Open cast mining at Cossall.

[Limey 242]

Anywhere that the seams outcropped was likely to have been mined by addits first, then by bell pits. In some areas you can see lines of indentations where the bell pits were that follow the outcrop a few hundred yards back.

Although not in Notts, the Lount O/C site that I referred to earlier is very interesting in that they discovered deep workings dating back to 1450 there. Previously it was though the earliest deep workings were around 1550. Leicestershire have done a good job with their mining history and produced this leaflet that describes some of the old techniques and history. For some reason they refer to the Lount site as "Lounge" - possibly the influence of a spell-checker!

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

I wonder how many pits were sunk at the "crop" during the 1926 strike??

In Dr Griffins book Coalmining, he mentions bell pits being noted in aerial photographs of Wollaton, he doesn't say exactly where, but my guess would be the early workings of the Wollaton Estate, there is an area marked on the abandonment plans of two mines, one on Bramcote Moor dated 1789 just north of Moor Farm, and a much larger early mine to the north west of that mine. In fact the sough that was mentioned months back drains the 1789 colliery, this was the sough that caused a few legal problems for Lord Newcastle.

Here's a part of the abandonment plan I posted way back when.

http://nottstalgia.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=9578&page=3

[firbeck 859]

I may have mentioned this before, but the workings I remember in the Balloon Woods/Coventry Lane area consisted of a large bell pit just immediately NE of the railway bridge on Moor Farm Lane. I notice the site is now occupied by a road called Ingleby Close, I hope the owner of the house at the bottom knows whats directly underneath him, not just the mine, but all the old cars and junk that was chucked into it in the 50's and 60's. Just to the east of this was another big one near what we refered to as the Jacksons open mine workings where there was a narrow gauge railway to a canal wharf. This area now is occupied by a road called Nidderdale Close, these places have hopefully got some decent piles underneath them! Going North up the lane was another big bell pit site in the corner of Balloon Woods where the track joined Coventry Lane. This is now the site of a childrens play area and centre, I wonder whether it's shown signs of subsidence. In the small wood to the north of Balloon Crossroads was a shaft with a small headstock over it, I gather that this linked down to one of the Wollaton Colliery roads and was used to pump water out of the pit. I can't see any evidence of it on Google Satellite Images.

Going up Bilborough Road the next big bell pit was adjacent to the entrance to BGS, now a roundabout. This was surrounded by trees and out of bounds to pupils, this however had another one just to the north of it in rough ground before the rugby pitches started. In fact there were various area of rough ground on the campus between BGS and Melbury junior, all these showed evidence of bell pits. Across from BGS in the fields towards Strelley was the remains of a coal wharf which aparently served the plateway that ran down to the Trent via Moor Lane. This was very visible from our tower block in the winter but not much evidence can be seen on the current Google Satellite image.

Another very deep and open shaft I recall in the area was just off the bridle way from Balloon Crossroads to Cossall, look on Google Satelite and there's a big round depression near Moor Farm either a big bell pit or a dew pond.

I've just made the mistake of looking up Old-Maps.co.uk for that area, the place is riddled with mine workings, worth looking at, I could spend the rest of the day pouring over those.

Incidentally, in a wood called Shaws Plantation near Catstone Hill I remember a kind of tank built into the ground with lot's of pipework, it was always a mystery to us, we always assumed it something to do with mine drainage, according to some old maps though it's referred to as a reservoir, well it wasn't that big, can't think what it could have been for, did you ever stumble across it Bilbraborn.

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

Bellpits were usually shallow shafts about 30ft deep, beyond that depth they weren't cost effective. They were worked until it was unsafe to "bell out" any further, then another bell pit was dug a few feet away, the debris from this filled the worked out one. This is how the Willoughby's made their futune, and how their house was financed in Wollaton Park.

Lord Newcastle had similar workings in Strelley, the cause of the infamous law case brought against him by the Willoughby's....

Later Lord Middleton operated a deeper colliery working, I presume, the Bord and Pillar method to the west of their estate at Wollaton and named in historic records as Wollaton Colliery, pre the one we are familiar with. Could be one of the two in the map I posted a year or two back.

Those workings would have to be 30 plus feet below the surface, but not as deep as modern collieries.

BSG list Turkey Hill Colliery, Cinderhill Colliery etc on their site, so there was definately "deep" coal mining in the 17th and 18th century going on, and then in the 19th century even deeper due to the use of pumping equipment being made available..Babbington, Hucknall No1, the Eastwood Collieries, Bullwell, Newcastle Colliery at Strelley etc..

Some of the old workings would have been a style of longwall mining, where the dirt would have been used in packs to help reduce convergence, so some surface sunsidence would have occurred, but after 150 years the ground will be settled. The ones to be watchful are Bord and Pillar mines, where after decades will be strating to collapse and could show up as voids in the surface, probably a coupld of feet in depth, enough to topple a modern brick house.

