I’ve written before about Lancashire’s coalfield so my few regular readers will have to excuse the brief recap. While not as big or as long lasting as Yorkshire’s or Nottinghamshire’s, it was certainly one of the main mining areas earlier in the 20th century and extraction was concentrated around south Lancashire in a belt that…
Tag: Coal Mine
#605 – Woodhorn Colliery
One of my current long term projects is photographing the remaining mining headgear / headstocks in the UK, and displaying these in a ‘typlogy’ format à la Bernd and Hilla Becher. I’d only managed to visit two sites this year – the unusual clad structure at Meadowbank Mine in Winsford, and the two at Snibston…
#594 – A Refreshed Typology
So with the photograph of one of the Snibston headstocks available for inclusion, I took the opportunity to refresh the typology and add in Grove Rake and Magpie Mine that I’d not included before. Grove Rake I took back in 2016, long before this project was conceived and so isn’t optimal really, but until I…
#593 – Snibston – Part 3
Nothing to see here other than some self indulgent colour photographs of rust! The museum part of the colliery site has unfortunately been demolished, but as well as the headstocks, there are a number of other mining artefacts on display in front of the tandem headstocks.
#592 – Snibston Mine – Part 2
The reason I visited Snibston was to see if I could make some photographs for my ongoing typology project. As I mentioned in my previous post, I feared that as the site had closed, I would either have to jump a fence or shoot from the road. However, the site reopened in 2020, thus eliminating…
#591 – Snibston Mine – Part 1
My only previous visit to Snibston was in 2010 (here and here), I can’t recall the occasion but it was a rather nice setup, with the site of the colliery being nicely preserved with a modern museum and short heritage railway line featuring diesel and steam shunters hauling the ubiquitous BR Mk1 coach. It was…
#575 – Haig Pit 2
Haig colliery sits on a cliff above the town and looks out to sea. While I couldn’t capture it relative to the town, I did manage to photograph this scene showing the coastline and the cliffs that fall steeply to the sea. This land between the cliff and colliery was previously home to the railway…
#573 – Haig Pit 1
Cumbria in the 21st century is a place we most associate with the Lake District. It’s rugged beauty brings millions of visitors every year, but as you head west through the county, you hit the little visited industrial coastline. There’s not that much there now except Sellafield and a few old industrial towns, but for…
#572 – Bersham Colliery 2
While I was killing time waiting for a clear or cloudy sky (see post 570), I tried a few different compositions. I quite liked this multi layered composition, which is totally different to the single layer type I’m using for the headgear project. This was taken, processed and uploaded t the blog from my iPhone…
#570 – Bersham Colliery 1
I’ll post a bit of history in the next post, but in this one I want to talk about the photographic aspects of this photograph. As this was going to be part of my ongoing colliery headgear project, I needed a featureless sky. Didn’t matter whether it was a clear blue sky or an overcast…
Mechanical Landscapes 