The Stanton Iron Company needed fuel. In 1870, its blast furnaces in Derbyshire were hungry enough that the company started looking north for new coal. Boreholes around the village of Pleasley, on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border, found a good seam, and sinking began in 1873. The colliery took its position on a ridge above the north bank of the Meden, 500 feet above sea level, aligned northeast to southwest to follow the river valley. It would produce coal for the next 110 years. When the pit finally closed in 1983, most of what stood above ground was demolished within a few years, in the standard postwar pattern of erasure. The two headstocks, the engine-house complex and one of the brick chimneys somehow survived.

What makes Pleasley unusual is what is left inside. The engine-house contains two working steam winding engines: one installed in 1905 by the Lilleshall Company, the other in 1922 by Markham and Co. The winders are the machines that did the actual work of lifting men, coal and equipment up the shafts. They are large enough to fill a hall, with polished brass and exposed steel, and they belong to an era when industrial machinery was built to be looked at as well as to do its job. A Friends of Pleasley Pit group formed to save them. The volunteers cleaned, restored and eventually rebuilt the winders to operating condition. On open days, the engines run again under their own steam, the rope drums turning, the linkages clattering through the strokes they made for eight decades.

The engine-house complex is a Grade II listed building, and the broader site is a Scheduled Monument under the protection given to nationally important archaeological remains. Both designations followed the work of the Friends. The chimney, forty metres of late-Victorian brickwork that once vented the boiler range, was steadied and repointed. The headstocks were stripped, stabilised and repainted in their original liveries. English Heritage publicly praised the restoration. The Land Trust took on ownership, and the Pleasley Pit Trust began converting the surviving buildings into a mining heritage centre. Around them, the pit tip was reworked to extract residual coal, then landscaped into a country park with lakes and paths.

Two adjacent railway lines once carried coal away from Pleasley, part of a dense network that linked the collieries to the iron towns and to ports on the east coast. The lines closed with the pit, and the alignments have been converted into cycle trails. From Pleasley you can ride west through woodland toward former mining villages, or northeast toward Hardwick Hall, the Elizabethan mansion that Bess of Hardwick built in the 1590s and that now stands as a National Trust property only a few miles away. The juxtaposition is local in the literal sense: a Victorian colliery turned heritage centre, an Elizabethan house turned heritage centre, the older grand and the newer industrial, linked by the bicycle paths that replaced their connecting railways.