Dinnington Main Colliery was a coal mine situated in the village of Dinnington, near

Rotherham Rotherham () is a large minster and market town in South Yorkshire, England. The town takes its name from the River Rother which then merges with the River Don. The River Don then flows through the town centre. It is the main settlement of ...

South Yorkshire South Yorkshire is a ceremonial and metropolitan county in the Yorkshire and Humber Region of England. The county has four council areas which are the cities of Doncaster and Sheffield as well as the boroughs of Barnsley and Rotherham. In N ...

, England. Until the coming of the colliery Dinnington was a mainly agricultural village with a small amount of quarrying in the area. In 1899 preparations were being made by the

Sheffield Coal Company The Sheffield Coal Company was a colliery owning and coal selling company with its head office situated in South Street, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. Formation The Sheffield Coal Company was one of the oldest colliery companies in Sh ...

to sink a new colliery at Dinnington. The company did not have the resources to complete the work and entered into a partnership with the Sheepbridge Coal and Iron Co and this joint company, the Dinnington Main Colliery Company, came into being in 1900. The colliery commenced sinking in 1902 and reached the

Barnsley seam 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 seams laid ...

of coal in the summer of 1904. The first coal was drawn to the surface the following year which is also when the mine gained its second shaft. Rail connection for the colliery was eventually made by the

South Yorkshire Joint Railway The South Yorkshire Joint Railway was a committee formed in 1903, between the Great Central Railway, the Great Northern Railway, the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, the Midland Railway and the North Eastern Railway to oversee the constructio ...

(SYJR) when its line opened in January 1909. The SYJR was a five way joint line with connections to ports and towns in the area and beyond. At the time of the 1946 nationalisation of the coal industry the colliery was in the hands of Amalgamated Denaby Collieries, based at

Denaby Main Denaby Main is a village situated between Mexborough and Conisbrough in the Metropolitan Borough of Doncaster in South Yorkshire, England. The village falls within the Doncaster MBC ward of Conisbrough and Denaby. It was built by the Denaby Ma ...

, near Doncaster. Following nationalisation the colliery became part of 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 "v ...

. The colliery stopped production in October 1991, and was closed in 1992 with the loss of over 1,000 jobs. At the start of the 21st century, the former colliery site was subject to one of the largest former coal

mine reclamation Mine reclamation is the process of modifying land that has been mined to ecologically functional or economically usable state. Although the process of mine reclamation occurs once mining is completed, the planning of mine reclamation activiti ...

schemes that Yorkshire had seen. Johnston Press, a regional publisher and printer, sited a £60 million printing press on the site in 2006. Nearby St Leonard's Church in Dinnington, has a mining memorial commemorating the 74 miners who died whilst working at Dinnington Main, though the eventual tally of the dead is disputed by some researchers.

References

* Barnett, A.L., Railways of the South Yorkshire Coalfield from 1880. R.C.T.S., 1984. {{Coal mining in Yorkshire Dinnington, South Yorkshire Coal mines in Rotherham Coal mines in South Yorkshire