Investigating Lancashire Coal mines

we wanted to just get straight out what a big fella here insisted on being fed first didn't you oh hello my name is matt and welcome back to another video we're fed james so we can crack on with filming um so we're here in the lancashire coal field and we're going to look at some features the first one is uh this little pumping station here this stone pumping station we're here with all the monkeys by the way so who better to show us around the remains of the lancashire coalfield and all the industrial stuff that's still here then these guys so like say we're a bit of a pumping station uh there on the other side of that pumping station is the old shaft what was the mine called are we allowed to say no here we are on the other side of that pumping station there that it seems very quiet at the minute is the old gamble side colliery one of the shafts is there apparently it's flooded but we're gonna um we're gonna take a look down inside the shaft and see what we can see interestingly though we've got this little uh trough here which we think something to do with the directing the water that came out the mind look at that the biggest spiders were in the world if you could see that and they went down there and just over there is the reservoir okay so as i've said this is the gambleside colliery here it is on the old maps now we're just outside and the newest town is burnley as you know the lads are from burnley so we're looking around that area i'm about to show you a shaft um and it's called the pumping pit shaft apparently um it suffered from water seeping into the mine uh as you will see um and this shaft uh it sounds like it was used to lower um men and lift coal up and down it it's 122 feet deep but apparently it was abandoned in the early 1900s and allowed to become a sump for the rest of the mine so all the water from the old workings in in gamble side colliery uh i've now pumped from this uh this shaft into the cloud bridge reservoir now and it's still done today by the uh by united utilities who run the water around there now it's not running permanently but you'll see the shafts you'll see the water going in and when it gets to a certain level i think they switch the pumps on and they pump it out into the reservoir [Music] [Music] the shadows [Music] okay 122 feet deep the top part of it is lined with brick and it then it goes into bare rock you can see all the water ingress that that's going into it and this is on a dry day so where that is coming from i don't know before this was abandoned and used as a as a sump for the mine there's a story that says men were lowered into this shaft in a tub attached by chains to the winding gear as there were no guides along the sides of the shaft the men had to stabilize the tub using sticks if it started to swing weren't it we think the thing in the corner was the uh the old pump why this one's here obviously you pump the water into there and again there's a club bridge reservoir that it discharges the water from the mine into so the interesting thing about coming out here in this rural area is that down in manchester where we're from obviously a lot of the culinaries are now in built up locations and so all you've got is the shafts are just capped with concrete and there's absolutely no way in whatsoever um wet earth you can still see the shaft of where it was um but there was that that route out of west manchester was literally columbus and there's just nothing to say apart from the odd methane extractor being out here in the hills obviously things got left alone and there's more interesting things to find [Music] oh yeah yeah is it refreshing okay so this is the baptistry it's an open-air baptistery where baptisms took place out in the open it was attached to a church that was here that opened in 1839 now as this little baptistry area is lying with puddle clay and holds water very well when the church was no longer used this area was used to hold water for the steam engine which was down at the pumping pit that we've just shown you now the last baptisms here were in about 1870 but i think that's about to change according to buff [Laughter] will be [Laughter] yeah with some nice clean water dirtier than it looks i mean it's clean it looks but dead will be gone [Laughter] does that mean i'm something to do with burnley now or somewhere i thought eating like a chippy in burnley would have been enough what church are we in now then what is that church [Music] monkey burnley something monkey monkey or something go on lad go on i've done it you can do it all the boxes loose you step down there's another step in it there go down that was easy easy that was you just see the remains of a tram roll by those trees there you can actually see where the tram road from the colure or one of the culinaries up here in the hills went and you can actually see it there how good is that and there it is on the old map there was quite a few around here these tram roads uh taking coal and goods um from these old remote collieries down to where it could be distributed [Music] and here we are this is the remains of the actual gambleside colliery now there's been mining activity at gambleside since the 1600s 1612 to be precise and the the the colliery had a boiler house engine house winding house together with an office a workshop and a cabin where the men changed before going underground there's also the remains of a chimney and a boiler house here as well working conditions were very difficult and the coal scene was often less than two foot six inches high [Music] there is on the old maps long since gone what you'll see there it says shaft now there's still evidence of the shaft let's take a look i'm not sure what's going on but there is a floor level about eight feet down from the surface that is crazy come on think about it this is gamble side colour there yeah this is one of the shafts the pumping shaft remembers the pumping shaft down at the bottom of the walk i can't believe that so you don't know what's underneath that it's just a shaft when we come in the winter their nettles weren't there and we could see an uneven surface down there so it could have been catchment and i think more than like what's happened is they've filled it to the top with all the remains of the buildings the old bricks everything here down the all yeah and then in the 100 years since then it's sank 8 feet that's why we've got the gap at the top that's what my brain tells me like i thought that could be totally wrong yeah but what i do know as for depth this color