Colliery

A coal mine considered as a whole working establishment: the shaft or shafts and the underground workings they serve, together with the surface plant that makes the coal saleable — winding engines, screens, washery, workshops, offices and sidings. The distinction from 'coal mine' is real if slight: a coal mine is the excavation, a colliery is the entire concern standing over it. It is the word the official record almost always uses, which is why so many British pits are catalogued as a colliery rather than a mine.

Historical usage

The word is first recorded in the 1630s, formed from 'collier' with the suffix -y, on the same pattern as bakery or brewery — a place where a trade is carried on. 'Collier' is much older and did not originally mean a coal miner at all: it appears in the late 14th century for a charcoal maker and seller, took on the sense of a digger in a coal mine only in the 1590s, and by the 1620s also meant a coasting vessel carrying coal. The man was named first, the ship second and the place last. 'Colliery' then became the settled term of art in statute, inspectors' reports and abandonment plans, and stayed that way through nationalisation — the National Coal Board took over some 1,647 mines in 1947 — until deep mining ended at Kellingley in December 2015.

How it worked

A developed colliery was an integrated surface system, not just a hole. Ventilation set its basic shape: one shaft was the downcast, drawing fresh air in, another the upcast, from which a fan house drew the foul air out. Headgear stood over each shaft, with a winding engine house alongside, and a boiler house and chimney to raise steam for both. Coal came up in tubs or skips to the screens, where it was sized and graded, then often to a washery, and out by railway sidings; waste went to the spoil heap. Round these stood the lamp room, workshops, offices, a magazine, and — after the Mining Industry Act 1926 funded them widely — pithead baths. Clock Face in Lancashire is a fair example of the developed type: No. 2 downcast, No. 3 upcast with the fans, No. 1 for pumping, and a 1939 baths building holding showers, lamp room, rescue station, first-aid room, canteen and cycle shed for 1,600 men and 40 pit-brow women, reached by a steel walkway bridge from the screens.

Why it was used

The layout was not a matter of taste. After the Hartley disaster of 1862, when 204 men and boys died behind a single blocked shaft, the law required every colliery to have at least two independent ways out, which fixed the two-shaft arrangement and with it the downcast/upcast ventilation circuit. Concentrating the winding, screening, washing and workshops on one site was then simple economics: coal is bulky and low-value, so every extra handling and every mile of haulage eats the margin.

Risks & limitations

As a label it is looser than it looks. 'Colliery' can mean one shaft, a group of shafts sunk decades apart and worked as one concern, or a company's whole holding under a single name — so a closure date attached to a colliery may refer to the last shaft, the last coal drawn, or the winding-up of the business, and the three can be years apart. Pits were also renamed and renumbered freely, often after the owner or the village, and neighbouring collieries frequently shared a name with a number after it.

Regional variation

'Colliery' is the formal and official word everywhere in Britain, but rarely the spoken one. In the North East, Yorkshire, the Midlands and the Scottish coalfields the everyday word is 'pit', which carries the whole vocabulary of pit village, pit head, pit brow and going down the pit. In Wales the Welsh word is 'glofa'. 'Coal mine' is the plainer modern usage and the standard term outside Britain.

Related terminology

Coal Mines Act 1911

Images

Mines associated with this term

5 examples chosen from 36 linked records — the term page is not an index.

• Cortonwood Colliery — South Yorkshire (well documented example)
  Named 3 times in this record, first in the summary: “A South Yorkshire colliery of no unusual size or fame until March 1984, when the National Coal…”
• Gethin Colliery — Merthyr Tydfil (well documented example)
  Named twice in this record, first in the history: “…by the jury on both occasions and prosecuted on neither. The colliery later passed to Powell Duffryn and turned to steam coal, working the…”
• Lofthouse Colliery — West Yorkshire (well documented example)
  Named 6 times in this record, first in the history: “…1873 and 1877, reaching the Silkstone seam at 321 m, and by 1895 the colliery was raising around a thousand tons a day. It worked the West…”
• Longannet Colliery — Fife (well documented example)
  Named 3 times in this record, first in the summary: “A large deep coal mine at Kincardine-on-Forth, Fife, that fed the adjoining Longannet Power…”
• Argyll Colliery, Machrihanish — Argyll and Bute (well documented example)
  Named 10 times in this record, first in the summary: “The last coal mine in Kintyre, and one of the loneliest collieries in Britain — a…”

Sources

1. (secondary) Clock Face Colliery, Part 2 — Sutton Beauty & Heritage
2. (secondary) Collier (etymology) — Online Etymology Dictionary
3. (secondary) Colliery (etymology) — Online Etymology Dictionary

Record created: 26 August 2026 · Last researched: 26 August 2026