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BETWEEN RIVERS

BETWEEN RIVERS SUMMER 2023: ANNE DOUGLAS, POET & ARTIST – ALAN HORNE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments3 min read555 views

BETWEEN RIVERS is a quarterly series edited by Alan Horne. It is focused on the area bounded by the rivers Alyn, Dee and Gowy, on the border between England and Wales in Flintshire and Cheshire. You can read about the background to Between Rivers in the Introduction.

In this August 2023 edition, we feature works by the contemporary Wrexham-based poet and artist Anne Douglas. She is a member of Cross Border Poets, based at Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden in Flintshire.

Most of her poems are meditations on natural features. We start with her poem The Alyn, about one of the defining streams of the Between Rivers project. The accompanying illustration, Morning Glory, is a drawing by the poet of convolvulus, often found on the banks of the river.

The Alyn

Ambling down Rossett’s Manor Lane
Passing the River Alyn,
Part of which traverses our road
We pass trees, hedgerows and tall trees
At the side of the fence.
We hear the dulcet, lyrical sounds
Of the blackcap,
The goldfinches flitting down
Between seed head weeds.
Later, we pass woodland and pastures
On which friendly cattle graze,
Through a country garden the Alyn
flows.
We cannot follow the meandering Alyn to its end
because it disappears through
neighbouring fields,
But we meet with the Alyn later as it snakes through kingfisher country:
they fly low, skimming over water.
We stop here and listen to the sound
of the river
Eventually the river becomes one of the tributaries of the River Dee
Or the Holy Dee.

 

Part of the interest of Anne Douglas’ poems is that they often appear at first to be transparent and simple, but then give a sense of something else happening just out of view. In Rose Wall or The Close of the Day this is almost literally the case, as the world of the poem is divided by a wall. It is accompanied by the poet’s drawing Rose Hips.

Rose Wall or The Close of the Day

Near a shady wall
A rose once blossomed
Fair and tall she grew
And through a gap
Her tendril crept
To dream
Of what might lie
On the other side
She breathed out
Her fragrance more and more
It was no different
On the other side
Still she grew there
Near the shady wall
Just as she would
Scattering her fragrance
Forever and a day
Until her life ebbed away
The evening sun
At the close of  day

 

Although born in Cheshire and being a long-time resident of north-east Wales, Anne Douglas was brought up in the Far East and has travelled extensively. This is reflected in many of her poems, which are sometimes almost haunted by the memory of a distant land. Here is The Bees Must Have A Name For It.

 

The Bees Must Have A Name For It.

With the cries of the birds
Perhaps the honey-guide bird
I come across a flounce of red flowers
In a pearlescent dusk
The bees must have a name for it
Lazy-blowing fragrance
Of the carnation border
Or of the bean blossom
They must have a name for it too
In bee language
Honey flowers
Here and there
More and more
As the branch
Peeps over the garden wall
Until at length
With a final kiss from the sun
Tiny fragranced flowers close
And night has come

 

If you would like to read more of Anne Douglas’ poetry, you will find her poems in the Love Wrexham online magazine and on the Cross Border Poets site.

 

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BETWEEN RIVERS

BETWEEN RIVERS SPRING 2023: ‘CONNECTIONS’  BY SARAH LEWIS & DIANA SANDERS – ALAN HORNE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments5 min read524 views

BETWEEN RIVERS is a quarterly series edited by Alan Horne. It is focused on the area bounded by the rivers Alyn, Dee and Gowy, on the border between England and Wales in Flintshire and Cheshire. You can read about the background to BETWEEN RIVERS here: https://davidselzer.com/2022/05/between-rivers-introduction/.

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For May 2023 we have an issue devoted to a contemporary project which combines poetry and music together with some visual art. This is Connections by Sarah Lewis and Diana Sanders, which links creative work relating to two rivers close to their respective homes, the Alun in Flintshire (the Welsh spelling is preferred to Alyn, which we use above) and the Alwen in Conwy. Connections was originally published in 2016 as a pamphlet and accompanying audio CD. Poems and artwork are by the two authors, while the music is by Diana Sanders, Pete Regan and A Handful Of Darkness. This feature presents some selected items and then, in the hope that you may like to read and listen further, we have with the authors’ permission embedded the whole pamphlet and links to other audio tracks at the end.

