 Ings Cottages
during a flood in 1947. There are several old photographs of the pit and
Ings Cottages in the public domain, but, on the ground now, it is hard to visualise what this area would have looked like when the pit was here. The transformation
into the nature park has all but wiped the grimey handprint of the past
off the board.
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 1998. A view of the Spikes - the Henry Daley Memorial Garden - at the Nature Park, Spring 1998. When the nature park was a still a working colliery, there were terraced cottages on the Crofton side of the pit known as the Spike or Spike Island. Ings Cottages, to give these houses their official name, were demolished shortly before the pit itself was finally closed in 1979.
Photographed by John Sargent in 1998.
The row of
houses just visible in the distance to the right is Chevet Terrace in
the Woodyard. Two shafts from the pit were located in the
area of the terrace. The shafts proved to be almost the last resting
place of a Walton villager - they were used to hide the body of Emma Sheard.
Unfortunately for the perpetrator of the deed, the old lady's remains
were discovered in 1948 after her manslaughter some years earlier by her
grand niece, Winifred Hallaghan. More details in Peter Wright's
interesting book. (see Links) |
See the map page for the location of Ings Cottages.
Although there is a commememorative plaque at the village's Millennium Gate, there is no memorial or monument at the nature park acknowledging the existence of the colliery. |
Defintion of
Ings: low-lying fertile land by a river or beck. Drain Beck and Oakenshaw Beck flow into the colliery area and, of course, the Barnsley Canal also passed through it.
In Yorkshire English: "T'watter's gitten ower t'ingses." (double plural) - The water has got over the ings. (Peter Wright, Yorkshire's Yammer, Dalesman Books, 1994)
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