here is gamble side color red the pumping pitch shaft what we showed you at the bottom look what we're down at the bottom of the hill level with the water that goes into the same manchester mine so this shaft here accesses the same mine down there level with the reservoir so that should give you a gauge just how deep this shaft here is oh so to the bottom of the hillside you know what i mean at least to the bottom of the hillside supposed to come to the top of the last shot it's a big one and we're not actually sure how they capped it looking at it they haven't capped it very well have they well wow that's scary in it what we having um we've got shoulders salted caramel tea cakes wherever you learn from mls have you coming tomorrow oh yeah i treat you all that's pretty good of you i know something like that now we're at one of the lads houses so we're going back out in a bit and we're going to uh i think this mentions about a hole in the ground not sure what all about do you know anyway okay so we're now a different location um i'm going to keep this one quiet because it is quite a dangerous location do you think we'll get in would you take me you have put a little bit of weight on recently haven't you and we just went for full english i don't think it's the best thing really are you excited i'm not really no [Music] sort of [Laughter] that's where we're going in there wait till you see it is it a big drop no just uh stays in with your arms might ease yourself down you'll feel your foot in breathing oh right what's there shitty hell and you're in what you like oh was it right fair bit of a sludge in it a little trainers on the step bruce it's all right chuck won't step there james right we're in i'm uh watching my ankles in sludge my god that's the way ahead look at this good job of the waders this has to be some sort of trauma truly so it's getting easier now that is deep the boys are coming close down nice bit of a stone wall it's getting shoulder now nice and breathing yeah is that a track i can see there well there's someone there it gets deep again right so we've got a collapse here to be fair that's probably the worst collapse you got your gas meter on yeah yeah yeah lands in my bag safety first party crazy first yeah you're right that's right oh it's getting deeper what's that it's all deep again now well this has to be a tram rule done at the summit yeah this is the old trafford definitely had the tracks coming down okay so we've got a date of about 1840 on this particular mine this is one of the wagon roads into the mine um you will see evidence of track in a bit this would have been worked by men women children and eventually horses and but fascinating to get this glimpse into this obviously it wouldn't have been as flooded as this back then um but uh what a place to size but they just all lay nicely don't they so what we are yeah him so the theory is that as we went through sort of grassy soft earth it needed to be bricklined but you'll see now as we're going to the rock the tunnel is now getting more and more sort of rockline the white one i think is calcite you call it mine but i think it's just calcite it's weird how brilliantly white one bit could be and then proper black on yeah this is called minus snot for obvious reasons i think it's calcite deposits one of the many features that you see down here [Music] yeah so change now from the uh stone archway and the whole thing is now cut out of rock oh it's quite beautiful standing there so they can get past because that's the first time it's actually been used for what it was meant to keep her since to allow people past crossing you know what's going on with that one man did he just start one and then finish do you know what i mean he's actually a kid to jump in he's not pretty cool see a little refuge um so we're thinking it probably some kind of really busy sort of tramway they said there's that many refuges and for people to move out the way i've never seen a refuge in a trampoline like this uh we're getting deep again now okay so we've now entered absolute bedrock and of course we're flooded again now and so there is quite a forboding place this and given the collapses that we see along the way as well i'm going to tell you a story about this particular mine evidence has come to light of six year old children being employed as drawers now i presume drawers were the kids that pulled the tubs along that were full of coal one particular case which has been confirmed has come to light of a father carrying his young son up from the local village asleep in a blanket to do his day's work and then carrying the child back down again at the end of the shift this was 18 years after the act of parliament banning children of this age from working in the pit so this child was around about six years old the mines act was of 1842 and it banned children from working down in the mines but as we can see 18 years later and it's still being breached many of the coal uh colliery owners lost a lot of the workforce because a lot of the workforce was made up of children so it's quite an unpopular act imagine being six seven eight years old and working down here obviously again it wouldn't have been as flooded but look at the place how long has that taken to form there [Music] [Music] they would have been in between the tram tracks with this yeah you can see all the sleepers you know where they have the wooden sleepers oh yeah they got to the wooden sleepers stay there that falls it down the finger so you can imagine the tracks the cars were just a little bit bigger than that yeah but again i'm gonna have to push it back here because they must have had some tall ones yeah i'm guessing this is a singing post it doesn't look structural but if it starts to creak you know the walls are coming in you need to get out well that makes sense because the gap the gap above that is the same on the floor in it yeah i don't know i don't know if they have the same concept as them i can't see it offering much structural strength no but they did have quite a few of them because they're all on the floor on the floor [Music] nice little what's this floor [Music] so you can see where the rails were over to one side so i presume the i presume the left-hand side they may have been cutting out coal because further up we do see evidence of a seam but we're about to approach the junction right here yeah the junction and we must choose a path over on the right it's just lit one of the boys has gone up there with the torch but the path we choose first is the left hand side [Music] okay