browseCoal Coast
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen (Photographer)
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s introduction to the book (currently out of print), 2003:
I follow the path on top of the cliffs. For much of the twentieth century this coastal stretch between Sunderland and Hartlepool, in the North East of England, was one of the most densely industrialized areas in Western Europe. Today I see but meadows and cornfields stretching out to the sea. Closer to the edge, I catch a glimpse of a bay below, where a young man scrambles the steep inclines on a motorbike with his child rattling about in the home-made sidecar. The trail takes me from the ex-colliery town of Seaham, above the tunnelled networks of closed coalmines, to the allotments at Easington, where retired miners grow their leeks and dahlias and train their racing pigeons.
My delight in finding these peaceable kingdoms ends with a desolate series of photographs of demolished pigeon lofts, shattered huts and devastated gardens. On the sixty one allotments, some of them cultivated for more than eighty years, the holders had been served notice to quit, to make way for bulldozers. The black beaches of East Durham were to undergo a major clean-up operation, removing the coal wastes accumulated over decades. The future lay with tourism. The manifestly idiosyncratic allotment gardens simply did not fit into the planners’ vision of the new era.
Their entire working lives spent underground hewing coal, and their leisure time digging the soil above it, had given the men an unusually strong bond with their environment. Regardless of the legalities, every miner I meet on the allotments assumes personal ownership of this entire landscape, by the same authority with which men at Wallsend on the Tyne, where the largest tankers in the world were built, waved off each ship: ‘I built that.’
When I was a little lad, we used to throw marbles into the rain gulley in the street and run all the way down to the beach to watch them come out the other end. Then we discovered an outlet pipe which was gushing water out of the mine and we dropped pebbles into it through a hole. They came out round as owt...
Men fishing on the beach at night used to kick at the ash heaps from the pits. The heaps would light up and you’d see them glowing the whole length of the beach. The fishermen would keep themselves warm...
Every day I walk the dog from Shippersea Bay to Hawthorn Hive and back through the Dene, where me mate and I cleared a path through the woods. That’s for the past sixty years... I can tell you where every pebble on this beach comes from.
Led by the miners’ intimate knowledge of the beaches, I begin to see narratives in this blighted landscape. The glistening black sands of fools’ gold, purple rocks of burnt shale, pebbles glowing with iron sulphate. Embedded in fused colliery spoil, among the emerald green seaweed, the nuts and bolts of a deposed industry are rusting into riotous colour. A lone segment of a ventilation duct crouches on the beach like an exotic seashell, while a miner's boot quietly disintegrates in the clay. The landscape is most eloquent in its post-industrial silence. As in a shop window at Seaham figurines of miners, pressed from coal dust, commemorate a lost world, so do these dislocated relics on the beach - until they are discarded by tides and storms and the clean-up operations. I picture a locomotive, left behind in a flooded mine, one day emerging from the side of a cliff face - a fossil for the future to tell of towns and communities and lives built on coal. A fleeting witness to man's vast but vanishing efforts, I find myself oddly moved by this trail; by the ‘terrible beauty’ of the East Durham coastline.
For two or three years I keep returning to the beaches. Until I know how far the sea must be from the cliffs on a flooding tide, for me to scramble round Nose's Point, through the caves, without getting stranded; the moment on a January morning when the sun will briefly light up the chalk patch on a cliff face at Hawthorn Hive and the hour in the evening when it will illuminate a lone limestone pinnacle on the Blast beach; the exact time an ebbing tide will unveil the snakelike lengths of railway track twisted among rocks by Dawdon beach. Until I may claim my ownership of this landscape. Then I come back to find the pinnacle has collapsed into the sea, and the chains and bolts are buried under sand, and the ventilation ducts, whose gradual disintegration I have keenly observed, have turned to coiled springs in blackened ash.
The deep plateaux of mine waste on the beaches give off an acrid sulphuric vapour, sour to the nostrils. I photograph miners’ boots, swimming in fluorescent chemical ponds. They appear animate, expressive, even urgent. I become foolishly fond of them, and look for them again, each time finding them somewhere else, doing something else. Then, one by one, they are gone. A section of a conveyor belt sees daylight for the first time, peering out of a barricade of slurry, and is promptly shed as a chunk of embankment breaks off. A shelter built with pebbles appears on the water’s edge, with seats and a fireplace, and disappears. Bulldozers grind and squeak, resolutely removing cliff faces of burnt shale. The broken pieces grow into pyramids, which are carried away by whining lorries and recycled into building material for future roadworks.
