Now, since it’s been a few days of catching up with little bits and pieces, here’s something massive for readers to get their teeth into – this is a historical artefact which I’ve been lucky enough to find, and I’m very excited about it.
It’s about fourteen inches wide, and six feet long. It’s a plan, on velum, of the progress of coal extraction in the Robins seam from under Walsall Wood and Clayhanger up until the early 1960s. The map is hand drafted, and was drawn for railway engineers to indicate where mine workings lay in relation to the railway through Walsall Wood.
This is a plan of where coal was removed in one seam under our area. It’s astounding.
A fragment of a remarkable plan; this covers from Walsall Wood cemetery to the railway bridge at the back of what is now Barrow Close. Click for a larger version, but please be patient as it’s a large image! this is about 15% of the entire drawing.
I feature just a small sample here, but in the meantime I need to get a six foot long document scanned in high resolution. As Captain Scott said, I could be some time.
Enjoy this, pick the bones out of it and please comment on what you see. I include some Ordnance Survey mapping from the same period tilted to the same angle so you can orientate the map.
This is local history gold – and bare in mind this is only one seam: there would e separate drawings for each one.
Please do comment or mail me: BrownhillsBob at Googlemail dot com.
The closest map I could approximate to the plan was this 1938 1:10,000 scale fragment from the National Library of Scotland archive; not that it’s been rotated – north is most definitely not up! Click for a larger version.