Northern Pits — Coal mine shaft sinking and winding | northernpits.com
How deep the northern coalfield actually went: the 300-620 m range across Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, and the 1958 Kellingley figure at the top of it.
The northern English coalfield worked deep. Shafts were sunk to between 300 and 620 m to reach the seams, and the collieries of Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire all sat inside that range.
The documented top of the range is Kellingley No.1 in North Yorkshire: about 619 m, or 2,031 ft, reached in 1958 — the deepest coal shaft in Britain. It stands as the benchmark against which every other northern shaft was measured.
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Depth was not a single number but a stack of horizons. The rise — the tunnel holding the winding house, power plant and fan house — lay 90-150 m below the surface, and a large colliery shaft could run 300 m or more below the rise before it touched the seam.
At 1950s sinking rates of 30-60 m a month, these depths translate directly into time: 300 m was five to ten months on the face, 600 m ten to twenty, and the Kellingley depth sat at the far end of that arithmetic — before the lining and equipping year.
This page does not invent figures for individual pits beyond the documented record; where a specific shaft is not in the published material used here, the honest entry is the field range itself. The procedure behind every one of these depths is set out in How a Coal Mine Shaft Was Sunk.
Further reading