COAL-FIELD OF THE BROWN CLEE HILLS. 



123 



are separated from each other by only about nine feet of clod and shale. The Batty coal, indeed, 

 is frequently near the surface, the uppermost bed being often wanting. The only seam worth ex- 

 tracting is the single or bottom coal, which lies in some places twelve feet beneath the Batty coal • 

 but this depth varies in different parts of the hill. The intervening strata consist of clod and 

 shale known by the workmen as petticoat measures, horse-flesh measures, &c, and of one band 

 of sandstone, about nine feet thick, called the level rock. Ironstone nodules of the richest 

 description occur in the lowest part of the series. Much of this coal, particularly that of the upper 

 beds, is in a half-consolidated state, the vegetable fibres appearing prominently in the mass and 

 giving to it the aspect of charcoal. Coals of similar character are much less frequent in the Titter- 

 stone Clee field, where they are termed mother, but they often occur in the poor and thin coal tracts 

 of Shropshire, and have been noticed in the previous chapter at Tasley near Bridgenorth. The lowest 

 coal rests upon a deposit called the Bottom Rock, which is a hard, white, siliceous sandstone, and is 

 the equivalent of the Millstone Grit. In the ravines upon the flanks of the hills it reposes on the Old 

 Red Sandstone, without any traces of carboniferous limestone. The maximum thickness of this rock 

 does not exceed two hundred feet. 



Coal has been wrought on these hills from time immemorial, and numerous old shafts 

 attest the extent of these operations, by which indeed nearly all the best coal has been 

 extracted. As the ground, however, has never been regularly allotted, each speculator 

 having begun his work where he pleased, and abandoned it when he encountered a 

 difficulty, it is impossible to say how much of the mineral has been wasted and what 

 quantity may remain beneath in unconnected and broken masses. On the sides of the 

 Abdon Barf most of the present shafts are shallow, but in former times it appears that 

 a pit was sunk to a depth of seventy yards, first, through a considerable thickness of 

 disintegrating basalt, and afterwards through the batty coal to the ironstone measures. 



The deepest shafts in the Clee Barf are eighty yards, the shallowest fourteen to fifteen, 

 and between these two extremes, there are pits of intermediate depths. They are all 

 worked by the common windlass, a single man sometimes raising coal from a sixty yard 

 shaft, aided by the counterpoise of only an oaken block or " Jack." Owing to their 

 lofty position these coal works are almost entirely free from water, which, except where 

 it lodges in the decomposed basalt, termed "gravel," percolates as rapidly as it falls 

 through the numerous cracks by which the hills are fissured. The workmen, however, 

 have to contend with rather an unusual natural obstacle to mining, in the winds which 

 blow with great force against this lofty and unprotected district, and which not only 

 render the labour at the pit's mouth difficult, but, without certain precautions, would, 

 at times, entirely stop the works. The most violent winds are from the west and south- 

 west, and during their prevalence the galleries are filled with powerful gusts accompa- 

 nied with much noise. This furious ventilation prevents, of course, the collection of 

 any fire-damp, so that the Brown Clee miner is compensated for working in these 

 cold and noisy chambers by the absence of all noxious gases 1 . 



1 The action of the wind in the galleries is checked by a pipe, one end of which reaches the extremity of the 

 working ground, and the other is fixed in a " suff" or stone bed to a vertical cylinder which rising to the sur- 



