Pond at Western Edge of Hardhill Wood

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 5 Nov 2021

It is unclear whether this pond - which sits immediately off a major path through the wood - is a balancing pond constructed to deal with occasional large outflows of water from the relatively new (15-20 years old I reckon) housing estate just East of here, a pond designed to filter pollutants from the water percolating through what was previously a heavily mined area, or a combination of both. The presence of a number of tall reeds, which are mostly behind camera, usually indicates some kind of clean-up operation is at work. The pond is situated right next to an old shaft for Hopetoun Colliery No 8 Pit. The mine first appears on an 1890s OS map, but sifting through patchy online information it appears it may well have been operational as far back as the 1860s. As usual, rather soberingly, a lot of the information that can be gleaned about the pit comes from reports of accidents and fatalities. The Durham Mining Museum website has the most comprehensive overview of its workings that I have found. Unfortunately though it gets lumped together with the No 9 Pit (which was sited a few hundred yards SouthWest of here), so there are no exact figures, but an average of 300 men were employed underground across the two pits for the bulk of the first half of the 20th Century. The fatality reports only mention coal, so it seems likely that they were both exclusively coal mines, as opposed to a number round here, which mined combinations of coal, shale and ironstone.

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