In the introduction, Sarah Lewis describes the village in the Alun valley where she lives.

Rhydymwyn lies in the Alun valley.  The river springs from the moors, high above Llangollen and winds its way down through the softer land, cutting through the limestone, and scooping out the valley on its way to join the Dee.  The limestone and the river shaped the industry that grew in the valley around Rhydymwyn and the remains of lead mines, mills and leetes can all be found by the sharp-eyed wanderer.  The presence of the river also influenced the sighting of a secret weapons factory during WW2.  The site, owned by DEFRA, is now a managed nature reserve and accessible to the public through membership of one of the local groups.   The camouflaged buildings, anti-spark paths, huge hangers and crumbling walls covered in old calculations and formulae, tell us of its history.  But gradually nature is reclaiming her space.  There are otters in the river, great-crested newts in the ponds, horseshoe bats in the tunnels, ravens in the woods, swallows in the hangers, grass snakes coiled under old rubble and a blissful peace that baffles and calms those who know of its turbulent past.

Diana Sanders describes her home too, and we can immediately see the contrast.

The second valley is that of the river Alwen and the village of Llanfihangel Glyn Myfyr which was the inspiration behind William Wordsworth’s poem Vale of Meditation.  It lies 350 metres above sea level, on the edge of the Hiraethog Moors.  It is the home of otters, dippers, trout and salmon.  On the hilltops, overlooking the river, the landscape appears to be empty but that would not be the truth.  There are brown hares in the sheep fields.  Foxes use the single-track lanes as their own highways.  There are raptors and song birds and the occasional shy woodcock.  It is a landscape filled with streams, glacial lakes and reservoirs.  It is a land overflowing with history.  Old farmhouses lie in the bottom of reservoirs, drowned to provide water for the people of the Wirral.  Old roads can be seen disappearing into the water.  Medieval sheep enclosures make rectangular patterns in the grass and bronze age burial mounds crown hilltops.  The weather in Hiraethog can be wild, with winds that shake buildings and bring down trees.  Horizontal rain leaves sheep hunched and us miserable and yet there is something about this valley that gets under your skin and gives meaning to the word ‘Hiraeth’ – the Welsh for yearning for home.

Connections is in two parts, the first about the Alun and the second about the Alwen, with both authors contributing to each. One of the attractions for Between Rivers is that one thing the first section does is to memorialise the Valley Works, that strange and extensive site of the former weapons factory which Sarah Lewis has described in her introduction. The frontispiece for this section shows calculations written on a wall in one of the surviving buildings.

And here is a related poem by Sarah Lewis.

Silent Chemist

She’s mixing up sunlight
with carbon dioxide and water,
dispensing oxygen for us to breathe.

She lingers and goldfinches spark up
from teasels, willow-herb flames light
up the places where buildings once stood.

She’s stirring up enzymes in the born-again wood,
dissolving the limbs of willow and ash
to nourish anemones, bluebells and beetles.

Inside a bat-filled ruin, she’s covering
the walls of faded formulae,
silencing the ghosts of war-time chemists.

She’s taking back her valley.

Sarah Lewis also has a contrasting poem, Unstoppable, which gives voice to the Alun river itself. You can hear the poem, with musical accompaniment, here: Stream Unstoppable – a poem by Sarah Lewis. by Diana Sanders | Listen online for free on SoundCloud.

The second section deals with the more untamed environment of the Hiraethog moors and the Alwen. Hares run through a number of these poems,  as if spirits of the moor. Another of the themes is the drowning of communities to create reservoirs. Here is Diana Sanders’ Llyn Brenig. (‘Llyn’ is the Welsh word for a lake.)

 

Llyn Brenig

Wind

creates shapes.

Waves curl and swarm

into a walk-on-water heron

which trembles into wood smoke

and a girl skimming stones across

the river.  River, hidden under the lake.

Full of memories and dreams and windows.

Bryn Hir, farmhouse, where wood is popping

in the hearth and flames warm chilled fingers.

Winter holds fast and the shepherd curls into his

sheep’s wool bed.   He dreams of waves

breaking in through thatch and door.