so we seem to be walking uphill whether it was an illusion or i don't know but you seem to go uphill you can't see it on the camera there was also what felt like fresh air but we were nowhere near the exit so anyway what i'll do is i'll show you the interesting parts of this and then we do eventually get to the end i'll tell you what that is that's for candles you put i reckon you put a candle on there in the brick normally you can what you can see is you can't won't be able to see in there you can see burn marks where the candle's been but i reckon that little shelf there is for candles so a bit of metal work there nice [Music] [Music] walls yeah the easier that the side of us oh that yeah that's like a man-made what do you mean like look we got more is this blocking off then like a way into the all we know about these is they called dead man's walls and we was warned not to remove them really yeah do you know what i mean like x minus told us not to start i know i'm taking one out now because that's not touching the ceiling but like they told us to leave them walls very much alone and because the dead man's walls obviously with a name like that we didn't want to start messing with them so if anyone watching this video can explain what dead man's walls are and why we shouldn't be removing them can you tell us in the comments it could be they just get to the end of the tunnel break it off and then no one's supposed to go down there again yeah well look this is the first place we come to the call we're at the core scene now all right like it's always small here so there you can just see the cold scene there that's the slim layer there you see it this looks very fally now like i'm i know i don't record none of this i'm not convinced all this is off the roof a lot of this is probably just what they threw here [Music] it could be from somewhere else in the tunnel so yeah that is the ceiling that's coming there [Music] graffiti on the wall there we're not quite sure what it says or how old it is i'll just put it that way for you it does look like a and balls to me but it could be last year it's at least a couple years [Music] because it is like basic drawings yeah more than names like people work back in the day drawing a picture yeah it was a lot easier another story for you this happened in the 1860s in a bell pit now the bell pits were the most basic of pits you dug a shaft and you did the workings around the bottom at the seam a young boy was left for unknown reasons in the workings at the bottom of the bell pit the bell pit fell in completely burying the boy and he was uh found dead when they eventually got to him that was 1860s okay the end for us obviously not the end of the tunnel this would have gone on and on but for some reason now we either have a collapse or an infill right so possibly during this end but the top of that sort of fall there that screen is a little gap so i'm going to go up take a look see if you can see over the top see if this tunnel carries on does end yeah nah that's the end there's just further collapse up there that's the end of it okay so back at the junction we took a look at some of the fines would come across along the way highland bishop he's got like a picture of a peacock or something in it that's a local one that martin that's from the village at the bottom rocky says on top as well stopper to be replaced so it says what says the borough what a foot is it waterfall mineral water at the top and then waterfall at the bottom well waterford's on the way to manchester from birmingham yeah yeah beautiful little bottle that apart from the fact that's broke on top and it just broke fully dissolved oh my god doesn't it that is what's holding the scene that's a lot okay so we're now going to walk up the right-hand side to the right-hand tunnel at the junction it goes on for a long way so i'm only going to show you the interesting bits uh because obviously you know it's more of the same what are you calling that a ginny trash yeah this is jimmy jack this what do you mean you mean the tramway yeah the the champion on it the wheels sat on that like the the wheel i'd like uh do you want me to if you looked at his profile sag on so the wheel sat on there then obviously you need to fix it you need to check to something there he's used to go down that wood boat we see these for some reason i don't know why when they've took all the metal to be used again in the war effort or whatever they've recycled the metal for for some reason they don't take the ends so down in this right hand tunnel it was quite different because suddenly the tunnel got a lot taller as you can see here um completely different constructs now mining goes back to the 1600s in this this uh mine interesting seed to see one of the seams up there that was really interesting possibly one of the earliest scenes so god knows how long that goes back and so whether that got exhausted you guys obviously you can still see it that's a drill that yeah this was amazing to see to see where the miners has that had actually drilled into the rock possibly put gunpowder down there or dynamite depending on when they did it but a direct connection and actual visible visible evidence of the men that was down here is absolutely fantastic and to see the scene i was completely bowled over by that because this is what they chased and this is how big some of those cold seams were um as narrow as that but that as a demonstration is a very very good like i don't know what kind that call you give me the other day no look how brittle this is but we we've burned this stuff in the blast furnace in the fire and it burns very very well so after walking down both tunnels for what seemed like miles we did eventually get towards the end of this second tunnel apparently down there there's just another blockage and and again the water gets quite deep apparently so it's time for a brew don't you so that was one hell of a journey but we finally got out back to safety and back into the fresh air time to wash your waders off and uh we got that brew how come you look so clean what's in mountains yeah they're a big deal but your face is completely clean because i'm a one with the mind [Music] you

Channel: Martin Zero

Views: 46,661

Rating: 4.9490256 out of 5

Keywords: Lancashire coal field, Lancashire coal mines, Gambleside colliery, Martin Zero, Coal mine urbex, Children working in mines, Industrial Tramroad, Abandoned coal mine, Victorian coal mine

Id: _r8uhnlH7Ik

Length: 34min 43sec (2083 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 18 2021