April was a funny month in a year of only mildly amusing and, frankly, quite moderately cool and wet weather which felt never-ending.

Bright and slightly breezy

After a break on the 5th, volunteers were on site on the 13th April, Paul, Chris, Janet, Jeff, John, Jamie and Andy making a fullish house to get stuck in weeding and tidying things up. Gardening, painting the railings, and repointing the modern but rather poorly built front boundary wall.

The 20th April was the next serviceable day for volunteers and again we had Janet and Jeff, Paul, John, Andy and Chris in what was an overdue day of beautiful sunlight shining down on the pit.

Celebrate good times

As the Friends are approaching the 10th anniversary of first taking on the site in June 2014, we will be looking back as well as forward for some highlights and insights into progress on site.

Looking back to April 2015, a couple of images show the heavy burden of manual clearance work on site at that time, and also the state of the winding engine house roof which was failing prior to the reroofing project 2016-17.

Swanning off

Further down the valley, along the Elsecar branch of the Dearne and Dove Canal, swans were nesting and life returns to an increasingly green and active valley.

A very late spring saw bare trees into April, but nature was quickly making up for lost time, before we headed into ‘no mow’ May to encourage pollinators.

Sunshine mining and a cloud over Wentworth – April 1945

Blasts from the past in local mining never get more controversial than the opencast working of coal on and around the Fitzwilliam estate at Wentworth in the 1940s. However, in mining every operation is an opportunity to study and learn, so it is not surprising to read that in April 1945 the Regional Assistant Directors of Open Cast Coal Production, Major Hardy Bick and Mr R.A. Voss allowed the Yorkshire South-East Branch of the Association of the Mining Electrical and Mechanical Engineers to visit the Wentworth Opencast site on 18th April 1945.

Around 60 people attended, touring the workings, and the site visit was followed by an AMEME Branch meeting on 28th April 1945 at Doncaster Technical College, where Mr. I. L. Davison read a paper entitled ” Open Cast Coal Mining” which described the process at Wentworth.

Dragline scrapers towed by caterpillar tractors stripped the surface soil, storing it in great mounds, working non stop for up to 24 hours to prepare the seam for working. Coal excavators then got to work loading coal on to dumper trucks. The opencast working then being back-filled with the material from the most recently stripped surface layers. After mining, the land was restored and handed over to the War Agricultural Committee who fertilised and re-seeded the land.