Yorkshire Coalfield

It takes a week to cycle from Penzance to Berwick. It took me 40 years. Because on the way, I wanted to include every town in England, in what amounted to some two years of day-rides. Most of these rides were point-to-point, but some were loops, and some looked on the map like a dropped noodle. It wasn’t a continuous line, but many separate lines, and all rides included towns I had not visited before. I used trains to get to starting points. Each ride had to be at least 20 miles, and in each new town, I had to touch a central feature, ideally the market cross or town hall. This is just one of hundreds of rides on this lifetime’s journey. A few more journey writeups can be found at my “Riding the Shires” website, from which this was taken, at Riding the Shires. Half a century of cycle-touring. (along with a couple of long memoires of the Soviet bloc).

To paraphrase H.V. Morton, it was a day that November had borrowed from September, cool, crisp and mostly sunny, with high cloudbanks giving good light effects. The starting point for this spin around the South Yorkshire coalfield in 2023 was Barnsley, the former capital of perhaps all the British coalfields, as it was the base of Arthur Scargill, miners’ leader in the acrimonious and at times violent struggle of the NUM, the main miners’ union, against the Thatcher government.

South Yorkshire still has not forgiven the Iron Lady. Or the county to the south, Nottinghamshire, where miners broke the strike, and where, as a reward, pits were allowed to stagger on somewhat longer than in Yorkshire. There were also technical reasons why Notts pits survived, but that has not assuaged the ill-feeling. Nottinghamshire men to this day are unwelcome in certain South Yorkshire pubs. Scargill, who once claimed “I can’t spell the word compromise,” remains a controversial local personality. He must be into his eighties now.

The miners’ strike not only marked the death of an industry, but also of a way of life and a hard-line, near-Marxist strain in British working-class politics. With his doggedly blunt and aggressive leadership style, Scargill was widely seen, outside the mining districts, as leftwing agitator using the miners’ strike to further his own ambitions. In the 1980s, he was the British establishment’s favourite bogeyman.

Having been down a couple of working pits in the 1980s, and seen myself what risks and discomforts they faced underground, I found it hard to criticise the miners. Their job was sheer heroism; I wouldn’t have worked down there long-term for any amount of money. The fact remains, however, that there isn’t a single country in Western Europe today that has preserved a large coal-mining sector. Not even Japan, which retains nearly all its primary industry, from textiles to shipbuilding, has managed it. Thatcher acted with political as much as economic motivations. But if she (and Labour before her) hadn’t closed down the pits, economic pressures surely would have instead.

But enough of the lecturing. Let’s get on with the ride.

Barnsley

When you approach Barnsley on the main road from Sheffield, the first thing you notice is a memorial for the “Oaks Explosion.” It’s a grim way to enter a town. This was the worst pit disaster in English history. A total of 361 men died in the tragedy, which happened in December 1866. They included every member but one of the rescue teams, who were caught in secondary blasts the day after.

Barnsley, a large stone-built town with expanses of terracing draped over several hillsides, is today quite an impressive place, with the feel of a regional hub. The centre is dominated by a huge 1930s-classical town hall of bright white Portland Stone. Barnsley and Sheffield men — miners and steelworkers — long carried on a rowdy rivalry which continues to this day, making the late-night services on the Sheffield-Barnsley line probably the least liked among local train crews. Less than 20 miles apart, the two towns remain distinct in tradition and dialect.

I was expecting miles of backstreets before I got out of Barnsley and onto the open road, but lucked upon a rail trail all the way to the first place on the itinerary, Royston. This was a double blessing, as it took me smoothly up to the hilltops along a gentle four-mile gradient I could pedal the whole way.

