Big 'K' is probably one of my 'most significant' explores that ive never bothered to write up. It was the culmination of about 5 years of exploring and documenting the demise of the UK coal industry and was a fitting send off for UK colliery exploring ticking just about every box.
No.2 Tower and The Fan Drift
I think the story really starts back in in 2010 when @dweeb dragged me along to have a go at the recently closed Welbeck colliery, i had done a few coal mines before that, Clipstone, Annesley, Castlebridge etc come to mind but Welbeck was the first of the UK Coal deep pit closures that i managed to catch right from day one and when everything was still intact.. It was a real mission (i think i even described it as 'a war' at the time) to get to see the whole place before it all got flattened. You see UK Coal wasn't just a coal mining company, it appeared at least to be a bit of a property development company too. They seemed to keep existing by closing down a pit every few years and selling it off for redevelopment. The knock on effect of this was that there was never really a chance for any of their colliery closures to get derelict, it seemed they closed and came down all in one fluid movement.
Coal Prep on the way in
Rail Loader
At Welbeck we did ok, Saw about 75% of the place before time ran out but there was also a lot we missed, some was down to timing, some down to the design of the place i guess. After it all eventually went i had a bit of a bug for coal and I knocked about at a few other older colliery closures again like Tower and Penallta but really i was waiting for the next biggy. It seemed like it should come at any moment but really it took at least 3 years and even then it was a little unexpected. Daw Mill was our local pit and we had been to look at parts of it while it was still live, there had been rumblings about it closing due to HS2 works and it was eventually announced it was closed in 2014. I was fairly phyced to get in there and did a few early recces but in the end it all went a bit wrong. To start with the colliery had a fire underground in early 2013. It wasn't clear exactly what was happening for quite a few months afterwards. It wasnt clear how much activity there would be on site, if the fire was even extinguished or if it would indeed closed for good. On top of that life had thrown a few curve balls and between house buying and various relationships going astray we didn't end up finding time to go look at the remains until well into 2014, nearly a year after it had closed! The baths had already gone at this point and we only really managed managed the headstocks, one winder and the workshops.. it felt like a fail then and still does now tbh...
No.1 Heapsted Area
No.1 Shaft Gates
Thankfully we didn't have too long to dwell on Daw Mill. Within a few weeks we were at our next closed colliery, Maltby in South Yorkshire. This pit was independently owned rather than being one of UK Coals sites but il include it anyway as it was both an amazing explore and a real eye opener to just how good the next few could be. We were again a little late for it. Demolition crews were on site already but we braved it one evening during the Easter holidays 2014 and it came off rather well. Maltby was on another scale to little old Welbeck with a proper modern concrete behemoth of a head stock. We managed more or less the whole site that night only leaving the bath house behind due to time constraints but I returned a year or so later to finish that after the rest had gone..
Shunter
Next on the list was Harworth. A strange pit that had been mothballed in 2006, there had been talk of it reopening but at the same time parts like the bathhouse had been demolished without anyone really noticing. By the time i started looking at it properly it was just the powerhouse and the two head stock / winder combos left. These were well guarded and it took a few goes to even get near in which time one head stock had succumbed to the sporadic demolition as well. Eventually in 2015 i did finally manage to get to see what remained and was pretty impressed.
Waiting for the cage
Aerial Walkway
By this point they were coming thick and fast, 3 epic coal explores in little over a year, but we were also aware that there wasn't many left! The next and penultimate closure at Thoresby was announced and we decided after our recent success at places like Teeside steel and various power stations which had largely been because we turned up real early doors before they had had a chance to do much securing or indeed turn the lights off we would try a similar tactic here. After a aborted daylight attempt we returned one night after dark and bloody hell what a master stroke, it felt like we would be busted any second but somehow we got away with it and it was a amazing, unbelievably intact in a way i hadn't seen a coal mine before.. Thoresby was a real treat but as with all the rest it seemed like no none else was really too interested.. It always seemed to be a handful of 'coal enthusiasts' exploring these places and they never 'hit the main stream' with only one pit now left that would change but maybe just a bit to late?
Lamp Room Racks
Lamp Hatch
And then there was one.. The actual subject of this report.. Big K was a 60s pit, an era of mine i wasn't overly familiar with. We knew closure was coming so we had been for a look. It looked good! More than good in fact so it was just a waiting game. Of course i had planned the same strategy as Thoresby.. get in early! but when the eventual closure id come on 19th of December 2015 even i was surprised when explorers tried to get in on the night it closed.. what was this?? people actually interested in collieries all of a sudden? Well it didn't go so well for those guys, they made it in the conveyors but little else. You see pits dont just close and shut up shop overnight. Things need decommissioning. This is what had always delayed us. Even at Thoresby we were a good few months after closure before we 'tried it early' here however there was a unique opportunity. Closing less than a week before Christmas it was just obvious when it needed to be done.
