Gees Engine or Venture Pit

This house with fine views over Cheshire is today known as Hilltop Cottage, although a few locals still know it as ‘Longchimney’. If you look closely at the photo you can see a depression in the ground in the lower right, this marks the shaft of the Lower Pit that was 213 ft deep to the Reform seam, passing through the Gees seam a short distance above. In the background just below the large tree at the rear of the house was the Bye or Rise Pit. This was 207ft deep.

The left section of the house with the gable end was the winding enginehouse for the two pits and in 1826 held a rotative atmospheric beam engine. It is described in the Colliery Inventory for that year as:
One Engine at Gees to Wind from 2 Pits 28" cylinder on the common principle, Iron carriage beams, spur gears, flat rope drums wrought iron boiler the whole fixed up in a building complete.

The mining engineer John Buddle, writing in the same year noted:
A common atmospheric winding engine with a 28in. cylinder, called about a 12 horse power.

He also recorded that there were:
5 Getters employed who work 5 quarters per day at present. The water is drawn by the Winding Engine at the Low Pit in buckets – feeder about 600 Galls a day.

By 1826 the pit was beginning to reach the end of its productive life and it is likely that by the 1830s the engine had been removed for reuse elsewhere on the colliery. The house remained and was converted to living accommodation and was extended significantly in the last twenty years.