Hill Top Colliery

Overview

A National Coal Board drift mine opened in 1948 high on the moors at Sharneyford, between Bacup and Todmorden — and, until 2014, the last coal mine still working in Lancashire. It closed in 1966 when the Union seam was exhausted, and was reopened thirty-one years later by two former miners who had spent the intervening decades keeping small private pits alive in the Rossendale valley.

History

Hill Top was opened in 1948, the only colliery the National Coal Board drove in the Rossendale valley, and designed as one of the short-life drift mines the Board favoured at the time. It stands high on the moor on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, the second highest colliery in the Board's Western Area after neighbouring Deerplay, with which it was later connected underground. The development work was done by men from Moorfield Colliery at Accrington, closed shortly after nationalisation, and the manager, Bill Dewhurst, came from there too. Two drifts were driven about 500 yards down to a block of virgin coal in the Union seam, some 4 feet 6 inches thick: an intake drift 78 metres long at a gradient of 1 in 1½, and a longer, easier return drift of 339 metres at 1 in 4. The first districts were mechanised pillar-and-stall, worked to the rise with a Dissington coal cutter and Duckbill loaders in headings twelve feet wide, then sliced back on retreat; conventional longwall faces followed, cut with AB Fifteen machines and cleared by conveyor to the surface. Shearer loaders arrived in 1964 and worked well, except that their picks were blunted by the hard ironstone nodules the Union seam is full of. About 200 men worked there at the peak, mostly from Bacup and Accrington, and the consensus among them was that it was a good pit. The coal was high in sulphur and went mainly to the chemical industry at Widnes. In 1966 the reserves were worked out and the colliery closed, leaving two pits in Rossendale; Deerplay went two years later and Old Meadows in 1969. That would have been the end of it, but for a miner from the closed Grimebridge Colliery who wondered what it would be like to own his own mine. William 'Billy' Clayton and his partner Rodney Mitchall reopened Grimebridge in 1978 and worked it, through an enforced closure in 1990-92, until the reserves and the money ran out in 1996. A year later their company took the Hill Top licence and drove two new drifts into the block of coal left between the old workings and an opencast site on Heald Moor. Hill Top worked on from 1997 to 2014 — the last colliery in the county — with a licence for 110,000 tonnes, of which very little was ever taken: four men working mornings raised 2,900 tonnes in the years to October 2011, and in 2003 the total was under 50 tonnes. Billy Clayton died of a heart attack in May 2008, bringing his grandson home from school, and his son of the same name ran the mine until it closed.

Geology

The Union seam here averages about 4 feet 6 inches and lies within the Lancashire Coal Measures on the eastern edge of the Burnley coalfield. Two things about the coal shaped the mining: a high sulphur content, which limited its market to the chemical works at Widnes rather than domestic or steam use, and hard ironstone nodules through the seam, which blunted the picks of the shearers introduced in 1964. Around Burnley and Todmorden Moor those nodules take a particular form known locally as coal balls, or Burnley bobbers — peat concretions common in the Upper Foot and Lower Mountain seams, hard enough to damage cutting drums and jibs, and collected off the tips by local people for the fossil plants preserved inside them.

Geological setting: Sedimentary Beds and Seams (well documented example)

Workings

A drift mine throughout, with no shaft: two drifts of 1948, the intake drift 78 m at 1 in 1½ and the return drift 339 m at 1 in 4, and two more driven in 1997 between the old workings and the Heald Moor opencast. Haulage was by winch on the inclines, on plateways of L-section steel at about 3 ft gauge, with flangeless disc-wheeled tubs that doubled as man-riding transport because the drifts were too low for anything else; some of them were bought second-hand from the closed Old Meadows Colliery. Pumps ran day and night on the mine's own overhead line, lifting just over 1,000 litres a minute and sending it over the Heald Moor watershed into the Irwell valley rather than the cheaper downhill route into the Yorkshire Calder.

Closure

Closed first in 1966 with the Union seam exhausted, and finally in 2014 after seventeen years of licensed working by the Grimebridge Colliery Co. Ltd. Over 150,000 tonnes were still thought to be in the ground at the end; what stopped it was not the coal but the lack of anyone to cut it — as the 2004 account put it, nobody wanted to work in the small mines any more.

What remains

Disused. In December 2016 the Health and Safety Executive issued a prohibition notice over the risk of water leakage at the site, and an improvement notice about the regular expert examination of the compressor.

Buildings of the disused colliery survive on the moor at Sharneyford; nothing read for this record describes their present state in detail.

Nearby mines

• Towneley Colliery — 6.8 km NW
• Bank Hall Colliery — 9.0 km NW
• Hapton Valley Colliery — 11.1 km NW

Straight-line distance, within 15 km. Show on the map.

Recorded claims

Individual factual claims, each attached to the source(s) that support it below. Where sources disagree, both are kept.

• The Hill Top Colliery at Sharneyford, between Bacup and Todmorden, was until 2014 the last coal mine still in operation in Lancashire. ¹
• The colliery was opened in 1948, when the National Coal Board drove two drifts into the Union seam, averaging 1.40 m thick; the intake drift was 78 m long at a gradient of 1 in 1½ and the return drift 339 m at 1 in 4. ^1,2
• Under the National Coal Board the colliery employed on average 101 men underground and 9 at the surface between 1950 and 1965, with about 200 at its peak, many of them from the closed Moorfield Colliery at Accrington. ^1,2
• Union coal is high in sulphur and was sold mainly to the chemical industry at Widnes; shearer loaders introduced in 1964 worked well except that their picks were blunted by the hard ironstone nodules common in the seam. ²
• After the 1966 closure the Grimebridge Colliery Co. Ltd, led by William 'Billy' Clayton and Rodney Mitchall, obtained a licence and in summer 1997 drove two drifts into the block of coal left between the old workings and an opencast site on Heald Moor. ^1,2
• A licence for 110,000 tonnes was granted in 1997 and about 150,000 tonnes remained in the ground, but four men working mornings raised only 2,900 tonnes in the years to October 2011, and under 50 tonnes were mined in 2003; Billy Clayton died in May 2008 and his son ran the mine until it closed in 2014. ¹

Photographs & further reading

Sources

1. (secondary) Hill Top Colliery — Wikipedia
2. (secondary) Hill Top Colliery, Forest of Rossendale, Lancashire — Alex Potts and Thomas Imgrund, Miner's Advice, 2004 (read via the Internet Archive)

Record created: 4 September 2026 · Last researched: 6 September 2026