The views from the old railway trackbed were characteristic of all the old pit country. This was a mostly undulating, sometimes quite steep, and surprisingly well-wooded landscape. Now the old roughcast stone villages, not the huge old collieries of yore, again set the tone. South Yorkshire’s stone cottages are not charming and rustic, like those of Dorset. They are crude, foursquare and often streaked with black, though still homely and often handsome. The ghosts of the collieries remain recognisable in the landscape as rural industrial estates with odd-looking whaleback hillocks where the slagheaps have been greened over. Streets of brick-built miners’ terraces also continue to dot the scene.

Every village involved in the industry has a large pithead winding wheel proudly sunk halfway into the earth to commemorate this heritage, and many of the miners’ WMCs have lived on as general pubs. You don’t find many slums: mining was well-paid, at least in the twentieth century (the strikes weren’t only about pay), and often quite remote settlements have a fine 1920s cinema, today often converted to a gym or tyres’n’exhausts shed.

Royston

Royston — a small town or large village — was unusual in that some of its old colliery buildings still stand. This was because it long retained a viable drift (surface) mine. This too is now gone, but the huge old tin-sided tower used for loading coal-hopper wagons still, er, towers over the town and the surrounding countryside like one the tripod monsters in War of the Worlds.

That tower was about the most visually interesting thing about Royston, which seemed little more than a busy crossroads with a dozen barbers and nail shops, and a good number of squashed rats on the tarmac. I had a quick breakfast here at Kelly’s café, a plain but spotless workmen’s place run by a no-nonsense Balkan matron. She provided a cheap, excellent meal, but seemed to take genuine offence that I had left two slices of toast uneaten. She looked at me accusingly and pointed at the toast:

“Why?”

“Why? Just didn’t fancy them. I haven’t touched them. You can reheat them.”

“What’s wrong wi da toast?”

“Nothing. Just didn’t feel like toast today …”

“Why? Will fill you up for your biking, young man.”

“I’m 64.”

“Yes. I say ‘young man’ to all the chaps, all ages. Makes them feel better. Now why you don’t like my toast?”

This could have gone for a few minutes, but a commotion on the pavement outside provided an opportunity for a quick exit. Three men were milling agitatedly about an electric Jaguar that had conked out right at the junction. It stood there gumming up everything, and they just could not move it. I pitched in, and, gratifyingly, my contribution made the difference. We slowly shoved the thing alongside the kerb. I was a bit shocked. I knew EVs were heavy, but I hadn’t realised they were that heavy. It was like getting a tank out of a trench trap.

The traffic out of Royston was bad, but my luck finding off-road routes continued. Here, it was a muddy bridleway most of the way to village of Felkirk, with its splendid Perpendicular church overlooking Royston. It was being fitted out for an upcoming craft fair and remembrance events. For once, I pottered around a nave that was crowded with people and lively with sounds of conversation.

Felkirk
Tudor schoolhouse

Next to the church stood a neat little stone-built schoolhouse of Elizabethan date, with original mullioned windows. Old colleges like those of Oxford and Cambridge are no rarity in England, but humble village schoolhouses of Tudor date certainly are — I don’t think I’d seen one before. I’d like to be able to say more about it, but unfortunately, it was locked up and no attempt had been made to make an attraction out of it. Apparently, it’s still in use as a community meeting place. The view from the graveyard, over a wide expanse of green fields and now yellowing woodland, was worth a sit-down. All around, workmen doing repairs on the lychgate milled about with tools and bits of wood. The greeting round here was just one word, spoken with a kind of dipping intonation: “Alraaht?”

An interesting word, lychgate. The “lych” means corpse, and is cognate with German Leiche, with the same meaning. But, more interestingly, it is also ultimately the same word as “like,” meaning similar, and German gleich (and the corresponding words in Dutch and Scandinavian languages). The weirdly morbid underlying idea was the “similarity” of a dead to a living body.

Hemsworth

A few miles on was Hemsworth, also built around a very busy crossroads and with even fewer attractions than Royston. I pedalled into a wasteland on the edge where I imagined the old pit installations had been, and found a scrapyard and a paddock with what looked like a few shire horses.

