Coke ovens 2

Coal from Brookhouse Colliery was made into coke at the adjacent coke ovens.

Rams push the red-hot coke into a hopper mounted on rails. The hopper is electrically driven (via the pair of overhead wires in the centre of the picture) and is transported a few tens of metres away to the cooling area where jets of water are sprayed onto the coke to cool it. It is then loaded into lorries or wagons to go to the steel works.

The coke ovens were closed and dismantled in the late 1980s. The land was opencasted to recover the shallow coal and then restored to make the Rother Valley Country Park.