The land is sighing out an ache.

Hiraeth, home lost to flood,

Valley lane, moss soft.

Tarmac rippled.

Falling into

water.

The second section contains most of the audio tracks. Some feature the unaccompanied spoken word, others have elaborate musical accompaniment for the poems. An example of the latter is Diana Sanders’ Halloween. You can listen to it here: Stream Halloween by Diana Sanders | Listen online for free on SoundCloud.

This is just a taster. Connections is an ambitious project of the kind that David and I hoped to discover when we started out with Between Rivers. There is much in it to see, read and listen to. Here is the complete publication:

Additional audio tracks can be found below:-

Stream Music by Diana Sanders | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

Stream Like A Raven – A poem by Sarah Lewis. by Diana Sanders | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

Stream You can take the river out of the moors – a poem by Sarah Lewis. Music by Diana Sanders by Diana Sanders | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

Stream Origami by Sarah Lewis by Diana Sanders | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

Stream Llyn Brenig by Diana Sanders | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

 All Souls by Diana Sanders by Diana Sanders (soundcloud.com)

Stream Sight And Birth by Diana Sanders | Listen online for free on SoundCloud.

I should like to thank Diana Sanders and Sarah Lewis for allowing us to make the whole of Connections available on Between Rivers.

You can see more of Sarah Lewis’ work, and her driftwood sculptures, on her Facebook page: (2) ShoreLark | Facebook

And there is more of Diana Sanders’ poetry and audio work on her Facebook page: (2) Diana Sanders – Poet and Sound Artist | Facebook

 

©Alan Horne 2023

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POETRY

AFTER THE PANTOMIME

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read865 views

When all of the evils are back in their box,

and those who can have been paired in marriage –

to an ovation from an audience

of boy scouts, elderly innocents,

and coach parties from Rhyl and Wallasey –

we emerge into Theatr Clwyd’s bar.

We watch, in awe, through the long glass window,

a vestigial sunset above Moel Famau –

variegated layers of coral

beneath a looming indigo bank of cloud.

Below – in the darkening river valley

of ribbons of homes, old mine shafts, quarries,

used car dealerships, and the Alyn’s waters

out of sight over glacial stones –

a billow of smoke, snaking round houses

at the edge of Mold and onto the hillside,

is rising white as steam.

 

 

 

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BETWEEN RIVERS

BETWEEN RIVERS SUMMER 2022: ‘THE COOK’ & ‘THE LADY OF LLONG’ – ALAN HORNE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment3 min read799 views

BETWEEN RIVERS is a quarterly series focused on the area bounded by the rivers Alyn, Dee and Gowy, on the border between England and Wales in Flintshire and Cheshire.

 

In this edition we feature a poem, Sarah Dolan’s ‘The Cook’ from 2015, and an archaeological piece from the Curious Clwyd website about the discovery of The Lady of Llong and her necklace.

 

‘THE COOK’

Sarah Dolan is an English poet and artist who lives now in Scotland,  but previously in Wales. She is a long-distance member of Crossborder Poets, who are based at Gladstone’s Library in Flintshire. ‘The Cook’ was written as part of a Crossborder Poets project at Erddig, a National Trust estate near Wrexham. The subject is one of a group of estate staff pictured in an old photograph, and the vivid images of the poem reach back to this long-dead person. You can see more of Sarah Dolan’s work at lemoninkproductions.home.blog and at www.facebook.com/SarahLouiseDolan

 

‘THE COOK’

from a knuckle of bone

time fashions a fist

one for the right and one for the left

 

a knot of carrot roots vein the surface

pumped with sap as sweet as honey

 

wrapped in a tissue paper skin

worn taut as the pastry lid on a pie

 

through fire and ice

her hands scar over

fine filaments of asbestos crow footing the skin

 

puffed pink with scrubbing

peeling and pounding

 

prepared with carbolic soap

the blood stained fingers

dust the table with freckles of flour

 

©Sarah Dolan 2015

 

 

‘THE LADY OF LLONG’

The Curious Clwyd website lives up to its name, with a wide selection of history, myth and other material about north-east Wales. It includes this article on the ‘Lady of Llong’ the remains of a woman found in a Bronze Age tumulus in Llong near Mold, together with a remarkable necklace which has now been re-strung. You can read the introduction below, with a link to the full article and photographs. Prehistoric remains are widespread in the Between Rivers areas, often in homely or industrialised settings. The spectacular grave goods are of course an important aspect of this account, but there is also a fine sense of the archaeological process, the area, and the life of its ancient inhabitants.

