Where Brookhouse Colliery used to be

A view of 'Pithouse West' opencast coal site taken on 12th March 1993 looking northwards roughly in the area where Brookhouse Colliery (deep mine) used to be.

The opencast mining was carried out to recover shallow coal from the site of the former colliery: coal too thin and shallow to have been mined by conventional underground methods. The former colliery site also included waste tips, slurry lagoons and coke ovens, all of which were removed and their remains buried deep within the backfill of the opencast site.

The picture shows the Clowne coal seam with the overburden removed, ready for lifting and loading into trucks. The white scar in the middle of the picture is a fault - a natural fracture in the rocks displacing the coal seam down to the right-hand side of the picture.

After the opencast site was finished in the mid-1990s, the site was restored to form part of the Rother Valley Country Park.

Scanned from Kodachrome 64 transparency film.