Clusters of blooming wallflowers hang off the shelves of a cliff. I crouch below in the bushes, and my gaze wanders into the black mouth of a cave. Inside in the dark, still dazzled by the midday sun I begin to discern a tangled mesh of grey hair, and in the midst of it, an alert pair of blue eyes. I’m off! Six months later I meet him sitting outside, in a plume of smoke, the homeless man who lives in the cave. He is entertaining a friend to a barbecue, and beckons me to join. ‘I've been watching you, lass,’ he tells me grinning, and offers me a rabbit to take home. ‘I breed them in the pen, on the cliffside there. Got a few in me mate’s freezer.’ Instead, I accept a whelk shell from his Aladdin's Cave, and a rabbit’s foot, for luck.
Text by Brian Young, District Geologist - Northern England, British Geological Survey, 2003
This is the Durham coast. I grew up here and went to school in a colliery village. I was unusual. I was one of only a handful of children whose dad did not work either in the pits or the shipyards. The local rocks fascinated me and after reading geology at university, I have worked as a geologist ever since. By some happy coincidence I returned to the North East of England twenty years ago to work on the very rocks which captured my childish imagination. We tend to take our everyday surroundings for granted, yet here is much that is special, the evidence of millions of years of earth history. Just as the waste on the beach tells of a former way of life, so the rocks offer the means to decipher this earlier story.
The rocks of East Durham are not just unusual, they are unique. Known as the Magnesian Limestone, from the abundance within them of the magnesium mineral dolomite, they are the products of the Permian period of earth history, about 290 million years ago. When these rocks were forming as limy mud on the floor of a hot, shallow sea, called the Zechstein Sea by geologists, our area lay just north of the equator. Movement of the earth’s continental plates over this vast period has brought us to our present position. In those days a barrier reef lay close to the shore: we can see its fossilised remains today at Blackhall Rocks. On occasions the sea almost dried up, leaving thick beds of salt and anhydrite, which in turn became buried beneath further layers of limestone. Salt and anhydrite are very soluble rocks and, where they lay near the surface, were dissolved away by percolating water millions of years ago. As they disappeared the overlying limestones simply collapsed into the space left behind. The jumbled, rubble-like appearance of much of the limestone we see on the coast today is the result of this process.
These are some of the best examples of Permian rocks in the world. Coal seams run beneath them, the highly compacted remains of dead vegetation accumulated on the floor of the tropical swamp forests, which covered much of northern Europe around 310 million years ago. Huge rivers carrying mud and sand periodically overwhelmed the forests, burying them and so building up the layers of shale, sandstone and coal we know today as the Coal Measures.
Coal has been dug from County Durham for centuries. It’s one of the world’s longest worked coalfields. A shaft sunk at Hetton Colliery in 1820 proved that coal seams extend beneath the limestone, but it was not to be easily won. Beneath the Magnesian Limestone, and separating it from the Coal Measures, there is usually a thick bed of loose sand, the remnants of Permian desert dunes, which covered the area before it was drowned beneath the advancing waters of the Zechstein Sea. Vast quantities of water in the sands turn them into quicksand at depth. Sinking shafts through them was difficult and dangerous, and cost several lives. Sinking the shaft at Easington Colliery in the 1890s, a man drowned: it was three years before his body was found, frozen into a block of ice by the freezing technique then being used to penetrate the sands.
The coastal collieries followed their rich seams for several kilometres beneath the North Sea, winning millions of tons of coal together with huge quantities of waste shale, mined with the coal. Rather than building this into heaps, which would consume valuable land, in those days when we cared little for our coastline, it was tipped on to the beaches, hopefully to be washed away by the sea. Even the stormy North Sea can only consume so much and soon the beaches were overwhelmed. Barely ten years since the last colliery closed, the evidence of this once disfiguring industry is becoming fainter with each tide. The sea is softening the angularity of concrete walls; bricks and clinker are being rounded into colourful forms, matching the beauty of the natural boulders which litter this shore; iron bars and coal waste are rusting and reacting with the sea water to form features never previously seen on this coast.
With the closure of the collieries came the will to restore the beaches, so far as possible, to their original condition. Thousands of tons of waste were cleared, though much remains at the Blast Beach and Hawthorn Hive. The sea is gradually removing this, but it is leaving us a final reminder of the mines. The waste shale contains an abundance of the mineral pyrite, also called fool’s gold. From its appearance, it was known simply as brass by the miners. Constant winnowing by the sea washes away the shale leaving the brown-stained pyrite as sand. Complex chemical reactions between the pyrite, seawater and shale is, today, forming vivid yellow crusts and cauliflower-like masses of the unusual minerals copiapite, sideronatrite and natrojarosite at Hawthorn and Blast Beach.
