Pithead wheels at the Clipstone pit site
These days I drive around the countryside which is more green and pleasant than it ever was. The shadows of the turning pitheads and rising spoil heaps rise in my memory and fall back to that place where you smile at the good things, forgetting the bad. There is a silence; a stillness that echoes of something once mighty now gone and a world moved on.
The pithead at Clipstone with its two exposed pithead wheels perched on high steel towers still stands as a protected monument, broken and bedraggled in a large of area of derelict land waiting for some bright spark to come up with an idea of what to do with it. I pass it often, every time taking my eyes off the road to look it as it passes me by, half believing the wheels are still turning.