Tag: Colliery
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#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.
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#568 – Barnsley Main Colliery 2
The siting of the headgear atop the shafthead building wasn’t unusual, although the backstays are supported by the winding house meaning that no part touches the ground. However, it’s certainly unique in the context of the other remaining headgear in the UK, and made all the more prominent by the demolition of the previous mining…
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#566 – Astley Green Colliery 2
As the gates were shut and preparations for a post-lockdown reopening were still underway, I had to limit my photography to the view from the gate. This is where the camera on my phone comes in handy, as being able to poke it through the bars on the gate gave me a different perspective to…
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#565 – Astley Green Colliery 1
Astley Green Colliery is only a 30 minute drive down the M61 from me, but I’ve not been since 2012, so I decided that my first post-lockdown jaunt would be for a quick look. As of the time of the visit (June 27th 2020), the place hadn’t yet reopened for visitors, but that was fine…
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#559 – Book review – The Last Years of Coal Mining in Yorkshire
In doing some online research for my blog articles I stumbled across a series of books by Steve Grudgings. Two of these cover the last days of the South Wales coalfield, and the other one was this one on Yorkshire. Regrettably, I never got round to photographing the few collieries that remained in Yorkshire until…
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#558 – Hatfield Colliery 3
As a black and white photographer, I try to start thinking about how I want the final image to look when I am at the location. As I am shooting digital, the file is a colour file and while I know that you can preview and save JPEG’s as black and white in camera, I…
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#557 – Hatfield Colliery 2
My drone now accompanies me if I am going somewhere suitable to fly it, and Hatfield seemed a suitable opportunity to give it a fly. As I’m not using the drone regularly (it’s not my primary camera), I’m still getting my head round how to use the drone in my photography and how to compose…
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#556 – Hatfield Colliery 1
Britain’s coal mining industry has been in a long slow decline for decades. It’s been well documented elsewhere and is an emotive subject that I have no wish to get bogged down with. But with the recent drive to lower carbon emissions, the closure of the coal fired power stations has seen a dramatic reduction…
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#470 – Best of 2016 part 3
So a (belated) third part to my 2016 retrospective continues with a quick look at Mutual Mills in Heywood – not an explore, more a drive by as I was in the area. I’ve a few more from the Manchester area that I’ve not yet got round to posting up – I’ll put these up some…
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#461 – Chatterley Whitfield Revisited 2
Institute shaft looming overhead. The view from the landscapes slagheap. The Chatterley Whitfield company logo, cast in iron. Platt Shaft headgear. The looming bulk of the Hesketh. And another one, a little further away. I wanted to frame it between some of the surface buildings to give it a little more context. Steam boilers. These weren’t…
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#460 – Chatterley Whitfield Revisited 1
I rarely go and revisit places that I’ve photographed, with only a handful of exceptions e.g. Bailey Mill last week. Partly this is due to sating may curiosity first time round, and partly due to my usual modus operandi of being one step ahead of the demolition crews. In Chatterley Whitfield’s case, my curiosity wasn’t…
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#259 – Staffordshire Collieries Part 1 – Chatterley Whitfield
Another one from the archives here, this was an ‘official’ visit to this crumbling edifice on a so-called open day. Actually, that’s being harsh and doing a disservice to our guides from the Friends of Chatterley Whitfield, who are probably more disappointed about the condition of this place than anyone else, and I’m sure…
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#170 – Beamish Part 1 – Big Stuff
A weeks holiday in the north east allowed for a visit to the Beamish Open Air Museum. I’d last visited about 20 years ago, and my memories were somewhat sketchy to say the least, but a check of their website suggested that a few new areas had been added to the site, so it had…
Mechanical Landscapes 