Additional information
Terrain
- Good surfaced tracks
Landscape
- Farmland
Dog friendliness
- Good, though watch out for bicycle riders
Parking
- Five Pits Trail car park, Hardstoft road, Pilsley
Toilets en route
- None on route
About the walk
Look at an old map of Clay Cross and you’ll see numerous collieries and a network of railway lines and sidings serving them. Before the decline of the 1970s and 1980s, coal played a big part in the lives of northeast Derbyshire folk, and the pit closures hit them hard. End of an Era Sadly, in an... age when industrial heritage sites are promoted as tourist attractions, not even an old pit wheel seems to have been left to remind us of this proud but dangerous industrial legacy. Between 1979 and 1989 Derbyshire County Council reclaimed vast acres of derelict, former colliery land and re-landscaped them on a large scale. In doing so they also created the Five Pits Trail, a linear recreational bridleway, with a loop route around Holmewood. Using the trackbeds of the old railways and sidings the route links the pits of Tibshelf and Grassmoor, and then passes through those of Pilsley, Holmewood and Williamthorpe. To save using two cars, this walk starts at Pilsley, north of Tibshelf, and does the loop around Holmewood before returning to base. The car park is located on the site of Pilsley Station, on the old Great Central Railway, which carried coal from the pits to London. The nearby terraced houses were built for the railway’s staff. New Wildlife Sanctuaries All along the route are reminders of how quickly the landscape can be transformed, no more so that at Williamthorpe. It was the last of the five pits to close, in 1970, since when extensive tree planting has taken place and a network of reed-fringed ponds created. The ponds are still fed by mine water that comes from as far as Welbeck and Thorsesby in Nottinghamshire. Williamthorpe Local Nature Reserve is now an important site for wildlife, with over 190 different species of birds recorded here, including reed warblers, snipe and great crested grebes. Grassmoor Country Park and Holmewood Woodlands, both on the trail, are also rich in natural history. Amid the green spaces are new industrial estates, such as the one at Holmewood, which stands on the site of the former colliery, and the vast factory sheds overlooking the ponds at Williamthorpe. They were built to create jobs and encourage new business in an effort to mitigate the devastating impact that the closure of the collieries had on local employment, since for many of these small Derbyshire communities mining was their sole livelihood. At the beginning of the 20th century Pilsley Colliery employed over 1,000 men and boys, but less than 60 years later it had closed for good.
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Derbyshire
The natural features of this central English county range from the modest heights of the Peak District National Park, where Kinder Scout stands at 2,088 ft (636 m), to the depths of its remarkable underground caverns, floodlit to reveal exquisite Blue John stone. Walkers and cyclists will enjoy the High Peak Trail which extends from the Derwent Valley to the limestone plateau near Buxton, and for many, the spectacular scenery is what draws them to the area.
