Holing

Cutting a wedge-shaped groove into a coal seam — usually along the bottom, sometimes in the middle or the top — so that the coal above it could be broken down. Also the groove itself.

Historical usage

Holing is the oldest and hardest part of a hewer’s work, and it long predates machinery. Barrowman’s 1886 glossary defines "to hole" as "to cut in under or above a seam preparatory to dislodging it from its bed", and holing as "the cutting so made"; dour holing was "difficult undercutting in hard coal or stone". A hewer’s day was undercutting the coal with a hand pick, lying on his side in the space he had made, until mechanical coal cutters took the work over from the late nineteenth century.

How it worked

The collier drove a slot under the coal so the seam lost its support and could be brought down with wedges, a pick or a shot. Where a soft band lay in or under the seam — holing dirt — he worked that out instead, because it cut more easily than the coal. The depth of the undercut governed how much coal came down at once. Where the seam met an existing roadway or another working place, the opening made between them was also called the holing.

Why it was used

Coal will not simply fall. Undercut it and the weight of the seam works for you, so that wedges or a modest charge bring down far more coal than they could from a solid face — and bring it down in larger, better-paying lumps than blasting alone.

Risks & limitations

The hewer worked under coal he had deliberately deprived of support, and the roof of his own undercut was the seam itself. Falls of coal onto men who were holing are among the commonest single fatalities in the nineteenth-century record. Mechanisation changed the hazard rather than removing it: machine cutting produced far more fine coal dust than hand holing, and that dust made explosions worse — a point made directly in the evidence after the Pretoria Pit disaster of 1910.

Regional variation

Kirving is the North East word for the same thing — Apedale’s glossary says plainly that "kirving was the same as holing", applied particularly to the shorter undercuts of pillar and stall working — with nicking the matching vertical cut at the side of the place. In Scotland "to boss" was to hole or undercut, and bossing the holing of a thick seam.

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.

• Crossgill Mine — Cumbria (well documented example)
  Named in this record’s history: “…where, as one local historian put it, 'roof falls were commonplace, holing into abandoned workings and slides of disturbed ground were all part…”

Sources

1. (primary) Glossary of Scotch Mining Terms — James Barrowman (1886), via Scottish Mining Website
2. (secondary) Glossary of mining terms (H) — North Staffordshire Miners’ Group, Apedale
3. (secondary) Glossary of mining terms (K) — North Staffordshire Miners’ Group, Apedale

Record created: 8 September 2026 · Last researched: 8 September 2026