Probably the best description of "Bell Pit" mining is a paper on ironstone
mining in Derbyshire by Lynn Willes in the PDMHS journal for 1997. This goes
a long way to dispelling the myth of the bell pit. My only criticism is that
there is not a discussion of how bell pit mining is represented on the
surface.
You are quite right to saw that the term is usually applied without any
thought to what might be happening underground and once again shows how the
underground landscape is often disregarded. Bell pit is a term which should
only be applied where a horizontally bedded deposit is being mined, coal and
ironstone being the most common, and then only when it can be convincingly
proven that shafts are discrete units with no connection to other shafts.
That im afraid discounts Grimes Graves where there is superficial
connectivity between some of the shafts, probably for ventilation. It also
discounts shafts sunk onto vertical mineral veins but the term is still
applied.
I have a brief discussion of bell pits on my website at
http://www.mroe.freeserve.co.uk/bellpit.htm
Martin Roe
Lead Mining in the Yorkshire Dales
http://www.mroe.freeserve.co.uk
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