Shafts??? Lofthouse showed us there are thousands of unmarked shafts, Manchester is one city with shafts dating back to the 18th not marked or even known about now with potential for collapse and leaving a gaping hole hundreds of feet deep. Nottingham is lucky, deep mining didn't take off until the 19th century, so all shafts in and close to the city are known, filled and capped..Although, I wouldn't put too much trust in NCB filled and capped shafts, the majority were NOT filled and capped to the proper specs!! So expect to see a few "slump" over the next few years!!

When you see phoptos of pit bottoms with the first tippings in shaft filling, it's obvious shaft filling wasn't done correctly....LOL I'd hate to think, I'd be employed in a factory or live in a house built over a shaft that the NCB had filled and capped.

[taxi ray 170]

This is quite a good map of the area from the 1930s.

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/maps/sheet/lus_stamp/eng_lus_054

[Bilbraborn 1,594]

There was a bell pit next to the old Police Station on Strelley Road. The building is still there but a bit overgrown. Also, it is said that St. Martin's pond at Bilborough Village (not to be confused with Martin's pond at Wollaton) was once a large coal pit. It's long gone now with houses built on top.

I am doing a study of mining around Bilborough. It is ongoing when I can find time. There was a branch of the canal which went from above lock 19 on the Nottingham Canal at Wollaton and followed the 200ft contour winding around to where Harvey Hadden stadium now stands. There was a simple mine owned by the Barber Walker company. Looking at a very large scale OS map of the area dated from around late 19th century which I own, one can make out what may have been tramways from Bilborough Village and another one from what is marked as Machine House once situated near where Beechdale Road joins Strelley Road. It also shows what can only be interpreted as an embankment going down the hill. On Sandersons earlier map , the same building is shown as Old Engine. This tells me that there must have been some form of tramway down the hill from a simple pit somewhere there. The mines in that area were all worked out by 1815 and the Barber Walker company had already started their mining near Eastwood transporting coal via their own railway through Beggarlee. But that is another story.

When my kids were young, I used to take them on King George Park which was between Aspley Lane and Beechdale Road. At that time there was a long and overgrown mound of earth adjacent to the backs of the houses on Beechdale Road. I think that this may have been that embankment shown on the maps from all those years ago. It has gone now.

There was a book published about the Barber Walker company, but all that is left is photocopied pages at Eastwood library. I will one day maybe find time to go and look at it. I think it may have information and maps about their early pits in the Bilborough area.

The Bilborough cut was cut through twice. Once when the Trowell branch railway line was built and once when the later Wollaton Colliery was built. When the cut was abandoned, all that was in open land was reclaimed by farmers, but that which was in woods survived until the sixties. I remember a dry stretch in the woods between Beechdale Road and Glaisdale/Glenbrook schools, another section, full of water, curved round from the end of SPD warehouse (as first built) on Glaisdale Drive through the woods to Old Coach Road near the train bridge. There was yet another section in the Roughs near Glaisdale Drive near what is now Glaisdale Parkway. All these remains are long gone.

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

You may find some clues with boreholes on the BGS site, go for the ones coloured orange. I found the exact postion of Newcastle Colliery, Bullwell Collier and a few obscure ones on Trowell Moor.

One odd thing I cannot put two and two together is, there are three shafts marked for Wollaton Colliery. The NCB only had two, and in all the history, what bit I've located, lists only two shafts, but the BGS lists three!! And they are all on the old Wollaton Colliery site.

The only conclusion I can come to, is it was sunk with three, and the NCB or earlier owner filled and capped one.

[firbeck 859]

I was interested to read about the clearly haphazard way that the NCB went about capping off mineshafts. I always assumed that the colliery slag heaps were simply bulldozed down the shafts, isn't that what happened at Wollaton. Trowell Moor Colliery was already capped off when we used to go there in the early 60's. One shaft had a concrete slab at ground level with a steel pipe, about 9" in diameter cast into the top, this was sealed with a bolted circular steel plate. The other capped shaft consisted of a brick structure about 8ft high topped with a concrete slab, again with a pipe cast into it only this one was lacking it's cap. If you dropped a brick down that it took an age before it hit the bottom with a bang and a splash, we assumed that the cage was down there and the workings were filling up with water. I've been looking up a few facts about the mine and I gather that these shafts were just over 1000 ft deep. Eventually local kids managed to knock a hole in the brick wall, it was 9" brickwork with very poorly bonded mortar joints. The hole was gradually expanded until it was about 8ft square, bloody dangerous as you can imagine. You could look over the edge right down into the shaft which was brick lined with a very rusty steel ladder disappearing into the gloom, we weren't tempted to climb down it, I often wondered whether anybody did. The smells drifting up from the shaft were that damp, cool aroma of coal, typical of the area, now long gone. We tried a variety of ways of making flares and using fireworks to drop down the shaft in order to see the bottom, but it was so deep they always went out along time before they got down there. Eventually we filled up the gap in the wall with loose bricks then pushed the lot down, the ensuing bang shook the ground, or so it felt to us. While all this was going on tankers from Stanton Ironworks were emptying liquid blast furnace slurry into a large area created within the colliery slagheap, this stuff stank and must have been pretty toxic, there was absolutely no fencing or security around this dangerous site whatsoever, it's a wonder no-one got killed there. I wondered since why this slurry was simply not poured straight down the mineshaft, I can't think of any deep artesian wells that would have been affected, it must have done more harm to the environment being placed above ground. The area has since been landscaped, while you can still see where the slagheaps were, they have been much reduced, possibly even pushed down the shafts. I wonder how much of the slurry remains though as I notice a couple of streams coming out of the area.

