Qualla: Asfordby Colliery

Asfordby Colliery: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MaltaGC, CC BY-SA 4.0. Half a billion tonnes of mineable coal still sits beneath the Leicestershire countryside near Melton Mowbray. It will never be brought to the surface. The story of why ends in a flooded shaft, a £6 million pile of ruined equipment, and a small village that learned the strange grief of losing a mine that had never quite started working. Asfordby Colliery was meant to be the future of British coal. Instead, it became its last expensive footnote.

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Image: MaltaGC | CC BY-SA 4.0

Asfordby Colliery: The Last Super-Pit

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MaltaGC, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the 1980s, Michael Heseltine - then Secretary of State for the Environment under Margaret Thatcher's government - proposed three new 'super-pits' designed to keep British deep mining viable for another generation. Two were blocked, mostly by objections to building heavy indust...

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Image: MaltaGC | CC BY-SA 4.0

Asfordby Colliery: The Geology That Killed It

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Salmon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Above the coal seams, the geologists found something the surveys had underestimated: thick volcanic sills, layers of igneous rock intruded into the sedimentary strata millions of years ago. These rocks were heavier than expected, and they pressed down on the seams below in ways t...

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Image: John Salmon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Asfordby Colliery: A Pit Without a Pit Village

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Innocenceisdeath, CC BY-SA 3.0. Asfordby was a strange place to lose. The traditional rhythm of British colliery closure - a whole village losing its livelihood, generations of mining families cut adrift in a single week - did not quite apply here. Most of the men who worked at Asfordby were not from the villag...

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Image: Innocenceisdeath | CC BY-SA 3.0

Asfordby Colliery: What Remains

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MaltaGC, CC BY-SA 4.0. The two winding towers were demolished in 1998. The site reopened as a business park. In 2007, part of the complex became a rail test centre, taking advantage of a 14-mile test track that had been built nearby; a spur from the test track was already connected to the old mine, an ...

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Image: MaltaGC | CC BY-SA 4.0