They were hoping for something astonishing and the omens were good. The accidental discovery of the Mold Gold Cape at Bryn yr Ellyllon in 1833, and the Caergwrle Bowl in 1823 suggested that the curious, somewhat unusual river valley tumuli along the Alyn were special, that within were treasures that would bring the peoples of the Early Bronze Age further into the light, that would confirm the power, prestige and wealth of this area of north-east Wales. Ellis Davies, writing some twenty years before the excavations noted the name of the field as, Dol yr Orsedd – Meadow of the Throne. Perhaps more interestingly, the tithe map of the area, notes the field as Dol roredd – possibly rendering into English as, Meadow of Abundance. Hopes were then high with the excavation of the burial mound at Llong, two miles to the south-west of Mold – and while no gold cape was found beneath the turves there, something rather impressive was unearthed, nevertheless.

The article includes a photograph of the grassy mound which is all that remains of the tumulus – and   a link to a Google map which takes you straight to the field where the remains are. You can see where the River Alyn runs through the field, which is bordered in part by a section of Alyn Lane. You can read the full, illustrated article here.

[Note: I became aware of ‘The Lady of Llong’ through Sam Hutchinson, who posted a response to the Spring 2022 edition of BETWEEN RIVERS].

 

©Alan Horne 2022

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BETWEEN RIVERS

BETWEEN RIVERS: INTRODUCTION – ALAN HORNE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.9K views

It’s a great pleasure to introduce and act as guest editor for this section of David’s site.

One day, David and I found that we had both written poems which referred obliquely to the Gresford disaster, a coalmine explosion, in a village near Wrexham in north-east Wales, which killed 266 people in 1934. We discovered a shared interest in this part of Wales, which centres on the catchment of the River Alun. No surprise there: the area is a popular destination for days out from Chester, where David has lived for most of his life, and from the Wirral, where I spent my childhood.

We noticed that, as far as we could see, there is little attention paid to this locality in literature, despite the existence of some remarkable cultural institutions such as the Theatr Clwyd in Mold and Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden. Yet it has an emblematic position in British history: a contested border between England and Wales revised as recently as 1974, and a linguistic frontier, with hills, rivers and fertile lowlands, minerals, heavy industry, ports, and big winners and losers in the post-industrial economy. Others may know of glorious memorializations of this area: we needed to find them.

We envisaged a project which would highlight literary and cultural artifacts relating to the area, and generate new ones. We widened our horizons a little, to include the area delineated by three rivers – the Alun, the Dee and the Gowy – to include north-east Wales and west Cheshire as well as the Flintshire and Wirral coasts of the Dee Estuary. BETWEEN RIVERS was born.

This wider area includes the city of Chester, plentifully represented in art and history, though our intention is not to focus on the city but on its extensive hinterland. We hope to be disciplined rather then pedantic about this geographical orientation.

As this is an English-language site, we do not claim to represent the wealth of Welsh-speaking culture in the area. But as William Blake says: Without Contraries is no progression. So we try to contribute a little to fruitful interaction across the language boundary.

BETWEEN RIVERS is a quarterly feature. Some we write ourselves. Some we discover, and we hope that readers of David’s site will point us to others. Over time we have featured a broad range of content, including paintings, fiction, history, photographs, poetry and review, and we aim to incorporate other cultural forms as we go along. We try to give equal weight and value to the past and the present, with both new and established work. As ever on David’s website, your comments are an integral part of the process, but for BETWEEN RIVERS we would also be keen to receive recommendations of literature, history and cultural objects which might be included.

In sum, we hope to instruct ourselves while drawing the attention of others to a fascinating region. I hope you enjoy this section. Welcome to BETWEEN RIVERS.