I tried to find some photographs of the mine but there only seems to be one which has been published on here. However I came across some interesting ones, taken in May 1952 and wrongly captioned Trowell Moor Sidings. having said that, this computer has decided it doesn't want to upload them from Photobucket, it did yesterday and the day before, I'll try again shortly, I have a bike to fix.

[Limey 242]

I wonder why we ever called them "Slag heaps"? They were/are not "slag" and were never referred to as "slag" by the mining industry - the "proper" name was "spoil" heap or tip!

But I digress - I am pretty sure that the old tips were often used to fill abandoned shafts. It was cheap, and readily available! I know that many spoil tips in Leicestershire and Staffordshire were used to fill both shafts and drifts after mines were abandoned and concrete "seals" were required at several levels during the filling process. The unfortunate happenings at Aberfan caused much head scratching and re-writing of regulations regarding spoil tips, and abandonment plans. Even when I joined the NCB 14 years after Aberfan, the repercussions were very noticeable in both the rules, and the planning required for any above ground activities!

[Compo 10,328]

there was an aerial ropeway on teh spoil heap at Annesley. I used to watch it for hours - very soothing to watch.

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

I've seen an engineering drawing of "how to" fill a shaft and cap it....First, if you know of a dangerous mine shaft, doesn't have to be coal, can be any mineral, call the Coal Authority, at Berry Hill Mansfield, they have a hot line for dangerous shaft reports. They are the only UK government agency responsible for mine shafts and investigate ALL reports.

Back to shaft filling, the roads around pit bottom have to be sealed with a brick wall and another brick wall built a few feet away, middle has to be plugged with concrete. ALL shaft access roads have to be bricked up, pit bottom and all insets.

Then so many cubic yards have to be used for the first so many feet... I gather tip material is banned! Then it can be building rubble, old bricks or broken concrete...Some shafts have to have caps poured above each inset. About 18 or so yards below the surface a thick reinforced concrete cap has to be poured, it has to be set into the shaft lining.

Then garvel infill to withing a couple of feet of the shaft top, then the final reinforced concrete cap is poured.. Many shafts have methane drainage pipes and a high wire fence with no naked lights warnings around them.

Unfortuanately, lots of shafts are just filled, then the water starts washing the infill out at the shaft bottom, then over time the shaft "slumps" as has been happening all over the UK...

Wollaton I think was just filled with all sorts of debris and concrete capped, so expect that to slump over time!! Radford the same, probably Clifton was too.

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

I think the term slag developed from tips catching fire and the resulatant material left was like slag. I think someone latched on to how to make money selling the red burned "slag", it was ground to gravel size and sold as ground cover for flower beds to inhibit weeds. Attractive and useful.

[firbeck 859]

Isn't it a small world, I was sitting behind the bike hire counter here in Braintree having given up trying to upload the photo's. I was just reading Ayupmeducks posting about filling mineshafts when a chap came in and asked for a price list, he said 'You're doing the right thing sitting out the sun', 'Yes', I said, 'Believe it or not, I'm just reading about capping off old colliery mineshafts'. Would you believe it, he'd operated around the South Yorkshire coalfields mainly in the Doncaster area, contracted out to the NCB, levelling spoil tips and shoving some of the waste down abandoned shafts. He told me that subsidence caused by inadequate filling and collapsing underground workings was a big problem up there. He mentioned an area that was earmarked for housing but the ground sank so much that a lake formed in the middle, he said they turned it into a country park like this one instead.

Amazing!

[BulwellBrian 107]

Slag comes from blast furnaces, not coal mines.

