Pit closure

From coal mines, slag heaps and a polluted river to a haven for waders and wetland birds. Jim Simpson on how one area has improved its natural landscape and is working to ensure that its economic fortunes follow

Pit closure


Bill Allen lowers his gaze and his field glasses from the rare tree sparrows at bird feeders on the Old Moor bird reserve in the Dearne Valley of South Yorkshire. "It's incredible how much this has changed," he says in wonderment.

Allen, from Mexborough, has lived in the area for 73 years and can recite the names of mines that employed thousands of men in the valley surrounding the reserve. He is in the reserve's cafe, meeting retired teacher Mike Weston, another local who is taken aback at how the whole valley has been transformed. "This was all coal mines, slag heaps and winding gear," he recalls, "but in the last 10 years it's been transformed."

Weston and Allen use the reserve as a meeting place as much as for bird watching, but for others - such as Paul Bolton, a former steelworker in his 40s - it has been a chance discovery. "This is an oasis for me," Bolton says. "When I found it I didn't even know about birding, and I only found it when Matalan moved its big store out of Barnsley to Cortonwood. I go there shopping with the wife at the weekend. I was never much interested in birds before, just football," he adds, pointing out a reed bunting.

On a midweek morning, the reserve is quiet and its visitors are mostly middle-aged or older, but many of its 80,000 visitors over the year will be schoolchildren. And one of the reasons why the reserve is so busy at weekends is that the kids bring their parents back, says warden Dave Waddington.

At one time, the Dearne Valley had everything to fit the "grim up north" stereotype. What had once been a fertile green valley, with watermills by the side of a meandering river, had become a giant spoil heap. Close to both Rotherham and Barnsley, the valley had eight pits in the valley bottom alone, and plenty more besides. The river would change colour according to what was being pumped into it from the mines. It was usually orange-brown from iron oxides.

The area gained notoriety rather than fame. It was the rough, violent setting for the 1969 film Kes, in which a young lad seeks escape from the humdrum brutality of school and home through training a kestrel - only to have it throttled by his brutal brother, and then finally accepting his lot "to go down t'pit". In the 1980s, even this employment was removed. In March 1984, the valley's Cortonwood pit was the first to be targeted for closure, leading to the year-long miners' strike.

Through this time, the area at the centre of the Old Moor reserve, Wath Ings, continued to attract wildlife and, in its trail, birdwatchers. Waddington started off as one of these, aged 12, and continued his interest in maintaining and managing the area after starting work as a joiner in nearby Rotherham. "Wath Ings was formed by subsidence in the 1930s and, because it is arable land on a flood plain that held the water, became a marsh that attracted waders, ducks and other wetland birds," he says.

Dumps for waste

The surrounding fields were really dumps for waste and coal stocks that had been untouched since the second world war. Barnsley council bought the site from what was then the National Coal Board and decided that the most cost-effective way of reclaiming the surrounding area was to take topsoil from the site to leave shallow lagoons and marsh. The spoil heaps themselves were bulldozed to form the gentle grassy hills that now encircle the reserve, which was enlarged from 50 to 250 acres.

The RSPB now runs the site with an eye to being part of the regeneration of the surrounding area, at one time the largest enterprise zone in the UK. The society says the reserve is part of a wider project to provide economic regeneration through tourism and leisure.

"The layout of the reserve is to enable people to see a lot of different habitats within a relatively small area, so you've got open water, grassland, fen and wet grassland, and soon we'll have reed beds," Waddington explains.

But the facilities such as the cafe and meeting rooms for business people are also needed to persuade companies to relocate to the area. Surrounding the Old Moor reserve are acres of land designated for light industrial development to bring employment back to the area.

According to Keith Clarkson, RSPB area manager, the reserve is crucial in demonstrating that the Dearne Valley can offer "quality of life" benefits. "If you are a business person moving to the Dearne Valley, and there is a large reserve, facilities for the family and footpaths and trails, then it's a far more pleasant and healthy place in which to be based," he says.

Unjustified perceptions

But prejudice still haunts the area. Mark Smith, business development manager for Renaissance South Yorkshire, is charged with trying to attract companies to an area that seems forever associated with slag heaps and deprivation. "A nature reserve is crucial for me in my work in attracting investment and dispelling many of the prejudices," he says. "It shows people that their perceptions aren't justified and makes them look at the area in a completely different way."

Smith will not name names, but he says a major call centre operator, which previously wanted to move to a city-centre location, was prepared to consider the Dearne Valley after being taken to the Old Moor conference centre.

As Weston puts it: "One of the reasons I worked hard and qualified was because I couldn't wait to get a good job and get away from here. But now it's as good, if not better, than anywhere else."

Spuggies, sheps and a boyhood passion

Square pegs in round holes do not come much more obvious than Chris Needham. When he worked as a miner, 6ft 6ins Needham was described by his workmates as looking like a "daddy longlegs in a Smarties tube" - and he felt just as trapped.

Born and bred in Darfield, in the mining area of the Dearne Valley, Barnsley, he had little choice in the matter. "I came out of school with next to no qualifications," he says. "I was that disruptive in class that they kept me down a level because they thought I'd distract the other kids they thought would get some O-levels.

"I'd only left school two weeks when my father asked me if I'd got a job yet. When I said I hadn't, he says: "If you haven't got a job by Friday, I'm taking you to the pit." That was the end of my careers advice."

And that was that for the next 17 years as he worked as an electrician underground, a working environment he describes as hellish. "When I first arrived at the pit, the men were dressed like zombies," he recalls. "There wasn't a company workwear scheme in those days. The workmen had to bring worn-out clothes from home, like the wedding suit that wouldn't fit any longer."

But Needham was saved by his boyhood passion for birdwatching - another feature that marked him out from the rest of his schoolmates and colleagues. He says: "My dad was good at finding birds' nests, so I got interested in birds, and a teacher at junior school, Mrs Adams, got me going even more. She was the first person I'd come across that knew anything about birds.

"Then, when I was 10, my parents scraped enough money together to buy me a pair of binoculars, which had never been seen before round here. Nobody did birdwatching at all. People used to tell me there was nothing to see, just spuggies [house sparrows] and sheps [starlings]."

But Needham knew differently. Although the heavy mining had destroyed the rural character of the Dearne Valley, it had created a wetland habitat through subsidence. As underground passages collapsed, marshes appeared on the surface, attracting a wide range of bird life.

Over the years, Needham became heavily involved in saving and promoting wildlife sites along the Dearne Valley, culminating in the creation of the RSPB's Old Moor nature reserve. And when his pit was closed in 1991, he chose retraining over the chance of a job at a pit in nearby Selby. So, to qualify for a university course in ecology, Chris found himself back at college at the age of 33 - twice as old as other students and supporting himself with part-time work.

The long work has paid off. He now has a degree in ecology, a master's in environmental management for business, and runs his own business, Ecoloserve, advising on the environmental impact of proposed developments. Needham advises on all types of ecological issues, and at the moment he is counting wading birds that are using the fields near the Humber estuary at Grimsby so he can advise the council on a planning proposal it is considering.

"I've achieved my aim," Needham says. "I spent 17 years underground, every day dreading going to work. My objective after leaving the mines was to wake up in the morning and want to go to work."