 

©Alan Horne 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

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BETWEEN RIVERS

BETWEEN RIVERS SPRING 2022: ‘AT LOGGERHEADS’ & ‘A RELATION OF SOME STRANGE PHÆNOMENA’ – ALAN HORNE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments11 min read605 views

BETWEEN RIVERS is a quarterly series – https://davidselzer.com/2022/05/between-rivers-introduction/  – focused on the area bounded by the rivers Alyn, Dee and Gowy, on the border between England and Wales in Flintshire and Cheshire.

This first edition of BETWEEN RIVERS includes two contrasting pieces. One is David Selzer’s 2018 poem ‘At Loggerheads’, and the other is an account by Roger Mostyn,  of explosions in an early Flintshire coal mine owned by his family, taken from the Transactions of the Royal Society and dated 1677.

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‘AT LOGGERHEADS’

This was one of the poems that prompted us to imagine BETWEEN RIVERS. Loggerheads was and is a popular destination in the locality for day trips and walks. David’s poem – previously published on the site in October 2018 – records the murmuring voices which fill the space between the rivers.

 

The Afon Alun rises from hidden springs

on the peaty Llandegla moors, and courses

through ruined mill races to this valley

of ash woodland and wych elm, hazel, oak,

of vast limestone cliffs, of redundant lead mines –

a place named for a dispute between two landlords.

Here the river waltzes, tripping over stones,

and its tawny shallows ripple and gurgle.

 

***

 

My mother and her two sisters, often

at loggerheads, rhapsodized about this place.

Crosville buses would bring day trippers

to enjoy the gardens, the bandstand

and the Crosville Tea House. In spring, folk

would walk the woods blooming with wild garlic,

bluebells, white wood anemones, celandine.

In summer, they would follow the river,

– dry in places where the flow

goes into sink holes and empty shafts –

to cross the bridge over the Devil’s Gorge.

The valley would be full of sounds – voices

calling, murmuring, distant music

echoing from the ancient, climactic cliffs

almost high enough for eagles to soar.

 

***

 

Downstream from the gorge, the Alun turns south east.

It meanders above abandoned coalfields,

and bones of men and boys left where they died.

In landscape shaped by Romans and Normans

it whirls into the Dee.

 

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A RELATION OF SOME STRANGE PHÆNOMENA… IN A COLE WORK IN FLINT SHIRE

Presented by Roger Mostyn  in 1677 and recorded in the Transactions of the Royal Society, this is an early account of experiences with firedamp – explosive methane – in an early coalmine. It is a foundation text about the mining which is such a feature of the region, and earns its place in several ways. It is an intimate historical record of mining and the lives of miners and a vivid example of seventeenth century scientific and technological discourse, in prose that is vigorous and sometimes almost poetical. This is a new transcription of the seventeenth century original, completed specifically for BETWEEN RIVERS. For ease of reading, we have replaced the archaic long s with the modern s and introduced some paragraph breaks. From the original we have retained the sometimes inconsistent spelling and capitalisation, the use of colons and semicolons where contemporary English would use a full stop, and any archaic or idiosyncratic usages. You can find the original document of 1677 online at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1677.0026

 

 

A Relation of some strange phænomena, accompanied with mischievous effects in a Cole work in Flint shire sent March 31. 1677. to the Reverend and eminently Learned Dr Bathurst, Dean of Bath and Wells, by an Ingenious Gentleman, Mr. Roger Mostyn, of the Inner Temple, who, at the said Doctors request, obtained it from his Fathers Steward and Overseer of his Cole-works, who was upon the place when the thing was done; the same Mr. Mostyn being also assured of it from his Father, Sr. Roger Mostyn, Lord of the Mannor, and several others, who were Eye-witnesses.

The Cole-work at Mostyn in Flint shire lies in a large parcel of Wood-land, that from the Countries side which lies to the South hath a great fall to the Sea-side, which is direct North; The dipping or fall of the several Rocks or Quarries of Stone that are above the Cole, and consequently of the Cole lying under them, doth partly cross the fall of the ground, so that the dipping of it falls within a point or less of due East, which is the cause, that the pits that are sunk at the Sea-side in the same level with the full Sea-mark, are not short of the depth of the others that are upon the higher ground, above fifteen or sixteen yards; so that they lie some sixty, some fifty, and the ebbest forty yards under the level of the Sea.

