Brodsworth Community Woodland - geograph

Brodsworth Colliery was a

coal mine Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from ...

north west of

Doncaster Doncaster (, ) is a city in South Yorkshire, England. Named after the River Don, it is the administrative centre of the larger City of Doncaster. It is the second largest settlement in South Yorkshire after Sheffield. Doncaster is situated in ...

and west of the Great North Road. in

South Yorkshire South Yorkshire is a ceremonial county, ceremonial and metropolitan county, metropolitan county in the Yorkshire and Humber Region of England. The county has four council areas which are the cities of City of Doncaster, Doncaster and City of Sh ...

, England. Two shafts were sunk between October 1905 and 1907 in a joint venture by the Hickleton Main Colliery Company and the Staveley Coal and Iron Company. The colliery exploited the

coal seams of the South Yorkshire Coalfield The coal seams worked in the South Yorkshire Coalfield lie mainly in the middle coal measures within what is now formally referred to as the Pennine Coal Measures Group. These are a series of mudstones, shales, sandstones, and coal seam ...

including the Barnsley seam which was reached at a depth of 595 yards and was up to 9 feet thick. After a third shaft was sunk in 1923, Brodsworth, the largest colliery in Yorkshire, had the highest output of a three-shaft colliery in Britain. The colliery and five others were merged into Doncaster Amalgamated Collieries in 1937 and the

National Coal Board The National Coal Board (NCB) was the statutory corporation created to run the nationalised coal mining industry in the United Kingdom. Set up under the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946, it took over the United Kingdom's collieries on "ve ...

in 1947. It closed in 1990. The colliery was consistently amongst those that employed the most miners in Britain, employing around 2,800 workers throughout the 1980s. The company built

Woodlands Woodlands may back refer to: * Woodland, a low-density forest Geography Australia * Woodlands, New South Wales * Woodlands, Ashgrove, Queensland, a heritage-listed house associated with John Henry Pepper * Woodlands, Marburg, Queensland, a her ...

, a model village for its workers. Since the colliery closed, its

spoil tip A spoil tip (also called a boney pile, culm bank, gob pile, waste tip or bing) is a pile built of accumulated ''spoil'' – waste material removed during mining. These waste materials are typically composed of shale, as well as smaller quant ...

has been restored and developed as a community woodland; owned by the Land Restoration Trust and controlled by the

Forestry Commission The Forestry Commission is a non-ministerial government department responsible for the management of publicly owned forests and the regulation of both public and private forestry in England. The Forestry Commission was previously also respon ...

. Some of the colliery site has been sufficiently remediated to allow houses to be built upon it.

References

Notes Bibliography *

External links

Brodsworth Colliery on nmrs.org.uk
Coal mines in South Yorkshire History of South Yorkshire Former mines in England Underground mines in England Former coal mines Adwick le Street {{SouthYorkshire-geo-stub

See also

References

External links