Barony Colliery, to the west of Auchinleck in Ayrshire was the last of the pits in the west of Scotland to close. It consisted of a number of shafts, although 1 and 2 were closed in the 1960’s, but all that survives is the headgear of No.3 shaft, more commonly known as the Barony A-Frame….
Tag: Colliery
#654 – Clipstone Colliery Revisit Part 2
There were three main areas visited – the winding engine hall, the adjacent power house and the heapstead under the upcast. The winding engine hall is now used as an events venue and has a large collection of mining memorabilia which was interesting but not what I wanted to photograph. The power house was more…
#653 – Clipstone Colliery Revisit Part 1
I’d last visited Clipstone Colliery in March 2009, not long after the site had been cleared, leaving just the magnificent grade 2 listed headstocks and power house standing alone in a recently graded field. In fact there were still piles of rubble round the back and the fence had not been erected around the buildings….
#652 – Clipstone Colliery 2009
These are some photographs that I’ve never published on this blog, although if you follow me on social media you will have seen them, and the colour versions appear on theviewfromthenorth.org. I visited here in 2009, and the site had just been cleared of all the surface buildings. All that was left was the grade…
#651 – Pleasley Colliery Revisit
I first visited both Clipstone and Pleasley Colliery on the same day in March 2009 and while Clipstone was my priority this time I thought I’d pay a quick visit to Pleasley as it was only 25 minutes away. Back in 2009 I was years away from starting my headgear typology but while I had…
#608 – Lancashire Rural Industry 2 – Hill Top Colliery
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…
#606 – An updated typology
My last update to the typology was a 3×3 grid as can be seen in this post back in April, or if you can’t be bothered reading that, see below for just the picture. I’ve decided to go with a three row format which means that the total number of images must be divisible by…
#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…
#599 – The Art of the Panorama Part 3 – Mills and Mining
Unlike the steel industry with its vast landscapes, the mills and mines I’ve photographed are for the most part more compact, more upright. At one time when the cotton mills were the dominant features of the urban landscape of the northern mill town, it was possible to make panoramas of these dozens of mills and…
#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…
Mechanical Landscapes 