Open questions: Lancashire

Where sources disagree, MineArchive keeps both accounts rather than picking one; where a fact could not be settled, the record says so. 19 such claims on 15 records. All regions.

Bickerstaffe Colliery

• The owners were Bromilow, Foster and Co. and then Bickerstaffe Collieries Ltd. (disputed)

Burgh Colliery

• Eight men and women were killed in the explosion of 1846. (disputed)

Clintsfield Colliery

• A circular earthwork north of the engine house is considered to be the site of a gin circle for horse-powered winding. (disputed)
• Only hand-powered windlasses are mentioned in the sale of the colliery's equipment in 1856. (disputed)

Coppull Colliery

• The colliery was renamed Hic Bibi Colliery in the 1860s, had several owners and closed in the 1880s; its fireclay then supplied a brickworks run by the Ellerbeck Collieries Company until 1959. (disputed)

Eccleston Quarry

• A local resident said that during the Second World War a Ministry paid a local man to run a pump at intervals to keep the quarry empty while its owner and staff were away, and that after the war an official reorganisation stopped the payments, so the man stopped running the pump and the quarry flooded. (uncertain)

Grimebridge Colliery

• The colliery's official closure is dated 1962. (disputed)

Habergham Colliery

• The museum dates the colliery 1854–1941; the Burnley Coalfield account has production from the Arley at 218 m beginning in 1870 after two years' development, and closure in 1941 through a shortage of manpower. (disputed)
• The BGS mine-plans catalogue holds a Mining Remediation Authority abandonment plan titled 'Habergham' (catalogue 12613, Arley Yard, Blindstone, undated in the catalogue); the catalogue gives no location and the plan's details do not clearly tie it to this working, so it may belong to another of the same name. (uncertain)

Holland Colliery

• Holland Colliery opened in 1855 and closed in March 1939. (uncertain)

Huncoat Colliery

• Sunk by George Hargreaves & Co. between 1890 and 1893 to the Upper and Lower Mountain. (disputed)
• Its first shaft was sunk in 1885 and eventually reached 850 feet. (disputed)

Lea Green Colliery

• Production ceased in 1964: the Northern Mine Research Society gives August, when 338 men worked underground and 174 on the surface, and the Sutton history gives September while allowing August. In that year the pit produced 200,000 tons and employed six hundred. (disputed)

Lead Mines Clough

• Archaeological and isotopic evidence indicates lead was being extracted on Anglezarke Moor c.680-1000 AD, most likely from the veins later worked at Lead Mines Clough, though later mining has destroyed most direct physical evidence of this early activity. (uncertain)

Moorfield Colliery

• The BGS mine-plans catalogue holds a Mining Remediation Authority abandonment plan titled 'Moorfield' (catalogue 10399, Upper Mountain, dated 1930); the catalogue gives no location and the plan's details do not clearly tie it to this working, so it may belong to another of the same name. (uncertain)

Parkside Colliery

• At least one fatality occurred during the colliery's shaft-sinking phase, before any coal was wound, though no further named detail or date is recorded. (uncertain)

Parr Colliery

• Opened in 1869. (disputed)
• The Nos. 1 and 2 shafts were sunk in 1871 and wound coal until 1926. (disputed)

Thieveley Lead Mine

• The Thieveley Farm and Black Clough ground was probably reworked by the Clitheroe Mining Company for a short period between 1753 and 1766. (uncertain)