Nottinghamshire 12 - Pleasley /Vanbunkle/ the saga continues with a reduced price and a threat/it's the pits

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"Everything has beauty but not everyone sees it" Confucius utters common sense again . Hold that thought. This will be going somewhere in the direction of ugly things and industrial history. Not to everyones taste hence the beauty that some people miss.

Gabby was taken up again to Preston for the satellite dome to be fitted . The silly sat nag takes us a different way everytime. Sometimes south and then up the M6 to Preston, sometimes across country east to west through Disley and the Airport ring road. Occaisionally she has taken us to Sheffield , over the tops to Manchester and today right up to Leeds and across the M62. A bleak and windswept motorway if ever there was one. Perhaps it feels worse to know that we are driving over Saddleworth Moor with its history of the 60's Moors Murders. You cannot drive over without thinking about Brady and Hindley and Keith Evans still buried somewhere up there. As we drove we talked as always about the house move. Our buyers have offered a reduction on their property and they hope that the drop will make their buyers complete the purchase. We resort to threats. About time too. A deadline for completion is given and we sit and wait. We are getting fed up waiting for the sale to go through.

We arrive and go for a walk to the nearby Sainsbury supermarket for a coffee before walking round the local park. Time passes by quickly and the dome is fitted . At last a new TV to replace our old one and we are ready to watch TV on our travels. We pay and drive home feeling pleased with ourselves. Another job well done. Sion of course has christened the dome Vanbunkle. We have a plan now a trip down to Herefordshire and the Gower to test out Vanbunkle. On our way home we get the call - our buyers buyers have pulled out of their sale. Our sale has fallen through and tomorrow we will need to explain we cannot buy the Rossett property. We are gutted. We are angry and frustrated. We wish that we had never agreed to sell to our buyers. Should we put the house back on the market again? So many questions and no answers were coming to mind.

To cheer ourselves up we decided to take time out and go for a drive out. What was local? What had we not seen before? Just a few mile outside Mansfield is the Pleasley Country Park and the Pleasley Colliery museum site. We parked up on what was once a very busy site. Today it was peaceful with just a few visitors. It was a trip down memory lane as we walked up to the coalmining site. The sun was shining and it felt like Spring had arrived. So todays trip was going to be a nostalgic trip into the past. Normally we find ourselves visiting Tudor manor houses and Georgian piles. Today it was industrial history when Britain was its most productive. A history we both have lived in. We were youngsters growing up in the 50's and 60's. Industrial Britain with its pea soup smogs, gas lamps and frequent bus services. Heavy industry. Steel works and coal mines. This was going to be a visit where we would fill in the gaps of the jigsaw. However well the guides and volunteers interpreted the sites there is nothing like first hand experience. We had it in bucketloads. Our memories of sights and smells would fill those gaps in what is essentially a pristine site.

Growing up in the North East Wales and Derbyshire coalfields our families lived and breathed coal. It was hard to avoid given our fathers and grandfathers worked in the pits. We looked at the tangled metal of the headstocks out of our bedroom windows. Their cages descending and ascending taking the miners down to the coalface for their shifts and returning them at the end of the day. We set our clocks by the whistle from the chimney as it called the miners to their shifts. As we looked at Pleasleys headstocks they were concrete and the chimney squared rather then rounded. I walked to the pit on Fridays to collect my grandmothers miners pension. I was invited to Christmas parties in the canteen. The canteen together with the offices had long gone. The miners used to buy their newspapers, comics and chocolates from the canteen . They purchased their large white towels and yellow soap embossed with the initials PHB - Pit head baths from the mine shop. The black coal dust underfoot was missing. The clothes on our washing lines used to be covered with black some days. The smell permeated the air and coated everything it came into contact with. The coal tubs were missing. The clank of the shovels on the coal tubs as the miners filled them with coal. The clang of the railway cart wheels and the sound of the steel toe capped boots. Each different part of the mine buildings brought back a memory or two. Coal being carted by Bob the Carter. Free coal which cost 10 shillings (50p) to cart from the pit to the house. Pit ponies in the field. There were machines outside but they were silent. Bricks lined up against the walls. All showing the names of local pits . Inside more engines once used to work the equipment. What was missing was the smell of steam and oil. The warmth that surrounded the machines. Our imaginations were running wild. Do you remember the playing fields? The social life of the pit. The brass band competitions held yearly. The fire fighting competitions. A football field and a bowling green. There was coal lumps with fossilised remains . As a child we broke lumps of coal looking for fossilised ferns and fishes . Never found any.

We walked past the huge machines labelled Markham Works . Did you know that they produced the drilling machines for the Channel Tunnel? Neither did I. The company has now closed and all the machines now used to drill the new railway beneath London are German made. There were posters on the wall advertising jobs in the mine. A clean and modern industry where apprentices were encouraged. A poster showing prospective Coal Queens of 1981. There was a certain amount of prestige in becoming Coal Queen. A depiction of the number of mines closed under Thatcher. I hadn't realised just how many closed in the 80's as coal deposits became harder to mine, foreign imports of coal became much cheaper and an awareness on the use of fossil fuels grew. It became uneconomic to mine pits like Pleasley which stood on the banks of the River Meden. Sunk in the 1870's coal was mined constantly up until 1904 and 1922 when the headstocks were constructed. The Lilleshall company installed the engine house equipment and coal was mined at deeper levels. The mine finally closed in 1986 and the community around Pleasley was pulled apart.

And finally one more useless piece of information . What is the connection between Pleasley pit and Florence Nightingale? Her father leased the land the mine the mine was built upon.

So back to the quote - what we saw today was not beautiful nor was it full of wonderful furniture but it was an insight into a past that we knew well. Cofucious was right saying that everything has beauty . These old pit buildings certainly had a beauty but not everyone would be interested in them.

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