Colliery spoil heaps were once such a prominent feature of our local landscape that it never occurred to me to photograph one but this example, at the top end of Coxley Valley, featured as a stand in for an extinct volcano in our 1966 Indiana Jones-style mini-movie ‘Quest Coxley’.
That’s my friend John as the intrepid explorer clutching the cavalry sword he used to hack through the dense undergrowth of New Hall Wood.
Settling Pond
Today at the same footbridge you’re entirely surrounded by woodland and the spoil heap itself has been landscaped to create a gentler slope.
The banking at the foot of the spoil heap in the 1966 photograph was the dam wall of a settling pond constructed to prevent sediment discharging into Coxley Beck. It has now almost completely silted up. In the 1980s it attracted hundreds of mating toads in springtime and hopefully it still does.
Fire break?
The footbridge over Stony Cliffe Beck is top centre in this map from 1930. Denby Grange Colliery was then called the Prince of Wales Colliery. One feature in the old map that isn’t obvious when you’re walking through what is now Stonycliffe Wood Yorkshire Wildlife Trust reserve is the band devoid of trees across the top of the map: a fire break?
Our ‘Quest Coxley’ travelogue was just one minute long, so that’s about 12 feet of Standard 8 cine film at 18 frames a second. In Photoshop I’ve stitched together 20 frames from a second or two of a panning shot to make the panorama.
Link
Stoneycliffe Wood Nature Reserve, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust
Earnshaw’s Yorkshire Garden & Fencing Centre, Midgley, on the site of Denby Grange Colliery