Beauty in Unexpected Places

Posted on 28th October 2026

It rather depends on what you find beautiful of course, but it is certainly unexpected. I had been aware of the fact that there were many old coal mines under the moors near where I lived for some time, but had assumed they had long since become blocked off. These were ones that had been started in the 1780s, and continued to be worked on and off for over a hundred years; simple single-level ones rather than pits, made to extract the very low-quality coal for local use. Anything dug from them had to be laboriously transported along packhorse routes or simple tracks from the mines up on the moors to the local farms and villages in all sorts of weather. When the standard-gauge railways had come, bringing in cheap coal from elsewhere, these small, remote operations were no longer viable for anything other than highly local use such as the nearby farms. Then, in the early 20th century the coming of motorised road transport had dealt a final blow: they had declined further and eventually closed down altogether. Being almost entirely underground, little can be seen of them now at the surface except for the odd bit of fallen masonry and traces of old trackways.

Nevertheless in February 1989 I went out looking for them, from the rather vague descriptions of their locations in a book on the subject, and a rough idea shown on the 1842 Ordnance Survey map of the area.

This was the result of one of the searches. I came across a hollow in the ground with some loose stones in the bottom, near where I thought the entrance to one called Danebower Colliery should be. Heaving out enough stones and earth created a hole; I squeezed through and, feeling somewhat like Alice in Wonderland, slithered down and found myself in a full-height mine adit; I had come through a spot where the roof had caved in, but the tunnel stretched further into the hillside as far as my torchlight would reach.

I walked along for about two hundred metres until I came to the place where levels were cut across for the actual digging out of coal. This is where the photograph at the top of the page was taken – all the other passages were either flooded to the roof or sealed by roof falls.

This is the ‘flooded to the roof’ part. Note that the orange colour in the middle isn’t the stone of the floor, but a cloud of precipitate hanging like a cloud in the water.

The orange colour is as a result of iron ore in the rocks, previously sealed away, being exposed to water and air during mining, a process that continues long after the mines have been abandoned. It’s quite a common sight in the area, but it doesn’t stop it from looking both striking and incongruous. It doesn’t quite compete with the remarkable blues and greens of the copper mines of Alderley Edge, which I’d already explored in the early 1980s, but in this case there was the special feeling of being one of only a very few people who had been there in recent years, or even knew of its existence.

Only a few hundred metres away was Robinsclough; I knew there was a mine there too, but it took quite a bit of finding. In the photo below can be seen one of the old packhorse routes already mentioned, with a tiny packhorse bridge, and the track barely visible leading up the valley side beyond. The sheep are obligatory in this kind of area.

Once located, Robinsclough Colliery proved to be tiny compared to Danebower, and furthermore was flooded. To quote from my diary of the time:

Some of the walling was drystone, like the other mines, but the roof and the other parts of the walls were irregular native rock. Because of the mud and water I was forced to straddle the tunnel, lodging my feet in gaps in the walls and pressing my back against the roof, holding the Olympus XA in one hand and steadying myself with the other, while holding the torch in my mouth.

As the tunnel went further in it angled down (or at least the roof did) and finally, when it seemed that the space between the roof and the surface of the water was less than a metre, I decided I could go no further. The mud, which had a thin layer of clear water over the top, was an interesting deep orange colour, as can often be seen at other spots in the area. Unlike ordinary slimy black mud it didn’t lie decently on the bottom but floated in suspension in weird frozen clouds like coral.

I then returned to the entrance, where I took this shot, which illustrates how small these old collieries are:

Places like this have a special quality for me. Looked at from the surface there’s little evidence of the amount of industrial history of the Peak District; now it’s just a few overgrown stone quarries or mysterious collapsed sections of walls and buildings; old lime kilns or isolated stretches of early railway trackbed and sealed-off tunnels. For the most part it’s just empty moorland, covered with heather and gorse; you have to know where to look to see the countless relics of history, Neolithic stone circles, Bronze Age round barrows, Iron Age forts, Roman roads, Medieval field systems… and two-hundred-year-old mines and stone quarries. They were eyesores in their time; now they are places to fascinate those with a love of things which have a story to tell – and which can be beautiful to look at as well.