Simon English
England Revisited

On a post next to the tip from a disused mine near Lambley on the Alston to Brampton Road.

On the same post, an upright sleeper, in the same place near the road as it was in 1971. I am certain that this is so as some of the pins that held the original flag and notice are still there, most deheaded or just rusty holes but one was still there complete. Then the sleeper marked the entrance to a disused coal mine but the track has now all but disappeared, although the bridge made from sleepers over the roadside ditch is sound even if it is invisible under a covering of grass.

All the small debris from the mine head has been removed or sunk under grass except this post which remains standing alone used as a rubbing post by the small black local cattle. I was astonished and gratified to find it, the time invested in searching was not so much that the area had changed as mis-memorising the scale of things enforced by photographs rather in the way that places from childhood all look smaller when revisited as an adult. Here things that I was looking for in the distance were actually at my feet.

The distortion of remembered scale was especially true of the spoil heaps that look so big in the photographs but now, sparsely grassed over, seem smaller. They have not been ‘landscaped’ at all, only a little quarrying for material to fill gateways. Some small brick structures remain.

The view in the distance is unchanged but botanically my interest is in the foreground. Here opportunist trees and shrubs of birch and willow have not spread as one would expect in this sort of wasteland. Each little individual sapling about 6 feet high in 1971 is now, growing in the thin soil, just small trees. Clearly shortly after establishing themselves sheep were given access to the site and their nibbling has prevented any new from growing, just leaving a couple of dozen originals. This gives the old mine site almost a deliberate garden look.

On the other side of the new wire fence along the road the roadside ditch supports a wide variety of wildflowers. In the grazing fields the reeds and grass tussocks support a seemingly healthy population of curlews. Their cries and territorial flights are a delight to hear and see.

The old mineral railway that runs east to west 200 yards to the south that once took high quality coal to the coke furnaces is gradually being returned to nature but the cuttings and embankments will always show its route over the moors. This, even if it is never restored to another use. The beautiful packhorse bridge to the east has got a preservation order on it. The abandoned rail route has had plans to carry the extended Sustrans cycle route which so far has got as far as less than a mile to the east however its continuation west is held up at the elegant bridge/viaduct at Lambley.

Nearby the Pennine Way Long Distance footpath runs north to south. Point 4 is for me significant as a crossroads of old and new transport systems – Roman road, horse track, rail way, cross Pennine roads and footpaths: two thousand years of layered history.
Point 4