Wednesday, 3 February 2021
T’Owd Pit
One of our regular town walks takes up past the former site of the local coal mine. Our house would have been about a five minute walk from the pit although there is nothing left of the mine above ground now. Nothing but a large grassy park with an information board and a tarmac track which would have been the pit railway.
Mrs H’s family were involved in the mining industry for at least a century. We still have her great grandfather’s pick used to hack coal from narrow seams. I once used it to hack up a pampas grass root in the lawn. It did the job very well and I could just about imagine hacking coal out with it, but coal mining doesn’t trigger much nostalgia.
At the end of our garden is a WWII air-raid shelter built by the builder who built the house in the thirties and first lived here. It is little more than a concrete box sunk into the ground with steps leading down into the interior. Why it was built we don’t know. Maybe the builder though enemy bombers might target the pit but we can’t ask him now.
That’s a frustrating aspect of personal and local history, the stories which are now lost. The questions we never asked our parents or grandparents, their reasons for doing this or that, their reasons for living where they chose to live. We don’t always ask and one day it is too late.
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6 comments:
I have mixed feelings about local history. I'm fascinated by our old house (17th Century) and would like to know more about it. Likewise several of the things I regularly see around the village. I often wonder what sort of life I would have led, had I been born several generations ago, but of course it's a bit of a fruitless speculation because I wouldn't then have been me - I would have been someone entirely different.
On the downside, our local historian is a bit of a bore, and approaching him with my questions would unleash a tsunami of irrelevance.
And the frustration of all the things our grandparents told us when we were too young to properly understand or remember the details they told us.
An Air Raid Shelter was built at my parents house. I was too young to remember it being built,it was always "just there".I was born there and my mother lived there for over 60 years until she died in 2002 at the age of 92. It was sold after her death and I remember the Solicitor acting for us asking if we had had Council permisssion to build it.I was amused and told him that it had been the Council who had actually built it .Being built of brick and reinforced concrete it will be around for a long time like the pillboxes put up at about the same time.
Only a week or so ago, I found, by accident, that I have a family member two villages away!
Apparently, you can use Ancestry for free but have to use the library computers - not your own!
"there is nothing left of the mine above ground now"
It's the things left underground that are the worry, i.e. great big potential sink holes.
Sam - I sometimes wonder what life would be like if I'd been born several generations ago, but as you say it doesn't make sense. Yet I find this problem helps when we need to avoid judging people of the past by our standards.
Woodsy - I never really knew my grandparents and in later life didn't think about asking my parents about them. My loss as I now realise.
John - it makes me wonder how many of these shelters were built. In the early sixties my parents almost bought a house with one in the garden. I was fascinated an a little disappointed that they didn't buy the house.
Scrobs - that's worth knowing! My wife's cousin recently discovered a relative she never knew about living within walking distance. That was an Ancestry discovery I believe.
Mark - the mine was worked for almost a century so a chunk of the A38 could disappear one day.
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