Malcolm Ranieri scratches at the surface of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty to discover the remains of its mining heritage.

Eastern United Colliery remained one of the largest coal producers in the area before finally closing in 1959.

Over three million people a year visit the Forest of Dean to view the beautiful forested areas, the attractive and unusual villages, the nature reserves, and well-known tourist spots such as Symonds Yat and Tintern Abbey.
The Forest of Dean is not easily defined but roughly it runs from Ross on Wye in the north to the River Severn which forms the eastern/southern boundary, to Chepstow in the south and the River Wye (and Tintern Abbey) forming the western boundary. This area of some 30,000 acres is designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and it is sometimes difficult to imagine that this was once a heavy industrialised region.
Evidence of this industry dates back at least to Roman times and includes many activities – from charcoal making to boat-building. It also boasted in Victorian times an extensive branch line-based railway system, sometimes using original tramroads. A reminder of this system is carried on by the preserved Dean Forest Railway from Lydney to Parkend.
Extracted from the forest was 200 million tons of coal, 10 million tons of iron ore, and half a billion tons of stone, clay, sand, waste soil and rock. You would have thought that this extraction and the abundance of rail and road connections would have laid waste to much of the area for ever, but re-forestation and landscaping have returned the land to its former state, as part of a statutory protection of the woodland. Whilst some of the industry can be traced, and preservation schemes such as Clearwell Caves prosper as tourist attractions, much has been lost for good.
The Dean Coalfield is 34 square miles in area and forms a saucer-shaped basin. The system is divided into three seams - the upper, the middle and the lower series. The upper series coal was close to the surface, of poor quality and little worked apart from locally. However, the middle series was extensively worked for higher grade housecoal for a period of 150 years. The lower series deep gales (seams) were not worked to any degree until after 1900, these provided the well-known high quality steam coals. The deep gales of the Dean Coalfield were expensive to mine because of geological faults and water problems which meant extensive shaft systems and pumping operations. For an example — at Princess Royal Colliery in the 1930s the average volume of water pumped was 2,700 gallons per minute or four million gallons per day, said at the time to be able to supply a town of 100,000 inhabitants! The pumping equipment was all electrically operated and twenty tons of water were displaced for each ton of coal gained.
I set my sights on five collieries spread across the Forest: Northern United, Princess Royal, Cannop, Eastern United (all NCB-operated from privatisation) and Lightmoor which was a private colliery. There were many other collieries in the Forest but these five in particular exhibit easily found remains.

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