page_title: Woolley Colliery
section_title: Woolley Grange
hierarchical_section_title: Woolley Colliery / Woolley Grange
caption_attribution_description: English: New for Old. New houses on old Woolley Colliery Site
context_page_description: Woolley Colliery is a village on the border between the Barnsley and Wakefield districts in Yorkshire, England. The village is in South Yorkshire whilst the former colliery was situated in West Yorkshire in the Wakefield Rural Ward. The village is known locally as Mucky Woolley, a tribute to its coal mining heritage and to distinguish it from the more affluent village of Woolley situated two miles away.
  Coal mines were worked as early as 1850, and at about that time the village was established when two rows of small terrace cottages were built to accommodate the miners. There are several coal seam outcrops on the hillside and coal was probably mined in that area for many years before that, but only on a small scale until railway transport began. The pit grew to become one of the largest in West Yorkshire; in 1980, it employed 1514 men underground and 428 on the surface.
  The colliery began as when two tunnels or drifts were dug into the hillside into the Barnsley bed seam. Vertical shafts were sunk to reach the deeper seams. In the 1960s there were three shafts in the pit yard and a fourth, for ventilation, about a mile to the east.
context_section_description: The pit closed in 1987 and was demolished in 1993. The site is now home to a private housing estate, Woolley Grange.
caption: Construction of the new housing estate at the site of the former colliery
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