Brookhouse Colliery 1977

Brookhouse Shaft was the main coal winding shaft for Brookhouse Colliery and was also the downcast shaft for fresh air to enter the mine. The upcast shaft (Beighton shaft) was unusually distant - about 3/4 mile away. The mine was closed in the late 1980s. The land was opencasted to recover the shallow coal and then restored to make the Rother Valley Country Park.

Waste tip with Brookhouse shaft in the background. The mine was closed in the late 1980s. The land was opencasted to recover the shallow coal and then restored to make the Rother Valley Country Park.

Coal from Brookhouse Colliery was made into coke at the adjacent coke ovens. Rams push the red-hot coke into a hopper mounted on rails. The hopper is electrically driven (via the pair of overhead wires in the centre of the picture) and is transported a few tens of metres away to the cooling area where jets of water are sprayed onto the coke to cool it. It is then loaded into lorries or wagons to go to the steel works. The coke ovens were closed and dismantled in the late 1980s. The land was opencasted to recover the shallow coal and then restored to make the Rother Valley Country Park.

Coal from Brookhouse Colliery was made into coke at the adjacent coke ovens. Rams push the red-hot coke into a hopper mounted on rails. The hopper is electrically driven (via the pair of overhead wires in the centre of the picture) and is transported a few tens of metres away to the cooling area where jets of water are sprayed onto the coke to cool it. It is then loaded into lorries to go to the steel works. The coke ovens were closed and dismantled in the late 1980s. The land was opencasted to recover the shallow coal and then restored to make the Rother Valley Country Park.

Coal from Brookhouse Colliery was made into coke at the adjacent coke ovens. Rams push the red-hot coke into a hopper mounted on rails. The hopper is electrically driven - you can see the locomotive and its electric pickup - and is transported a few tens of metres away to the cooling area where jets of water are sprayed onto the coke to cool it. It is then loaded into lorries or wagons to go to the steel works. The coke ovens were closed and dismantled in the late 1980s. The land was opencasted to recover the shallow coal and then restored to make the Rother Valley Country Park.

This greeted everyone who came to the main colliery office entrance at Brookhouse.

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.