This above-mentioned work is upon, a Cole of five yards in thickness, and hath been begun upon, about six or eight and thirty years ago: When it was first found, it was extream full of water, so that it could not be wrought down to the bottom of the Cole, but a Witchet or Cave was driven out in the middle of it upon a level for gaining of room to work, and drawing down the Spring of water that lies in the Cole to the Eye of the pit; in driving of which Witchet, after they had gone a considerable way underground, and were scanted of wind, the Fire-damp did by little and little begin to breed, and to appear in crevisses and slits of the Cole, where water had lain before the opening of the Cole with a small blewish flame working and moving continually, but not out of its first seal, unless the Workmen came and held their Candle to it, and then, being weak the blaze of the Candle would drive it, with a sudden fizz, away to another Crevess, where it would soon after appear blazing and moving as formerly.

This was the first knowledge of it in this work, which the Workmen made but a sport of, and so partly neglected it till it had gotten some strength, and then upon a morning the first Collier that went down, going forwards in the Witchet with his Candle in hand, the damp presently darted out violently at his Candle, that it struck the man clear down, singed all his hair and clothes, and disabled him for working a while after; some other small warnings it gave them, insomuch that they resolved to employ a man of purpose, that was more resolute than the rest, to go down a while before them every Morning to chase it from place to place, and so to weaken it. His usual manner was to put on the worst raggs he had, and to wet them well in water, and assoon as he came within the danger of it, then he fell grovelling down on his belly and went so forward, holding in one hand a long wand or pole, at the end whereof he tied Candles burning, and reached them by degrees towards it, then the Damp would flie at them, and if it miss’d of putting them out, it would quench it self with a blast, and leave an ill-sented smoke behind it: Thus they dealt with it till they had wrought the Cole down to the bottom, and the water following and not remaining as before in the body of it among sulphureous and brassie Mettal that is in some veins of the Cole, the Fire-damp was not seen or heard of till the latter end of the year 1675, which happened as followeth.

After long working of this five yards Cole, and trial made of it in several places, it was found upon the rising grounds (where the signs of the Cole, and the Cole itself came near the day) that there lay another Roach of Cole at a certain depth under it, which being sunk to, and tried upon some out-skirts of the main work, it was found at fourteen yards depth, and wrought, proving to be three yards and a half thick; and a profitable Cole, but something more sulphureous than the other, and to reach under all the former work. This discovery of so promising a work encouraged us to sink some of the ebbest pits, that we had formerly used on the five yards Cole, down to the lowest Roach, and accordingly we began in one that was about thirty two yards deep, which we went down with perpendicularly from the first shaft, and sunk down twenty yards before we came to the said Roach, in regard it was at the Sea-side, and upon the lowest of the dipp (where the Rocks successively thicken as they fall) having prick’d it, and being sure of it, we let it rest, having had for a considerable time, as we sunk the lower part of it, many appearances of the Fire-damp in watery crevisses of the Rocks we sunk through, flashing and darting from side to side of the Pit, and shewing Rainbow-colour-like on the surface of the water in the bottom; but upon drawing up of the water with Buckets, which stirr’d the Air in the Pit, it would leave burning, till the Colliers at work with their breath and sweat and the smoke of their Candles thickned the Air in the Pit, then it would appear again, they lighting their Candles in it sometimes when they went out; and so in this Pit it did no further harm.

Having brought our first Pit thus forward, we were to consider of another to follow it, both for free passage of Air, as for furtherance of the work, and being desirous to get it in some forwardness before Summer, (when the heat of the weather at some time, and the closeness of the Air in foggy weather at other, occasions the Smothering-damp) it was resolv’d, for expeditions sake and saving of some charges, to sink a Pit within the hollows or deads of the upper work, at 16 or 17 yards distance from the first Pit; this we proceeded in till we came 6 or 7 yards deep, then the Fire-damp began to appear as formerly, accompanying the Workmen still as they sunk, and they using the same means as afore, sometimes blowing it out with a blast of their mouth, at other times with their Candles, or letting it blaze without interruption.

