Doffcocker Colliery seems to have come into existence sometime between the 1850s and 1890s. In 1896 the mine was owned by Samuel Rothwell and managed by James Herbert Rothwell. I always thought the colliery would have been a small concern but in 1896 there are 24 people shown working underground and 4 above ground.
The colliery worked at least two known shafts, situated behind what was the Sportsman’s Arms pub on Chorley Old Road - now a restaurant - and worked the Little Coal and Lower Mountain Mine seams as they are known locally or the “Gannister Coal” as I believe the seams are known in the wider coalfield, together with associated fireclays. The Upper Foot seam is said to lie above the Lower Mountain Mine and in other areas the two become on large seam, so I assume this “Little Coal” is the Upper Foot seam. Interestingly the Upper Foot is also known as the Bullion Mine and is said to contain “bullion balls” of vegetable material or I guess plant fossils in its top surface.
It appears that sometime prior to 1909, Rothwell added a fireclay works to the colliery to exploit the fireclay that sits between the upper and lower coal seams and said to be 7 feet thick, the bottom 18 inches to 2 feet of which is Gannister Clay, a harder fireclay. The upper and lower coal seams directly above and below the Gannister are 10 inches and 14 inches thick respectively. Ganister is actually a hard quartz sandstone rock that occurs elsewhere in the Lower Coal Measures and its name has come to represent the whole of the rock sequence. So what is known locally as Gannister Clay, must be “the clay that is found in the same rock sequence as Ganister rock”.
At sometime after 1914 the mine appears to have been disused but fireclay has been obtained by the works under a manager named William Battle and a Mr. W Tong, Mining Engineer reported that the geology through which the shafts were sunk contains 33 feet of filling, 9 feet of “rock”, 115 feet of metal and blue metal (grey and grey-blue mudstone), 8 feet of “soft parting” (probably a poor, coaly shale), Little Coal, Fireclay, Coal. The parenthesis are mine and the coal/fireclay sequence is as mentioned above.
I believe the 40 Yards or Upper Mountain Mine is supposedly 40 yards above the Gannister Coal so that would be about 13 metres below ground here but it is not mentioned in the above sequence. Bearing in mind that near Chorley the Upper Mountain Mine is about 90 yards above the Gannister Coal. There are, or rather were, a couple of other pits higher up the hill from here and they probably went for the Upper Mountain Mine seam.
The two shafts are now in the back garden and in a small wedge of land between two residential properties and I remember before they were built, survey work had to be carried out to ascertain the exact locations of the shafts.
Site of Doffcocker Colliery image by Google
Site of Doffcocker Fireclay Works image by Ordnance Survey
Historic coal and clay mining in the West Pennine Moors.
Delph Hill is a little area located on the lower southern slopes of Winter Hill, on the outskirts of Bolton on the old toll road from Bolton to Chorley. Once the site of houses, a mine and associated fireclay works, quarries and more.
The area surrounding Delph Hill was quarried out sometime before the mid-19th Century, the site was used later as a reservoir and there are some very interesting wells in the area.
