the No.8 upcast shaft from 8ft in diameter to 14ft and sinking deeper to reach the Woodhead seam. The coal was reached on 5th January 1929 and the final depth of the shaft was 340 yards. A new steel headgear was erected and a winding engine by Markham of Chesterfield installed. This had cylinders 26ins diameter and 5 ft stroke with a winding drum 16ft in diameter. The colliery was plagued by water problems and after attempts to work the Four Feet coal in 1942 led to an greatly increased inflow the pit was abandoned in June 1943. The Markham winder was dismantled and sold for use at a colliery in Hollinwood, Oldham.

A scene from the days when coal was brought all the way to the washery from the bottom of the Jalainur opencast mine. The coal geology is very obvious in the background although it is only the thickest seams that are extracted..

Last rites for the headstocks at Welbeck Colliery today. It was sad to see the end of this pit, but at least it was because the reserves of coal had been extracted.

This shaft, with the trees growing out of the top, is a bit of a mystery. It is clearly a coal shaft but I cannot find any information about when it was worked or by whom. I suspect that this is a ventilation shaft rather than one from which coal was drawn and it may have been connected to a shaft which stood against the left hedge in the distant field (centre left). It does not show on any of the maps from the 19th century and it is probably related to 18th century workings in this part of Bollington

A visit to a drift mine today provided a few interesting photographic opportunties.