Colliery Brickworks

A brick and fireclay works attached to a colliery, working the clay that comes up with the coal. Fireclay is the seatearth beneath a coal seam — the fossil soil the coal-forming plants rooted in — so a pit working coal is already cutting through the raw material of refractory bricks, and many British collieries turned that by-product into a second business.

Historical usage

Fire-clay brick manufacture began in the Scottish central belt around Glenboig in the 1830s; the Garnkirk Colliery and Brickfield Company was formed in 1831 specifically to work the deep fireclay seams of the Garnkirk and Glenboig area of Lanarkshire, in beds reported at four to nineteen feet thick. By 1895 the area held five separate works and was the world's largest producer of fireclay bricks. At Prestongrange in East Lothian one of the coals, the Clay Seam, was worked chiefly for the two-foot underclay beneath it, and after 1872 the works expanded and mechanised on shale and fireclay from the neighbouring colliery. Brora's brickworks in Sutherland was the pit's principal customer, and the arrangement recurs across the British coalfields wherever a workable clay lay with the coal.

How it worked

The clay was won underground, in the same way and often by the same men as the coal, or dug from the surface where the seatearth outcropped; at Glenboig it was mined at forty yards, blasted with gunpowder like coal. It was then ground, tempered, moulded or pressed and burnt in kilns on the colliery site — often Hoffmann continuous kilns, whose fuel efficiency suited a works with cheap coal on the doorstep. James Dunnachie's gas-fired kiln at Glenboig, using a Wilson producer from 1881, cut fuel consumption by half and later by three-quarters.

Why it was used

It turned two liabilities into assets. The clay had to be cut through anyway, and colliery waste and small coal that would not sell had to go somewhere; a brickworks consumed both and produced something saleable. Refractory brick was in permanent demand from the iron, steel, gas and glass industries that the same collieries were already supplying with coal, and common brick from the local building trade. It also smoothed the colliery's income: brick demand and coal demand did not fall at the same time.

Risks & limitations

A colliery brickworks is only as good as its clay. Glenboig's fireclay was prized because it was remarkably free of iron oxide and lime, which soften a clay under heat; an ordinary seatearth makes ordinary bricks worth much less. The works also ties the pit to a second set of markets, so a downturn in construction or in the furnace trades hits it as well. And when the colliery closed, the clay supply generally went with it.

Regional variation

Strongest in the Scottish central belt, where the fireclay industry was effectively a branch of coal mining and 'fireclay works' is the usual term; in England and Wales 'colliery brickworks' or simply 'the brickworks' is more common. Scottish bricks are usually stamped with the works name, which is why so many can still be identified today.

Related terminology

Charcoal Blast Furnace, Coal, Fireclay, Lime Kiln, Spoil Heap

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.

• Baggeridge Colliery — West Midlands (well documented example)
  The colliery had a brickworks alongside it, and the toposcope in the country park that replaced them now looks out over the sites of both.
• Coalisland Collieries — County Tyrone (well documented example)
  Automatically linked by scripts/link_terms.py: exact-phrase match in the record's own recorded text.
• Dalmellington Iron Works — East Ayrshire (well documented example)
  After the Waterside furnaces closed, a brickworks was established on the site in 1928 with a 14-chamber transverse arch kiln and a 24-chamber Belgian kiln, powered by the converted 1847 blowing engine — a coal-and-iron company's plant turned over to brick.
• Herbertshire Colliery — Falkirk (well documented example)
  By 1912 the colliery and its associated brickworks had passed together to the Callendar Coal Company, which diversified into a range of fireclay goods — firebricks, chimney cans and the rest — exactly the pattern this term describes.

Sources

1. (primary) Edinburgh Area — brick clay and fire clay — Scotland's Brick and Tile Manufacturing Industry
2. (primary) Glenboig Union Fireclay Company, Glenboig, North Lanarkshire — history — Scotland's Brick and Tile Manufacturing Industry

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