Woolley Colliery

Woolley Colliery is a village on the edge of the Barnsley and Wakefield districts in Yorkshire, England. The village itself is in South Yorkshire whilst the former colliery is situated in West Yorkshire.

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 2 miles away. The village gets its name from the coal mines which were working there at least as early as 1850. About that time two rows of small terrace cottages were built for the workmen. Several coal seams outcrop in the hillside so coal was probably mined thereabouts for many years before that but only on a small scale until railway transport began. The pit was one of the largest in West Yorkshire; in 1980, it employed 1514 men underground and 428 on the surface.

The main mine began as a pair of tunnels into the hillside in the Barnsley Bed seam. As time went on, vertical shafts were sunk to get at the deeper seams. In the 1960s there were three shafts in the pit yard and a fourth, for extra ventilation, about a mile to the east. At that time around 17,000 tons of high quality coal were produced each week from four seams.

After the 1984-5 strike, the men from North Gawber colliery were also transferred to Woolley. The pit finally closed in 1987.

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