simmy, that pit disaster is terrible mate…..never heared of it.
truly terrible.
Yeah it’s one of them that you either know about or have never heard of. Think its still classed as one of the biggest mining disasters in the world.
The pits are now capped, but its obvious where they was and there are still the ruins of some buildings on the site so its quite moving to think what happened.
The Wiki link only tells part of it, locally there’s a lot more info that’s been passed down the generations. Apparently, there was a farmer ploughing the field and the force of the blast underneath lifted him, plough and 2 shire horses a couple of feet in the air and the hedges in the fields were sucked into the ground.
Devastated the local towns and villages as everyone knew someone who had lost a loved one.