The Markham Colliery worked the deep coal seams of north Derbyshire, just outside Chesterfield, in a landscape stitched together by railways, ironworks and the dark heaps that mining leaves behind. By the interwar years it was one of the busy pits feeding the foundries and power stations of the East Midlands. Shifts moved underground every few hours; cages dropped men down the shaft and brought them back up, day in and day out, the rhythm of work measured in the rise and fall of a wire rope. Mining in Derbyshire was always dangerous work. The men who took it on were fathers and sons and brothers, neighbours in pit villages where everyone knew which household had lost whom.

The first of the great Markham disasters came in 1937, when an explosion underground killed nine men. The community had barely steadied itself when, less than a year later, another explosion tore through the workings. The 1938 blast killed seventy-nine miners and seriously injured forty more. Two disasters in two years at the same pit produced grief on a scale that whole streets carried for decades. Wives, widowed in their twenties and thirties, raised children who had only photographs of their fathers. The Coal Mines Act of 1911 already required inquests and inquiries into accidents of this kind, but no inquiry could undo what had happened. The names from 1937 and 1938 became part of local memory long before they were ever cast in bronze.

On the morning of 30 July 1973, twenty-nine men stepped into the descending cage at Markham. The cage was a double-deck steel box, lowered on a winding rope under controlled deceleration. As it approached the bottom of the shaft, the winding engine man saw sparks beneath the brake cylinder. He increased the regenerative braking. He pulled the brake lever. He pressed the emergency stop. None of it had any effect. The brake rod, a two-inch steel bar eight feet long under constant tension, had broken in two from metal fatigue. With nothing to slow them, the men plunged onto the wooden landing baulks at the bottom of the shaft. Eighteen were killed by the impact. Eleven more were seriously injured. The investigation that followed found that the rod had been quietly cracking for a long time, weakened by alternating bending stresses it had never been designed to bear. A National Committee for Safety of Manriding in Shafts was formed within months, and the National Coal Board began an industry-wide overhaul of every winder's braking system. The cost of the lesson had already been paid.

The Markham pit closed in 1994, swept away with most of the deep mines of central England. The headstocks came down; the spoil heaps softened into grass. What might have been left was silence. Instead, in 2013, the sculptor Stephen Broadbent installed the first of his steel figures on the site of the old colliery: a slow processional column of life-sized walkers in profile, each one with a circular bronze tag at the chest carrying a name, age, occupation, and the year of the disaster. The first eighty-eight figures went in over the following years. The remaining figures arrived in October 2022, completing the line. One hundred and six men: the nine of 1937, the seventy-nine of 1938, the eighteen of 1973. The trail is open to anyone who comes to walk it, and it is impossible to walk it quickly. Each figure asks you to read a name and consider that someone, once, knew that man well enough to grieve him.