The Hills are Alive

The land is flat and not a little bit boring as you travel west and south westwards from East Yorkshire.

The slope of the Wolds is just glimpsed over your right shoulder when the A63 opens up into the wide three lane M62 motorway and there before you is just the vast openness of the lower part of the Vale of York , the flood plain down to the Humber/Trent/Ouse/Derwent corridor and beyond to the Thorne wastes.

There is no high ground for about 50 or more miles in each direction.

That is apart from a scattering of elongated hillocks, regularly shaped in the same effect as smoothing a meringue mix from a spoon onto a baking tray.

These landscape features appear to change every time I pass by on the ocassional shopping trip to Ikea at Leeds or into Sheffield with subtle changes in the alignment to the horizon and the gentle sloping rises from normal ground level.

Sad as I am I have not found any defined names or even local colloquialisms for these topographical mounds.

This is because they are entirely fashioned and formed by man from the waste and debris excavated in the coal mining process that was the predominant industry in the surrounding areas for much of the last 150 years.

On the fringes of the Selby Coalfield is a particularly large and grassy hill which looms up out of the usual low mist on a working day in any season of the year. It forms an important marker on our trips to West Yorkshire as it is the half way point of the journey. The motorway crosses, first, a canal with the array of brightly painted narrow boats and inland waterway pleasure craft and then the loose dressed site of what must be one of the biggest car boot sale venues in the region although these must fall on a sunday because we have never witnessed the mad scrap and brawl in full flow which accompanies such an event...well at least the ones we frequent.

The hill is now well established with grassland and vegetation but I do remember it's early incarnation as just a muddy pile about 30 to 40 years ago when we would travel past on the way to and from family vacations. At that time there was plenty of interest for a lad of my age in the ant-like movements of oversized tipper lorries, diggers, excavators and grading machines as they crawled over the fledgling mountain. It was a lifesize Tonka Toy experience and holding up a finger and thumb through the side window of the family VW Estate it felt like you were in control of the distant vehicles.

Of course, I was not bothered or indeed interested in how the waste rocks and soil had got there even though far beneath our very car there would be hundreds of coal miners working a shift and producing a seemingly endless supply of it.

There is now very little in the way of physical structures or infrastructure to even hint at the former dominance of the coal industry in West and South Yorkshire.

A common sight was of the headgear and winding houses above the mineshafts but these have now been demolished in spite of what are thought to be large reserves of coal still in situ. A bit of a giveaway for what was once a colliery community is a row or bank of rows of terraced houses left stranded in the middle of nowhere apart from a large hill of spoil. There is one such rural aspect terrace visible to the east of the M18 close to what I remember seeing as the structures of the Moor End Colliery.

Also victim to the demise of the industry and mines that we often passed on our travels (before the motorway network of today) included Rossington Main and Thurcroft to the south of Doncaster. Close to the M1 the former Markham Vale Colliery retains its spoil heaps but has undergone a transformation after the pit closure in 1994 as an Enterprise Area. Slowly the hills are being whittled away to create valuable commercial land.

The carriageways that make up the convergence of the main regional motorways between Leeds and Doncaster are frequently coned off for repairs as a consequence of mining related subsidence but this is merely regarded as an inconvenience rather than arousing a feeling of loss in the demise of a once proud industry and the large communities that relied upon it for their livelihoods.

Recent dramatic landslips from the man made hills onto main rail routes and roads, thankfully without any loss of life, have been another reminder of the origins of the raw materials and their potential instability.

Many of the spoil heaps still survive. I would like to see them assume the names of their donor coal mines in the future so that the rich heritage of that industry, which contributed so much to the powering of the nation through its industrial heyday , remains in living memory even after the last Collier has gone.