The only people who come to look at the winding house and the headstocks are the miners who used to work here. The cage that lies jammed just underground is the one that took them down into the earth every day to work. It isn’t heritage for them. Not yet.
They’ve put up a steel security fence around the site to deter intruders. Otherwise the kids would be in here, smoking and shooting up and having sex. Inside the fence sit the concrete and brick walls of the winding house, with its arched windows. There are huge vents, two feet across, and skips full of rubbish waiting to be taken away. A boiler about twelve feet high lies abandoned, leaning at a drunken angle. When you look at the winding gear itself, it’s amazing to think that men’s lives hung from those wheels on two steel cables no more than an inch thick.
These wheels are the most distinctive markers on the landscape. They tell us we’re in coal mining country. Like two big blue bicycle wheels, they sit at the top of the headstocks and can be seen for miles. The modern superpits hid them inside concrete towers, but they’re still there. As pits have closed, a use has been found for some of these wheels. A couple even decorate the front of the Wonderland Pleasure Park. I kid you not.
But maybe this is better than the sad fate of the old headstocks at Brinsley, which are abandoned in the middle of a field, like some unexplained megalith, a twentieth century Stonehenge. In the future, people will wonder about them. What did anyone do here? What strange rituals did they go through under this mysterious structure?
At the top of the engine house are two narrow slits, where you can step out onto the diagonal girders supporting the wheels. There are handrails to help you walk up the girders — because that’s what they had to do to keep the winding gear maintained. A ladder takes you from the girders to the platform around the wheels. Below you then are four concrete pillars, with two cables hanging between them, and the cage just visible in the hole in the ground.
A few new industrial units have been built by the road, and some of the old pit offices and store rooms are still standing, their yards full of bits of old cars and junk so useless that no one can be bothered to nick it. The rest of the site is grassed over, awaiting development. But the grass has that peculiar brown look that tells you it’s growing on something other than soil. Here and there a birch or a clump of bracken is trying to re-colonise the area. At the entrance, a sign says the pit site has been designated under the New Deal for Nottinghamshire programme. The sign is starting to look old.
The site of this old pit is probably one of the most barren places in the country now. It has been levelled into a plateau, but great grey mounds of rubble have been left, mountains of dust and shattered lumps of concrete, broken drainage pipes and bricks. Around them still lie the piles of black spoil and dusty roadways carved out by heavy-wheeled vehicles. The ruts they’ve left fill up with evil black mud in the winter. Here and there rusty metal rods protrude from the flattened earth. Lumps of iron with no apparent purpose lie abandoned among the slag and stone and the scrubby plants.
A sign says ‘Warning to children and parents — building sites BITE’. But there’s no building going on here, no work of any kind. The bulldozers have done their job and left. The rails and sleepers have been pulled up from the old mineral lines, though the signals are still there, and even a little signal box up the line. The shaft itself is well filled in, and sealed over tight with concrete. No memories here. The whole thing has been obliterated.
In the middle of the devastation, some joker has planted a red flag. Its fluttering is the only movement, apart from the pigeons and the occasional rabbit scuttling towards the scrubby undergrowth.
Well, that’s during the day. At night, it’s nowhere near so pretty.
It’s quiet up here on the plateau, only the sound of birds and the traffic going by on the back road under the old rail bridges. The gates are well blocked with heaps of spoil to stop vehicles getting on, but to those in the know the new roads give easy access to the pit site across the bridge. Then you drive between the mountains of debris and you find yourself in a dip, a little hollow hidden by great clumps of bramble and bracken. No one can see you here. No one can even see a thirty-foot truck down here.
I had the Subaru parked up behind the winding gear house. To the east, a faint glimmer of light was coming up over the hills near the M1. If I strained my eyes hard, I thought I might see the outline of Hardwick Hall.
Slow Kid and Metal pulled up in the Astra, and Metal wound down the window.
“We could have got that Jap car away while the cops weren’t looking, Stones. There was hardly any damage.”
“You’re kidding.”
“There’s a bloke in Holland just can’t get enough of them four wheel drives.”
“Not now, Metal.”
In the back of the Sierra were two figures slumped low on the seat, and between them a great hulk of something that looked a bit like Doncaster Dave. Come to think of it, it was Doncaster Dave, but he looked a lot more handsome than usual, because he was wearing a stocking stretched over his head. Lovely. Look no further for the Face of the New Millennium.
I opened the gate in the steel fence and the two cars pulled in behind the winding gear house. Slow parked the Astra in the shadow of the derelict boiler, and they all got out. The two lads in the Sierra needed a bit of help, as their legs seemed to have gone wobbly. But Dave was quite willing to give them a hand. It must have been a bit like being helped across the road by Godzilla. When the four of us had gathered round them, they were looking definitely nervous.
The lads weren’t much to look at, typical weedy scruffs from the council estates in Mansfield or Ashfield. Neither of them would make the meat in a sandwich for Doncaster Dave. They were scared already, not know what was going on. It’s like that when things go wrong unexpectedly. It’s the unknown that does it. Of course, this makes it easier for us.
Metal and Slow tied the lads’ hands behind their backs with some blackened rope and fastened it to one of the steel cables that held the cage suspended from the winding wheel. We all looked down, and the lads looked too. There was a big black hole down there below the cage that looked as though it went down into the earth for miles. Well, it did once. But now it’s only a few feet down to the concrete cap they used to seal the shaft. I was betting these lads didn’t know that, though.
“Right, lads. Sorry to leave you hanging around like this. But if you don’t tell me everything you know, you’re going to feel really let down. Know what I mean?”
“We’re working for a bloke called Rawlings,” said one lad straightaway.
“That’s a good start, youth.”
It didn’t take long to find out what we needed to know. They were only amateurs, well out of their depth. They opened up beautifully.
Afterwards, we dropped the kids off on the edge of Mansfield and left the Sierra in a lay-by on the A60, minus its most valuable contents. Maybe the car’s owner would get it back after all, if somebody else didn’t nick it first.
On the way back to Medensworth, Dave had a question. For once, it wasn’t about where we were going to eat.
“Stones,” he said, trying out the sound of his voice.
“Yeah, Donc?”
“These ram raids, like.”
“What about ’em?”
“I was just wonderin’. What do they need all these rams for anyway?”