The Bath House
Christmas Day and Boxing day i just couldn't shake the family but come the 27th i drove up girlfriend in tow arriving late afternoon with just an hour or so of daylight left. Plan was to have a bit of a recce and find a feesable route in, grab some externals in the daylight and then do as much as we could after dark. We headed in over the railway at the back of the coal yard and picked our way across the yard to the first conveyor. The conveyor took us to coal prep but we wasted little time here as all the lighting was off and it wasn't appealing for photos in the fading light. Thankfully the site seemed dead tho, some machinery running here and there but not a soul stirring.
Lockers
At coal prep we came across a bit of a problem. I knew i wanted to be heading to the No.1 heapsted area. This shaft is where men and machinery entered the mine and was linked by aerial walkway to the bath house. In contrast No.2 headstock was where air was fed into the mine and the coal extracted. Even if we could have got past the airlocks there wouldn't have been much to see other than a hole in the ground on that side.. Trouble is between us and both there was nothing but an expanse of sloppy coal quicksand. Where ever i tried to cross i ended up knee deep in it and with an accomplice who it has to be said was less than enthused about spending her Christmas holiday in a coal mine in the first place she was even more than less than enthused about getting stuck up to her waist in sludge in the process.. Somehow we managed it tho, it wasn't quick, pretty or at all stealthily (think stuck in the middle of a yard of coal sludge whailing for help...) and it certainly wasn't clean but we got across some how ending up in completely the wrong place, the base of No.2 head stock.
Baths
While here i had a quick run round and checked if the No.2 tower was accessible.. It wasn't, the towers are accessed by lift with some emergency stairs but both were locked solid on this side. All we could find were the conveyors were coal was unloaded. The coal comes up the shaft in skips and goes through a kind of airlock arrangement before being dumped out here and conveyed over to the coal prep / washery. We eventually made it to the No.1 shaft and thankfully as this doesn't need to be air tight we managed to find a hole to squeeze though and get in.. Light were on and rails in the floor lead to and from the gated shaft head.. But whats this? theres only a bloody train! Presumably used to shunt equipment in and out the cage. This was looking good already!
Workers Entrance
After photographing the train we headed up to the next level above. This is where men would have entered the triple decker cages to be taken in and out the mine. There was stairs here to go a bit higher, as it would turn out they got you all the way to the top with a bit of out of the box thinking but at the time i doubted they would.. The official access to the tower was outside and was locked just like No.2 tower so at the time we pressed on towards the baths thinking we would return and check on our way back, usually a foolish decision...
Obligatory Comfy Chair
Winder Controls
We took the aerial walkway towards the bath house. As i had expected there was a gate here but we managed to get over the top and dropped down into the lamp room where the miners would have picked up lamps and been checked in underground.. This where the second slightly comedy moment of total non-stealth cropped up.. I took two steps into the lamp room and it felt like all hell broke loose, suddenly there noises and red lights flashing and god knows what.. had we triggered an alarm?? Nope just a fucking light up sign on a trip beam! The sign was supposed to remind miners to check themselves for contraband, that is items that were banned underground mainly because they could potentially start a fire, everything from matches and electronic devices to kit-kat wrappers.. The sign was activated by an invisible laser trip beam across the room so every time someone left the lamp room to go underground the sign would flash... Coming the other way in the dusk, with security virtually just outside the window it was a bit of a ring clenching moment! Even after realising what was going on there was a frantic attempt to make it stop and then after it did stop a fairly frantic couple of minuets trying to slyly look out the windows to check security had been looking the other way until we could continue!
Winders
After we had calmed down a little we headed through to the baths, really mint but if there was one point on the site i thought we might run into people it was in the locker rooms so we went carefully. The lockers here were the familiar 'modern' style that had been salvaged from the selby complex and refitted into a few of UK coals other pits as 'modernisation'.. Some lockers were open but i didnt rummage as i didnt fancy its owner walking round the corner half way through! We proceeded from the baths down onto the ground floor and stuck our heads into the canteen area but decided we were pushing our luck a bit as there were lots of ground level windows and anyone outside would have seen us much more easily than we would see them! We found a door we could open and bailed across the yard checking out the still running fan drift on or way out.
The last ever British Coal
Heading back south i was all hyped to write this report but after getting home and logging on the forum guess what? Beaten too it! Turned out @AndyK had been there the day before.. (If i had a penny for the amount of times thats happened since!) my thoughts at the time? something along the lines of wtf! people actually exploring collierys??! Fair play to Andy tho his report was epic and he had seen one bit i had missed, the No.1 Winder tower! That set of stairs we had dismissed must have been the one after all so within a few days i was back for round two..