On to South Kirkby and South Emshall, in what was shaping up to be a glorious autumn evening of clear skies, pleasant breezes and long shadows. Big remembrance poppies were pinned to lamp-posts, brightening up a not very attractive pair of contiguous old mining townships with busy roads. Then the traffic at last calmed down, and the terracing morphed into an unexpectedly pastoral setting.

You could tell from its mere name that few people in the next village, Hooton Pagnell, had ever dirtied their hands with colliery machinery. Though only a couple miles from South Elmsall, it was as if scene-shifters had switched the coalfield for the Cotswolds. Pretty stone cottages framed by turning woodland were strung out along a high, winding lane, at the end of which was Hooton Pagnell Hall. It sounded like an Agatha Christie murder setting, but looked like a prison camp. This estate had the stoutest defences against the outside world that I have ever seen. The entrance resembled a mediaeval portcullis. Along the perimeter roads, the entire park was surrounded by a 12-foot stone wall topped with spikes of broken glass, behind which an equally high hedge formed a secondary line of defence. At one corner rose a structure that looked uncannily like a watchtower. You could not get so much as a glimpse of the house or park within. Which was a shame, as country estates are the jewels in the crown of the English countryside. Intrigued about this place, I was disappointed to later find that, though the Pagnell family had held it since Norman times, it wasn’t the lair of some misanthrope or loony local tyrant, as I’d secretly hoped, but a boring old trust property that does wedding events.

This was the first of several estates on the rest of this ride. The next was only a few miles down the road, Hickleton Hall. How lovely it was to pass this in the early dusk, with candelabras shining from the well-windowed lounge; to see, across the ancestral park, the lights on for once in a big Georgian country seat. But appearances were deceptive. This was a house with real problems. Described in its own online sales blurb as needing “extreme extensive alterations” and worth only half-a-million (as of 2016), which would barely buy you a large detached house in Surrey now, the place was afflicted by subsidence from mining, omnipresent asbestos, water ingress, theft of garden ornaments, heating pipes, gutters and other lead and copper, and dereliction in the coach-house that could not be worked on because of a protection order on its resident “rare species of bats.” Its annual security costs were approaching £100,000 due to constant call-outs for the security company and fire services. What a miserable indictment of public morals in this area. I don’t know who was keeping the lights on that evening at Hickleton, but thank you. It was pretty clear now why the other place had walls topped with broken glass.

Hickleton Hall

I left this pleasant plateau for the last bit down to Mexborough in the still industrialised Don Valley. When I first saw Mexy — I don’t know if they really call it that, but it makes me sound more authoritative — it and the sorry towns along its railway to Donny and Sheffield formed a kind of hell-scape of slagheaps, half-abandoned pit buildings and yards, coal sidings and general desolation. That was the early 1980s, when the industry was in its death throes. Coming from the leafy shires, I had found it shocking. Today, Mexborough is still no Cheltenham, but you could honestly say it was green again, its rivers (Dearne as well as Don) once more clean and attractive, and its original character as an old if now not very bustling market town returned to the fore.

Its history, summed up in wall plaques in the station waiting room, was colourful. This place was the unlikely home of the world’s first Miss World, Alice “Lavender Lee,” who in 1919 won The “Pictures” Girl magazine competition, the predecessor of the international pageant, and also of the heavyweight boxing champion of Britain at that time, William “Iron” Hague (I wonder if they ever got together). It was childhood home too of Ted Hughes and Brian Blessed. And, last but not least, of the three Walter Ashbys, grandfather, father, and son. Each of these local men survived service in a major war (respectively, the Boer, Great and Second World Wars) after taking a family heirloom, a Roman “Lucky Penny,” with them to the front.

More like this can be found at my website Riding the Shires. Half a century of cycle-touring.

I’m fine with being quoted (up to two paragraphs), but all rights @joeslater.
 

© text & images Joe Slater 2025