Mining

Mining.

Much of Brighouse outside of the town centre and outside of the village centres is built on former deep mines and former open quarry land although I have not found any records of recent mining activity in Brighouse and its villages apart from Rastrick on the Elland boundary and Hove Edge, however I have been able to find some old legal documents about parcels of land within the area that shows some land been sold with the rights to abstract coal and ironstone from the land some records dating back to 1834, these also list some of the owners as ‘Physicians & Surgeons’ Arthur Homesfield who lived in Kettlewell and ‘William Whitteron Mines’ from Hampstead in the Borough of London, there are also records showing some of these parcels of land regularly changing hands along with the extraction rights into the early nineteen hundreds.

Agents acting for the Government and former British Coal Board still carry out regular checks on these old caped mine shafts for leakage and subsidence and in several parts of Brighouse along with some of its villages some of the houses suffer from water rising and leaking from some these old mineshafts in severe wet weather.

There is also reports dating from around 1960s that a family in Highfield Avenue Bailiff Bridge who woke up one morning to find a huge hole in their front garden and it took several loads of fly ash from the then Elland Power Station to fill the hole?

There have also been some reports in the Brighouse area of rising water and cracks appearing due to alleged subsidence?

In Rastrick edging on the Lower Edge area of Elland they are still extracting Stone in open caste mining activities and in Hove Edge behind the football playing fields it looks as though recent mining activities have been used to extract Stone, there are also reports of several opencast mines that have been filled with unknown contents having been built on? (Please see Hove Edge sector for more details).