Mining was a way of life for generations. That has now gone. A teacher friend in South Northumberland told me that a couple of years ago, when he passed a piece of coal around his class, not one child knew what it was. Mining began here a little over a century ago. It involved digging through layers of 290 million year old limestone to mine 310 million year old coal. Seen in the context of the 4,600 million years age of the earth, even the coal is a comparatively recent arrival. In these terms how insignificant does human activity seem?
Text by James Musgrave (interview, 2003):
I walk on these beaches every day. It’s nice when you see that big roll on the water; when you get northerly gales and a full moon tide and these mountain seas coming in. Whooh! Over the years they’ve washed a lot of the cliff away.
I used to work underneath here. Eleven hundred feet down. When I think about it, I wouldn’t like to go there again. Even though I was down the pit for forty two years, I’d be frightened to go into the bowels of the earth, now, but there was beauty. Once, I was on this hauling machine and the roof over me was like glass right around the top of the drift. And there it was: all the ferns, just like the ferns in the dene, but fossilized. I went to look at it and I said: Eee, lad! Dear knows how many millions of year I was looking at. Fifty million? A hundred million? I was looking at things Adam and Eve never saw!
And we hauled all that out of the earth, the coal and the waste. The aerial flight was on twenty four hours a day with the waste. There were about fifty buckets going all the time round, tipping, filling up, tipping… And the lads on the beach, shore lads, seacoal lads, used to come up on top of the cliffs and, if the wagon was high enough, they could pull the lever and tip the bucket there and then. There was a lot of good coal among the waste. You could have a lump, that big, that was all coal. So they used to pull the lever, tip the bucket on the top and then get the coal away; warm themselves at night.
They had to put in a belt line in the end, because the buckets couldn’t cope. There was that much stone coming out of the pit. Everything went into the sea. If they demolished a building, it went in the sea. The pit waste would build up and build up and they’d get the bulldozers to shove it right out to sea. I’ve seen the heap a hundred yards long. There must have been thousands of tons over the years. That’s how the beach got ruined. You’d have to go down another ten feet before you got to the natural bottom. This used to be a beautiful beach. They are getting the ash off it now. They mix it with concrete to make house bricks.
They used coal to power everything in the pit and they used to tip the ash down on the beach from the cliff side. And it was still burning. It burned for years. During the war they put limestone over it, so it wouldn’t give any light off to the German bombers. Once, me brother and some other lads, they’d come from the beach and they panicked because the train was coming down to tip some more. He got in the red ash. His leg went right into the burning ash and it pulled all the skin off. There were no notices up, no fences to keep the young ’uns off. He got blood poisoning through it. He was talking to mother when he was dying and he said: Mam, I’m not frightened to die. So I think, meself, there’s something come to him and said: You’ll come with us Kenny, you’ll be all right. That’s my belief, like. But fancy a lad, seven year old, saying: I’m not frightened to die. One thing’s for certain, there’s something after we peg out, like. There’s life after death. I know there is, because I've experienced it.
When I was about five, I saw me brother standing between me mother and father. I was playing on the green with some boys. I can always remember that. It was not a voice, but something said: Look up! I turned and looked up and they were in the bedroom window. I pointed and said: There’s our Kenny! I runs round the top of the street, down and up the stairs, I’ll never forget it, and into the bedroom. They were still there, me mam and dad, and I said: Where’s our Kenny at? Dad says: Oh, he’s in Heaven! But I kept saying: I’ve seen him! He was standing between you! He was smiling at me! His black hair… I couldn’t get over it, because I saw him. He was seven when he died and I was only two.
There are so many memories in these cliffs and beaches. When I was a lad, there used to be wallflowers growing on the cliff side, there. There were two houses down on the beach in those days. The other year, I was down the allotments and I had plenty of wallflower seed on, so I said: I’ll set them away. See if I can get them to grow up there again. I had a sugar bag half full of seed, and I was trying to shoot them up with a bit clay round the seed and I said: Eee, that’s no good. Because, when I was shooting them up with the catapult, they were just spreading into the wind. So I got a bit fire hose off the beach and cut it in little pieces. I put the seeds in, packed them with clay and shot them up like that. When they hit the solid rock up there, the rubber went bang and the seeds burst out. The next year some took hold. Aye. They’re still there. The Hanging Gardens of Hawthorn Hive, I call it.
Note: Coal Coast was part of the Coalfield Stories programme of production documenting Durham's post-industrial experience. It was first shown at Baltic, the centre for contemporary art in Gateshead, in 2003. A book of the photographs was published by Amberside (2003), but is now out of print.