As we sunk down and the Damp got still more and more strength, we found that our want of Air perpendicularly from the day was the great cause and nourisher of this Damp; for the Air that followed down into this Pit, came down at the first sunk Pit at the aforementioned distance, after it had been dispersed over all the old hollows and deads of the former work, that were fill’d up with noysom Vapors, thick smothering Fogs, and in some places with the Smothering-damp it self: Nevertheless, we held on sinking, till we came down to 15 yards, plying the work night and day (except Sundays and Holydays) upon which intermission the Pit being left alone for 48 hours and more, and the Damp gaining great strength in the interim, by that time the Workmen went down, they could see it flashing and shooting from side to side like Sword-blades cross one another, that none durst adventure to go down into the Pit: Upon this they took a Pole and bound Candles several times to the end of it, which they no sooner set over the Eye of the pit, but the Damp would flie up with a long sharp flame and put out the Candles, leaving a foul smoke each time behind it.

Findithat things would not allay it, they adventured to bind some Candles at a hook hanging at the Ropes end that was used up and down in the Pit; when they had lower’d these down a little way into the shaft of the Pit, up comes the Damp in a full body, blows out the Candles, disperseth it self about the Eye of the Pit, and burneth a great part of the mens hair, beards and clothes, and strikes down one of them, in the mean time making a noise like the lowing or roaring of a Bull, but lowder, and in the end leaving a smoke and smell behind it worse than that of a Carrion. Upon this discouragement these Men came up, and made no further trial; after this the Water that came from it being drawn up at the other Pit was found to be blood-warm, if not warmer, and then Crevisses of the Rocks where the Damp kept, were all about fire-red Candlemas day following. In this juncture there was a cessation of work for three days, and then the Steward, thinking to fetch a compass about from the eye of the Pit that came from the day, and to bring wind by a secure way along with him, that if it burst again it might be done without danger of mens lives, went down and took two men along with him, which serv’d his turn for this purpose; he was no sooner down, but the rest of the Workmen that had wrought there, disdaining to be left behind in such a time of danger, hasted down after them, and one of them more undiscreet than the rest went headlong with his Candle over the Eye of the damp-Pit, at which the Damp immediately catched and flew to and fro over all the hollows of the work, with a great wind and a continual fire, and as it went, keeping a mighty great roaring noise on all sides.

The Men at first appearance of it had most of them fallen on their faces, and hid themselves as well as they could in the loose sleck or small Cole, and under the shelter of posts; yet nevertheless the Damp returning out of the Hollows, and drawing towards the Eye of the Pit, it came up with incredible force, the Wind and Fire tore most of their clothes off their backs, and singed what was left, burning their hair, faces and hands, the blast falling so sharp on their skin, as if they had been whipt with Rods; some that had least shelter, were carried 15 or 16 yards from their first station and beaten against the roof of the Coal, and sides of the posts, and lay afterwards a good while senseless, so that it was long before they could hear or find one another: As it drew up to the Day-pit, it caught one of the men along with it that was next the Eye, and up it comes with such a terrible crack, not unlike, but more shrill than a Canon, that it was heard fifteen miles off along with the Wind, and such a pillar of Smoke as darkened all the sky overhead for a good while: The brow of the Hill above the Pit was 18 yards high, and on it grew Trees 14 or 15 yards long, yet the mans Body and other things from the Pit were seen above the tops of the highest Trees at least a hundred yards.

On this Pit stood a Horse-engin of substantial Timber, and strong Iron-work, on which lay a trunk or barrel for winding the Rope up and down of above a thousand pound weight, it was then in motion, one Bucket going down and the other coming up full of Water. This Trunk was fastened to the frame with locks and bolts of Iron, yet it was thrown up and carried a good way from the Pit, and pieces of it, though bound with Iron hoops and strong Nails, blown into the Woods about; so likewise were the two buckets, and the ends of the Rope after the Buckets were blown from them stood a while upright in the Air like pikes, and then came leisurely drilling down: The whole frame of the Engin was stirr’d and moved out of its place and those Mens Clothes, Caps and Hats that escaped were afterwards found shattered to pieces, and thrown amongst the Woods a great way from the Pit. This happened the third of February 1675, being a Season when other Damps are scarce felt or heard of.

 

©Alan Horne 2022

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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