[Limey 242]

Yeah, old workings "settling" can take many, many years! Interestingly, there are all sorts of formulas and theories for calculating the amount of surface subsidence that will occur - but none, to my knowledge, that ever actually predicted the end result. Even in areas where the same mine worked the same seams at the same depth, the amount of subsidence could vary massively and was often VERY visible! I remember a road junction near the mine in Measham that, in the space of one year, changed its appearance three times! We still had to learn the formulas in college though!

Interesting thought on the "slag" name Ayup - that could indeed be the source of it, especially from old tips where the coal "cleaning" was done by hand. I suspect a fair amount of small coal was destined for the tip!

[firbeck 859]

Slag comes from blast furnaces, not coal mines.

When I was a kid my father used to take me on the tandem down to Stanton Gate to do a bit of train spotting ( Garretts out of Toton in them days ). Just north of the station were two huge slag heaps from the Stanton Ironworks blast furnaces, I guess the name just stuck with me and all spoil tips subsequently became slagheaps as far as I was concerned.

[Limey 242]

I think "Slag heap" was a common term for spoil tips - but I agree that they really should only apply to piles of "slag" - but then again, we referred to the remains in the grate in the morning that had to be taken out before the new fire was laid as "slag"!

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

Pre WW2, coal mine owners would not pay for slack and smalls, woe betide a miner who had loaded a tub with smalls or slack!! He was fined and not paid for the tub of coal. The smalls went to the tip..A lot of the coal spontaneously ignited over time. One tip I recall that was on fire, was between Hucknall road and Bulwell, probably a combination of Hucknall No1 and Bulwell collieries.

I used to save a few pennies on busfare by walking down the public footpath through the tips to an NCT trolleybus terminus. The tips smoked and stunk bad too..

[BulwellBrian 107]

I remember that Kirkby colliery (called "Summit" ) by my dad had a tip that was always smoking.

I think they called the stuff that came from burnt tips "Burnt Shale".

[Bilbraborn 1,594]

This may be interesting to Firbeck. When they built the dwellings on Nidderdale, adjacent to the railway at Wollaton opposite side to Balloon Woods, they had to get an old map to find the old pits. I knew this as my dad was involved in that site. They had planned two more houses but had to scrap them as they found a shaft where they were planned. Even aqfter capping it was not safe. They built a row of garages instead. I lived in one of the flats on Nidderdale. They were built directly over the site of the canal.

[Bilbraborn 1,594]

By the way. My son and I went this evening to photograph around Robinettes. The towpath up the Robinettes branch is so overgrown it is impassible. I'll maybe try again when it isn't so hot.

[mgread1200 141]

If the coal is wanted and its cheap to get by opencasting then eventualy they will have it no matter what objections are raised. I live on the Notts Derby coal fields not far from the old Pye Hill pit and over the years there have been many opencast projects Smotherfly I think was one that covers quite a big area. there was a massive spoil tip at Pye Hill I used to walk past it every day back in the seventies you would not even know there was a mine there now apart from the old entrance that led to the mens canteen.

[Bilbraborn 1,594]

I think if they hadn't built houses at Bilborough all those years ago, they would have open cast mined there. My granddad used to say there were that many primitive mines there that he wouldn't be surprised if the lot disappeared underground one day. I missed out the expletives.

[Bilbraborn 1,594]

Just got my house deeds through the post this week. Talk about history book. I've got to translate the gobbledegook but I can make out a lot of the history of the ownership of the land around this part of Bilborough. As far as I can make out, when the Middletons sold all their Nottingham property by auction in the 1920s, the tenants at Old Park Farm, one Jackson family bought the farm and the land. They didn't have it long as the council bought it in 1937 to build houses. The war must have intervened as these houses were built in the late forties. They must have had fun filling in all the bell pits. As far as I can make out, the 1603 wooden tramway built by Huntingdon Beaumont to assist movement of coal from Lord Willoughby's mines passed right next to Old Park Farm. It was actually the Old Wollaton Park Farm as the old Wollaton estate (pre 1588 Wollaton Hall) actually bordered on Bilborough Village and Strelley Estates. When I was little and growing up in this house, many people wrote to us with the address Old Park Estate, Aspley.

[Raybo 28]

Firbeck you were right about the driftmines at Oakwell Grange & Cossal, my dad was a bricklayer and in the winter there was a shortage of work in the building trade so he would sign on for work in pits (still laying bricks but underground) I went with him a couple of times but there didn't seem to be any coal moving so it must have been near the end of their use. You had to go down an incline sat on some sort of bogey truck on rails to get to the bottom and from what I can remember he was bricking up roadways if that makes any sense. I remember going to Wollaton Colliery with him to fetch money he was owed and we had a fantastic breakfast in the pit canteen. Another thing I remember was our coal house was full to the roof so he either got coal allowance like the miners or he did a dodgy deal. What about the pit towels?, dad would always finish up with pit towels which were the best you could buy and us kids would dissapear into one of these towels when we came out of the bath.