Many local miners had ancestors who'd come to work in the pits, flocking here after the pits started turning out coal in the 1850s and 1860s. Others were the first in their families to work in the coal industry...

First experiences of pit life could be a real shock, an eye-opening introduction to life underground, especially before the days of nationalisation when there was little training and men and boys had to learn on the job...

Dark, dank and dirty - just a few words used to describe what it was like underground. Miles and miles of desolate roadways stretched out from beneath Kiveton Park, towards the faces where men worked the coal from the ground...

Seams of coal stretch out for hundreds of miles under the towns and countryside of Britain, layers of "black diamonds" waiting to be brought out of the earth. How this was done was transformed over time...

Pit ponies are the archetypal symbol of the coal industry, but interestingly there weren't any pit ponies at Waleswood after the turn of the century...

For men underground, it was unusual never to have been partially buried in a roof-fall, an injury that meant taking time off work or to have finished working underground without one of the illnesses which characterise the lives of former mineworkers...

Pit baths were built in the late 1930s at both Kiveton Park and Waleswood. Before that time, men walked home to get washed, their faces and bodies black with coal...

Not all men who worked at Kiveton Park and Waleswood Collieries worked underground. Lots of different jobs had to be done on the surface and a job above ground meant dependable local work...

In the early 1870s, the Old Colliery Offices were built at Kiveton Park, to provide offices for the newly-sunk pit but also as a school house - the facilities of the villages were struggling to keep up with the rapidly expanding population of miners and their families...