Eddisbury Hill

The land on the slope of Ecton Hill in Rainow and Commonside in Macclesfield is riddled with old coal workings. On the far side of the Buxton New Road is Eddisbury Hill on which can be clearly seen the remains of the spoil mound of Brocklehurst's Eddisbury Hill Colliery which operated after the First World War and was abandoned in 1925.

The workings in the foreground are much older and date from some time after the enclosure of the Rainow Wastes in the 1620s. At that time Laurence Hooley (Hulley) of the One House, who already had coal under his land, was granted additional acreage on Eddisbury. These pits are both small and numerous and do not appear to have been worked with a horse gin. I reckon they employed a simple hand windlass (locally known as a 'Pit Turn') to raise the baskets of coal. They were largely worked out by the end of the eighteenth century.

As an aside, I have searched the OS maps of the Macclesfield area for mention of Ecton Hill and cannot find the name on any of them.