No.2 Tower and The Fan Drift
I think the story really starts back in in 2010 when @dweeb dragged me along to have a go at the recently closed Welbeck colliery, i had done a few coal mines before that, Clipstone, Annesley, Castlebridge etc come to mind but Welbeck was the first of the UK Coal deep pit closures that i managed to catch right from day one and when everything was still intact.. It was a real mission (i think i even described it as 'a war' at the time) to get to see the whole place before it all got flattened. You see UK Coal wasn't just a coal mining company, it appeared at least to be a bit of a property development company too. They seemed to keep existing by closing down a pit every few years and selling it off for redevelopment. The knock on effect of this was that there was never really a chance for any of their colliery closures to get derelict, it seemed they closed and came down all in one fluid movement.
Coal Prep on the way in
Rail Loader
At Welbeck we did ok, Saw about 75% of the place before time ran out but there was also a lot we missed, some was down to timing, some down to the design of the place i guess. After it all eventually went i had a bit of a bug for coal and I knocked about at a few other older colliery closures again like Tower and Penallta but really i was waiting for the next biggy. It seemed like it should come at any moment but really it took at least 3 years and even then it was a little unexpected. Daw Mill was our local pit and we had been to look at parts of it while it was still live, there had been rumblings about it closing due to HS2 works and it was eventually announced it was closed in 2014. I was fairly phyced to get in there and did a few early recces but in the end it all went a bit wrong. To start with the colliery had a fire underground in early 2013. It wasn't clear exactly what was happening for quite a few months afterwards. It wasnt clear how much activity there would be on site, if the fire was even extinguished or if it would indeed closed for good. On top of that life had thrown a few curve balls and between house buying and various relationships going astray we didn't end up finding time to go look at the remains until well into 2014, nearly a year after it had closed! The baths had already gone at this point and we only really managed managed the headstocks, one winder and the workshops.. it felt like a fail then and still does now tbh...
No.1 Heapsted Area
No.1 Shaft Gates
Thankfully we didn't have too long to dwell on Daw Mill. Within a few weeks we were at our next closed colliery, Maltby in South Yorkshire. This pit was independently owned rather than being one of UK Coals sites but il include it anyway as it was both an amazing explore and a real eye opener to just how good the next few could be. We were again a little late for it. Demolition crews were on site already but we braved it one evening during the Easter holidays 2014 and it came off rather well. Maltby was on another scale to little old Welbeck with a proper modern concrete behemoth of a head stock. We managed more or less the whole site that night only leaving the bath house behind due to time constraints but I returned a year or so later to finish that after the rest had gone..
Shunter
Next on the list was Harworth. A strange pit that had been mothballed in 2006, there had been talk of it reopening but at the same time parts like the bathhouse had been demolished without anyone really noticing. By the time i started looking at it properly it was just the powerhouse and the two head stock / winder combos left. These were well guarded and it took a few goes to even get near in which time one head stock had succumbed to the sporadic demolition as well. Eventually in 2015 i did finally manage to get to see what remained and was pretty impressed.
Waiting for the cage
Aerial Walkway
By this point they were coming thick and fast, 3 epic coal explores in little over a year, but we were also aware that there wasn't many left! The next and penultimate closure at Thoresby was announced and we decided after our recent success at places like Teeside steel and various power stations which had largely been because we turned up real early doors before they had had a chance to do much securing or indeed turn the lights off we would try a similar tactic here. After a aborted daylight attempt we returned one night after dark and bloody hell what a master stroke, it felt like we would be busted any second but somehow we got away with it and it was a amazing, unbelievably intact in a way i hadn't seen a coal mine before.. Thoresby was a real treat but as with all the rest it seemed like no none else was really too interested.. It always seemed to be a handful of 'coal enthusiasts' exploring these places and they never 'hit the main stream' with only one pit now left that would change but maybe just a bit to late?
Lamp Room Racks
Lamp Hatch
And then there was one.. The actual subject of this report.. Big K was a 60s pit, an era of mine i wasn't overly familiar with. We knew closure was coming so we had been for a look. It looked good! More than good in fact so it was just a waiting game. Of course i had planned the same strategy as Thoresby.. get in early! but when the eventual closure id come on 19th of December 2015 even i was surprised when explorers tried to get in on the night it closed.. what was this?? people actually interested in collieries all of a sudden? Well it didn't go so well for those guys, they made it in the conveyors but little else. You see pits dont just close and shut up shop overnight. Things need decommissioning. This is what had always delayed us. Even at Thoresby we were a good few months after closure before we 'tried it early' here however there was a unique opportunity. Closing less than a week before Christmas it was just obvious when it needed to be done.
