An old mining landscape
The remains, photographed on Monday 28th December 1981, of Church Farm Colliery, also known as Buller's Pit, at Mangotsfield, five miles east of Bristol. The capped shaft in the foreground was known as Land Pit. It worked two seams at 78 and 93ft. The same seams were worked at the other shaft at 215 and 229ft, suggesting that the strata were steeply inclined and must have outcropped somewhere not far behind the camera position. Easier and more economical, I would have thought, to work the colliery as a drift mine. Unsurprisingly the mine was not prosperous and had a fairly short life. The engine house dates from the deepening of the main shaft to 285ft in 1881, when a new pumping engine was also installed. The mine closed ten years later.
The shaft in the foreground was at the summit of a small spoil heap, usually overgrown with sparse grass and stunted hawthorn bushes. When I was a boy there was a hole in the cap and you could drop stones down the shaft. It was not very deep and the stones hit the bottom with a thud after a second or two. At the time of the photograph the spoil heap had been stripped of its vegetation by industrial archaeologists. They had also exposed the foundations of a winding engine at the other shaft. All the land visible here is now covered with housing. The engine house has been tidied up and preserved among the new houses. Land Pit was again uncovered during the building work and some masonry exposed. I have not been back since, but I believe all trace of the shaft has now been removed.
An old mining landscape
The remains, photographed on Monday 28th December 1981, of Church Farm Colliery, also known as Buller's Pit, at Mangotsfield, five miles east of Bristol. The capped shaft in the foreground was known as Land Pit. It worked two seams at 78 and 93ft. The same seams were worked at the other shaft at 215 and 229ft, suggesting that the strata were steeply inclined and must have outcropped somewhere not far behind the camera position. Easier and more economical, I would have thought, to work the colliery as a drift mine. Unsurprisingly the mine was not prosperous and had a fairly short life. The engine house dates from the deepening of the main shaft to 285ft in 1881, when a new pumping engine was also installed. The mine closed ten years later.
The shaft in the foreground was at the summit of a small spoil heap, usually overgrown with sparse grass and stunted hawthorn bushes. When I was a boy there was a hole in the cap and you could drop stones down the shaft. It was not very deep and the stones hit the bottom with a thud after a second or two. At the time of the photograph the spoil heap had been stripped of its vegetation by industrial archaeologists. They had also exposed the foundations of a winding engine at the other shaft. All the land visible here is now covered with housing. The engine house has been tidied up and preserved among the new houses. Land Pit was again uncovered during the building work and some masonry exposed. I have not been back since, but I believe all trace of the shaft has now been removed.