Bell Pit

A shallow shaft sunk to a seam near the surface, then worked outwards at the bottom until it became too dangerous to go further — leaving a chamber wider than the shaft above it, roughly the shape of a bell in section. It is the simplest way to mine anything that lies just below the ground, and one of the oldest.

Historical usage

Bell pits were worked in Britain from prehistory to the twentieth century, for coal, ironstone, flint and lead. Grime's Graves in Norfolk is Neolithic; the ironstone pits around Bentley Grange in West Yorkshire are medieval; coal was still being got this way at Ford in Northumberland in the early 1900s. Brora's outcrop workings along the Sutherland links began as bell pits in the sixteenth century, and the Bronze Age copper workings on the Great Orme include shafts of the same basic kind.

How it worked

A shaft is sunk to the seam — a few yards, rarely more than about twenty — and the mineral drawn up in a bucket or kibble on a hand winch, much as water is drawn from a well. At the bottom the miner works outwards in every direction, enlarging the base and leaving a sloping roof of the rock above. There is usually no support of any kind, so the working stops when the roof becomes unsafe. The pit is then abandoned and another sunk a short distance away, often using the spoil from the new shaft to backfill the old one. Because each pit follows the same seam, the results line up: bell pits are typically found in rows or clusters tracking the outcrop across a hillside.

Why it was used

It needs no capital, no drainage, no ventilation and no timber — just a windlass, a rope and a man willing to go down. For a shallow seam it was for centuries the only economic method, and it remained so on small rural workings long after deep mining had industrialised.

Risks & limitations

Everything that makes a bell pit cheap also makes it short-lived. Unsupported, it collapses; undrained, it floods; unventilated, it cannot be driven far from the shaft. It also wastes most of the seam, since a wide margin of coal or ore has to be left standing around each pit and between one pit and the next. That is why they occur in such numbers — the method only works by repetition. The abandoned shafts are a lasting hazard: a backfilled bell pit can settle centuries later into a crown hole, and the depressions left where they collapsed are the usual way the workings are recognised on the ground today.

Regional variation

The term is used across the English coalfields and the Yorkshire lead field. Very similar shallow shafts elsewhere carry local names — 'shaft mounds' in scheduling and survey language, describing the ring of upcast spoil rather than the pit inside it.

Related terminology

Coal, Kibble, Opencast Working, Room and Pillar, Shaft, Subsidence

Images

Mines associated with this term

Included only where MineArchive's own research gives a reasonable evidential basis — not every mine where this might plausibly apply.

• Brora Colliery — Highland (well documented example)
  Automatically linked by scripts/link_terms.py: exact-phrase match in the record's own recorded text.
• Great Orme Copper Mines — Conwy (surviving physical example)
  Bell pits aligned along the geological faults are visible across the surface of the headland, the shallow end of a Bronze Age copper working that also runs to several kilometres of narrow underground galleries.

Sources

1. (secondary) Bell pit — Wikipedia
2. (secondary) Bell pits — Co-Curate — Newcastle University

Record created: 25 August 2026 · Last researched: 25 August 2026