The Bath House
Christmas Day and Boxing day i just couldn't shake the family but come the 27th i drove up girlfriend in tow arriving late afternoon with just an hour or so of daylight left. Plan was to have a bit of a recce and find a feesable route in, grab some externals in the daylight and then do as much as we could after dark. We headed in over the railway at the back of the coal yard and picked our way across the yard to the first conveyor. The conveyor took us to coal prep but we wasted little time here as all the lighting was off and it wasn't appealing for photos in the fading light. Thankfully the site seemed dead tho, some machinery running here and there but not a soul stirring.
Lockers
At coal prep we came across a bit of a problem. I knew i wanted to be heading to the No.1 heapsted area. This shaft is where men and machinery entered the mine and was linked by aerial walkway to the bath house. In contrast No.2 headstock was where air was fed into the mine and the coal extracted. Even if we could have got past the airlocks there wouldn't have been much to see other than a hole in the ground on that side.. Trouble is between us and both there was nothing but an expanse of sloppy coal quicksand. Where ever i tried to cross i ended up knee deep in it and with an accomplice who it has to be said was less than enthused about spending her Christmas holiday in a coal mine in the first place she was even more than less than enthused about getting stuck up to her waist in sludge in the process.. Somehow we managed it tho, it wasn't quick, pretty or at all stealthily (think stuck in the middle of a yard of coal sludge whailing for help...) and it certainly wasn't clean but we got across some how ending up in completely the wrong place, the base of No.2 head stock.
Baths
While here i had a quick run round and checked if the No.2 tower was accessible.. It wasn't, the towers are accessed by lift with some emergency stairs but both were locked solid on this side. All we could find were the conveyors were coal was unloaded. The coal comes up the shaft in skips and goes through a kind of airlock arrangement before being dumped out here and conveyed over to the coal prep / washery. We eventually made it to the No.1 shaft and thankfully as this doesn't need to be air tight we managed to find a hole to squeeze though and get in.. Light were on and rails in the floor lead to and from the gated shaft head.. But whats this? theres only a bloody train! Presumably used to shunt equipment in and out the cage. This was looking good already!
Workers Entrance
After photographing the train we headed up to the next level above. This is where men would have entered the triple decker cages to be taken in and out the mine. There was stairs here to go a bit higher, as it would turn out they got you all the way to the top with a bit of out of the box thinking but at the time i doubted they would.. The official access to the tower was outside and was locked just like No.2 tower so at the time we pressed on towards the baths thinking we would return and check on our way back, usually a foolish decision...
Obligatory Comfy Chair
Winder Controls
We took the aerial walkway towards the bath house. As i had expected there was a gate here but we managed to get over the top and dropped down into the lamp room where the miners would have picked up lamps and been checked in underground.. This where the second slightly comedy moment of total non-stealth cropped up.. I took two steps into the lamp room and it felt like all hell broke loose, suddenly there noises and red lights flashing and god knows what.. had we triggered an alarm?? Nope just a fucking light up sign on a trip beam! The sign was supposed to remind miners to check themselves for contraband, that is items that were banned underground mainly because they could potentially start a fire, everything from matches and electronic devices to kit-kat wrappers.. The sign was activated by an invisible laser trip beam across the room so every time someone left the lamp room to go underground the sign would flash... Coming the other way in the dusk, with security virtually just outside the window it was a bit of a ring clenching moment! Even after realising what was going on there was a frantic attempt to make it stop and then after it did stop a fairly frantic couple of minuets trying to slyly look out the windows to check security had been looking the other way until we could continue!
Winders
After we had calmed down a little we headed through to the baths, really mint but if there was one point on the site i thought we might run into people it was in the locker rooms so we went carefully. The lockers here were the familiar 'modern' style that had been salvaged from the selby complex and refitted into a few of UK coals other pits as 'modernisation'.. Some lockers were open but i didnt rummage as i didnt fancy its owner walking round the corner half way through! We proceeded from the baths down onto the ground floor and stuck our heads into the canteen area but decided we were pushing our luck a bit as there were lots of ground level windows and anyone outside would have seen us much more easily than we would see them! We found a door we could open and bailed across the yard checking out the still running fan drift on or way out.
The last ever British Coal
Heading back south i was all hyped to write this report but after getting home and logging on the forum guess what? Beaten too it! Turned out @AndyK had been there the day before.. (If i had a penny for the amount of times thats happened since!) my thoughts at the time? something along the lines of wtf! people actually exploring collierys??! Fair play to Andy tho his report was epic and he had seen one bit i had missed, the No.1 Winder tower! That set of stairs we had dismissed must have been the one after all so within a few days i was back for round two..
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