Water Garland

A wooden or cast-iron curb or gutter fixed around a mine shaft's lining, catching water running down the shaft walls and conducting it away by pipe or water box to a lower level rather than letting it fall freely down the shaft.

How it worked

Fitted at intervals up a shaft's lining, a garland formed a continuous ring or channel that intercepted water seeping through the surrounding rock and running down the shaft sides, carrying it sideways into a pipe or launder rather than allowing it to cascade down onto men, cages and machinery working below. The same word was also applied, in a quite different sense, to a rectangular wooden frame with iron corner-plates used to keep coal piled high on a tram from spilling.

Why it was used

Water running freely down the full length of a shaft was both a nuisance and a hazard to men and machinery working below it; a garland let a shaft continue in normal use while still being actively drained, without waiting for a wetter section of ground to be sealed off entirely.

Risks & limitations

Cleaning and maintaining garlands meant working from a scaffold rigged on top of a cage as it moved up and down the shaft -- itself a hazardous task: on 6 June 1943, three men engaged in exactly this work were killed at the already-published Blidworth Colliery when the shaft's two cages collided.

Disasters associated with this term

Included only where MineArchive's own research gives a reasonable evidential basis, with the nature of the relationship stated — not every disaster where this term might plausibly apply.

• Blidworth Colliery Cage Collision (1943) (contextual relationship)
  Named in this record’s narrative: “…mounted on top of a descending cage, and while being moved from one garland to another, the shaft's two cages collided for a reason that…”

Sources

1. (secondary) Glossary of coal mining terminology — Wikipedia
2. (secondary) Glossary of mining terms (G) — Apedale (National Stoke Mining Group)

Record created: 31 August 2026 · Last researched: 31 August 2026