It is well worth paying a visit and trying to imagine what it used to be like think about Victorian owners stood in the great bay window facing the pit or the family who used to live in the back part of the offices. From the 1870s through until the middle of the 1990s, when the pit shut, this was where the managers and office workers were based.The building has also been used as a school. Kind of! That building used to be the Colliery Offices. Is that building with the clock a coalmine? Each census return recorded where the people living in each house had been born. You can see exactly where they came from by looking at the census returns for 1871, four years after the pit was sunk. People flocked to Kiveton from all over Britain, particularly Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire. (Our thanks to Graham for transcribing these for us so accurately.) As happened in lots of other places, the sinking of pits meant massive social transformation. You can download the census returns for 18. Census returns provide us with excellent evidence about what life was like in this area before the mining industry took hold. Wales was an established village hundreds of years before Waleswood pit was sunk, but there was little in Kiveton except a few agricultural cottages and, of course, the remains of Kiveton Hall, which had been demolished in 1811-12. It took eighteen months for Kiveton Pit to be sunk: the sinkers hit the Barnsley Seam, the one they were really interested in, in December 1867. The records of both the sinkings are available to the public, in Sheffield Archives for Kiveton Park (see the links on our Archive Page). Deep mining began in the 1800s across Britain and happened in the 1850s in Waleswood and in 1866-67 in Kiveton Park. The beginning of a deep mine, such as those at Kiveton Park and Waleswood, was called the sinking of its shafts. There is much evidence of coal being used in Roman Britain and increasingly through the medieval period. Even though we have no evidence for it, it seems likely that coal would have been mined much earlier too, as elsewhere in Britain coal has been discovered in Bronze Age funeral pyres. Mining began here hundreds of years ago and we have records from the 1600s about coal being taken from surface outcrops in the area of Kiveton Park and Wales. Many people believe that we still need coal and our pits should never have been closed. It has an important role in many industrial processes and coal-burning power stations generate a great deal of our electricity. Coal is not used for many of these things anymore, particularly not in Britain, but coal is still very important. Steam was also used in transport, notably ships and the railways, and of course coal was used to heat homes – every house would have had at least one coal fire. They burnt coal to create steam and power engines. Thousands of mills and factories were built. Why did people need coal?Ĭoal is a good source of energy when it is burnt and the industrial revolution created a big demand as it gathered pace in the 18th and 19th centuries. Coal is found all over the world, with world coal reserves estimated at 909 billion tonnes. The Barnsley Seam at Kiveton was around 4-5ft thick and lies 401 yards deep, but other seams were deeper and shallower, thicker and thinner. Where is coal found?Ĭoal is mainly found in layers underground, sometimes a few inches thick but often much thicker: these are called seams (imagine the layer of jam in a sponge-cake). Different types of coal are suitable for different things. Lots of different grades can be found, depending on how far the coal has matured. Coal is a fossil fuel made up mainly, but not only, of carbon and hydrogen. As a result, it was transformed into coal. Over time, this was buried and compressed by heat and earth movements. Millions of years ago, plant and animal matter was deposited on the ground. Article from the Leeds Mercury circa 1900ĭo you have any questions about what is was like to work in the pits of Kiveton and Wales? Let us know and we'll put your question on our site! What is coal?Ĭoal is a hard black substance that burns very well.The Waleswood Curve and Waleswood Station.Betty Quinton compares living through WW2 and Corona virus lockdown.
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