Hapton Valley Colliery

[1] The hills above are formed of Carboniferous sandstones, ranging from millstone grits to finer grained stone such as the Dyneley Knott flags and the Dandy Mine Rock.

[5] Beginning in 1853 at Spa Wood, two shafts where sunk to a depth of 128 metres (420 ft) for the Exors of John Hargreaves Ltd.[3] The site was on a spit of land between Hapton and Habergham Cloughs, just south of where they combine to form Green Brook.

On the surface, the ginny track delivered the coal to a coking plant at Barclay Hills Colliery to the northeast, and ultimately connected to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Gannow in Burnley.

[3] The horizontal, condensing steam engine powered four bucket-lifts but a system of specially designed automatic fill and empty barrels was also employed to raise 1,000,000 gallons of water per day from the workings.

[13] In the early 1940s a small surface drift was driven from Thorney Bank Clough behind the Hapton Inn to speed-up access for the miners.

In the early 1950s new tub circuits with an increased capacity were installed and work on new drifts heading east from the pit bottom, cutting through the Deerplay Fault, was completed in 1954.

[16] In October 1957, work had to be stopped for several months on one of the new eastern faces after only two weeks in operation because of water ingress estimated at between 700 and 800 gallons per minute.

[3][13] In 1962 the colliery employed 67 on the surface and 386 men below ground working two faces in the Union seam where production had increased to approximately 700 tons per day.

[13] The method employed at the time (longwall mining) involved digging two tunnels at either side of the coal face, the intake and return gates, for access and ventilation.

Although the use of powerful ventilation may have been linked to an increased occurrence of pneumoconiosis (miner's lung) in the Burnley Coalfield, no major explosions were recorded in the district until the 1960s.

While the ignition was probably the result of shotfiring, or from a flash produced by a thermite reaction involving aluminium foil and rusty iron, the source of the gas was not conclusively identified.

[13] The victims are remembered with plaques at St Mark's Church on Rossendale Road, and at Burnley Miners Club, which holds an annual reunion.