Barnsley, Rotherham and Worksop sit on top of the Midland coalfield, stretching from Nottingham into Yorkshire and the mining industry in this area once supported tens of thousands of jobs in collieries dotted across the landscape. In this book, the culmination of some forty years of research, author Ken Wain tells the story of the mining industry in the area from the primitive mines of the medieval period to the rundown of the industry and the end of deep mining in Britain. The Coal Minin...

The River Forth is one of Scotland's great waterways. It has a majestic history and heritage, part of which is the Forth bridges. Of these, the most iconic is the Forth Rail Bridge, which opened in 1890. But there is also the Kincardine Bridge, opened in 1936 and once the longest swing bridge in Europe, the Forth Road Bridge, opened in 1964, and the new Queensferry Crossing, due to be completed in 2016. In this book, Michael Meighan looks at all these bridges as well as the Clackmannanshire B...

The culmination of some forty years of research sees Ken Wain tell the story of the mining industry in this part of South Yorkshire. He tells the life stories of the many collieries from Chesterfield to Sheffield. With some 900 shafts in Chesterfield alone, and hundreds in the Sheffield area, Ken gives an insight into the growth of coal and ironstone mining in the region, as well as some of the human stories of disaster, and of working and living conditions for the miners and their familie...

A number one bestseller, this favourite New Zealand novel captures a real 19th century community.The bleak coal-mining settlement of Denniston, isolated high on a plateau above New Zealand's West Coast, is a place that makes or breaks those who live there. At the time of this novel - the1880s - the only way to reach the makeshift collection of huts, tents and saloons is to climb aboard an empty coal-wagon to be hauled 2000 feet up the terrifyingly steep Incline - the cable-haulage system t...

This interdisciplinary book encompasses the fields of rock mechanics, structural geology and petroleum engineering to address a wide range of geomechanical problems that arise during the exploitation of oil and gas reservoirs. It considers key practical issues such as prediction of pore pressure, estimation of hydrocarbon column heights and fault seal potential, determination of optimally stable well trajectories, casing set points and mud weights, changes in reservoir performance during d...

On the edge of the Warwickshire coalfield, coal had been mined in Nuneaton since the fourteenth century and the town was a centre for quarrying and brick-making too. Coal had been mined in the Stockingford and Griff area of Chilvers Coton for five centuries, and by the mid-1860s, new capital, increasingly efficient mining methods, together with the building of the railways, brought about a golden bonanza of coal production in this area of Warwickshire. The building of railways and roads ge...

Located close to the Ellesmere Colliery, the Walkden Yard ultimately became the NCB Central Workshops for Lancashire. From here the workshops served the Bridgewater Trustees' collieries, providing engineering support as well as maintaining the numerous railway locomotives and the many hundreds of wagons that the company owned. Opened in 1878, Walkden Yard transferred to the National Coal Board upon nationalization after the Second World War and its importance grew as it served the other La...

The area of Lancashire and Cheshire can be considered one of the homes of the Industrial Revolution, and it was the abundance of coal close to the surface that literally helped fuel the great growth in cities such as Manchester and Liverpool. With poor roads, it was easier to move coal by water and so Lancashire landowners developed the first canals in Britain. Lancashire coal powered the cotton mills, the steelworks and the ironworks, it powered the locomotives that transported people and...

Coal was the very bedrock on which the town of Whitehaven was built, the trade in coal with Dublin starting after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Shipping ever increasing quantities of coal to Ireland brought another industry to the town – shipbuilding. In the seventeenth century, the Whitehaven Pottery began, local coal firing the kilns. Coal mining fathered several more local industries, including chemicals, iron ore smelting, glass bottle making, foundries, engineering and even the ...

The first deep shafts sunk at Atherton were by John Fletcher. The family firm of Fletcher, Burrows & Co. sank numerous shafts in the vicinity of the village of Atherton including Gibfield, Howe Bridge and Hindsford. Nationalized in 1947, the collieries were operated by the National Coal Board until the closure of Chanters Colliery in 1966. Howe Bridge was the largest and longest-operated of the local pits and lasted for 109 years, from 1850-1959. Gibfield has a notable claim to fame in tha...

From Roman times, rocks have been worked for a wide range of purposes, initially as building stone. As time passed, more and more stone was needed for high-status buildings like castles, halls and monasteries, as well as for bridges, dry stone walls and road-building. The Yorkshire Pennines have a varied geology with many rock types that proved suitable for building and other uses, and the landscape is dotted with old quarry workings, large and small, some of which can be linked to the med...

In the United Kingdom surface coal mining began in 1942 in response to a national shortage of deep-mined coal. By the 1980s, when Dave Wootton began touring sites and taking photographs, the industry was firmly established with major operations and very large machinery. His fully captioned pictures cover the period from 1986 until British Coal Opencast (BCO) was privatised in 1994. There are panoramic shots showing the scale of operations and fine close-ups of individual machines of many k...