Woolley Colliery
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Wolley_Colliery_Village.jpg
Woolley Colliery is a village in the metropolitan borough of Barnsley in South Yorkshire, England.
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 before railway transport began.
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 nineteen-sixties 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.
The colliery finally closed in the late 1980s.