Lottie’s Wood gives up its underground secrets
During the ploughing of a pasture field at Lottie’s Wood, Sunniside, ready for the planting of a wildflower meadow for the Trust’s Forest of Flowers project, two dark circles were exposed in the soil.
Nothing more might have been thought about this, had not local history enthusiast Colin Douglas, 73, come across them while walking his dog.
Mr Douglas says: ‘Many would have given two circles in the soil only a passing glance, but being born and brought up on a farm it fired my imagination’.
He scoured Ordnance Survey maps and was able to confirm from what he found that they were probably evidence of an ancient bell pit system – an early type of coal mine.
The bell pit circles, which are about six metres in diameter and about 40 metres apart, probably date back to mines from the 17th century. They might never have been discovered had the Trust not used an innovative deep ploughing technique pioneered by Landlife (our Forest of Flowers partners) which inverts the soil to bring up the low nutrient sub-soil. The use of this technique has been proved to be especially beneficial to the establishment of a new wildflower meadow.
Mr Douglas, chairman of the Sunniside Local History Society, said: ‘This is a particularly exciting find because, although there are bells pits pinpointed on maps for this region, these are the first ones found that are not covered by grass. It gives us an insight into the coal mining heritage of this area.’
Bell pit mining was once the most advanced coal mining technique in operation. Shafts about 30ft to 60ft were dug into the seams and women and boys would have been lowered down the hole, probably by a winch operated by hand or by horse-power. They would have used wooden picks and shovels to extract the coal in all directions forming a bell shape beneath the surface. Horses were then used to winch the basket of coal to the surface.
It was hazardous work, and they worked as deep as shafts would allow. When a pit was deemed unsafe, very often only after an accident or collapse had occurred, the shaft was abandoned and another one dug. The spoil from the new shaft was deposited into the disused one so there was very little evidence of bell pit mining left. This type of mining continued until technology improved, allowing air to be circulated and water to be pumped from deeper mines. It is now rare to be able to identify bell pits and indeed the Trust’s plans to create a wildflower meadow on site, would probably have hidden their existence again.
However, with the support of the Sunniside Local History Society, funding has been secured from the County Durham Environmental Trust to preserve the best example of the bell pit circles (the one that dates back to the early-mid 17th century) and provide a display board to let people know more about it.
