Wombwell had been farmland before Lundhill Colliery arrived - a small population on the South Yorkshire coalfield, growing slowly. The pit changed everything. By the 1850s Lundhill was one of the largest and deepest collieries in Yorkshire, and Wombwell had become a colliery village whose economy and rhythms turned on the daily shifts. The company employed roughly 290 men and boys; about two-thirds of them worked days. Most lived within walking distance, some in cottages within the shadow of the headgear. Six-day weeks. Five hundred to six hundred tons of coal lifted to the surface each day. The pit was known to be dangerous - everyone knew - but it was the work that was there, and so the work that was done. The youngest miners were ten. Most were eighteen or older. They descended in cages on three shafts, the deepest of them going 198 metres into the ground.

Firedamp is the miners' word for methane - the colourless, odourless, explosive gas that seeps from coal seams. In the candle-lit pits of the mid-nineteenth century it was the constant enemy. A pocket of it would gather in a heading, a flame would find it, and the gas would ignite with a force that propagated through the workings, picking up coal dust along the way and turning a localised flash into a roaring shock wave that travelled the length of the mine. At Lundhill at 12.20pm that February day, that is what happened. Whatever the immediate ignition source - and the investigations did not produce one definitive answer - firedamp went off in the workings. The blast was so powerful that smoke, dust and fire arose visibly from shaft three. People miles away saw it. They came running.

The mine was now on fire, and a second explosion was a serious possibility. A group of volunteers - because that is who staffed mine rescues in 1857, neighbours and off-shift miners - descended shaft two anyway. They found 19 survivors, scorched and badly injured. Two of those survivors later died of their burns. The search continued until 7.30 that evening when the fire keeping the rescuers out made further progress impossible. The fire brigade arrived but could not put out a thirty-metre column of flame roaring from shaft three. Between ten and fifteen thousand people gathered to watch and to mourn - to wait for news that, for most families, would not be good news. The Illustrated London News put the disaster on its front page, the first time it had ever done so. For Wombwell, the loss was not abstract. The dead were sons, husbands, fathers, brothers, neighbours. The youngest were children.

The Lundhill pit no longer exists. The ground above it is now Hillies Golf Course, a nine-hole layout in the rolling former coalfield landscape. On 17 February 2007 - the 150th anniversary of the disaster - a memorial was unveiled in front of the clubhouse. The sculpture incorporates mining symbols and at its centre is a large piece of coal held in twisted metal. The memorial is for the 189 who died and for the families left behind. The work was hard, the wages thin, the dangers known. In nineteenth-century British coal mining, disasters on this scale were not unique - they were part of an industry that powered the empire on the bodies of men and boys. Lundhill was one of the worst, and on its anniversary, in the quiet of a golf-course clubhouse on a hillside above Wombwell, the names are still read.