Wednesday 27th
February 2019
We walked up into Polesworth village after breakfast. Although
Polesworth is classed as a village, it is now more akin to a sizeable town. We
were pleasantly surprised, after our first impressions yesterday, as the
village centre, and this side of the town, are so much nicer than the eastern
side encountered on our approaches yesterday. The River Anker passes through
the town and it seems one side has a nice village feel, although there is much
new building beyond the village centre, and the other side is full of rough
looking housing.
We crossed the River Anker over a footbridge that brought us to a
field, the Glebe, right behind the village high street where horses were
grazing. It doesn’t come much more villagey.
All that remains of Polesworth Abbey is the clestory, now called the
Abbey. The original Abbey was founded in 827 by St. Modwena and King Egbert.
The Abbey prospered for over 700 years until the Dissolution, after which it
was granted by King Henry VIII to Francis Goodere, who dismantled most of the
Abbey buildings to provide stone for a new Manor House, Polesworth Hall, built
on the site of the Abbey. Polesworth Hall was demolished in the 1870’s and the
present day vicarage is built on the site. We went into the Abbey, only small,
but an amazing place. There was a service in progress so we couldn’t look
around too much. We sat and listened to the service but the dog, who we had left
in the entrance porch, started barking. I left, but Brenda stayed behind for
some much needed quiet time. We resolved to come back later after the service
was finished.
There is a profusion of old buildings in Polesworth. The Nunnery
Gateway dates back to the 14th century and was built as the gateway
to the Abbey. It is a remarkable building with an arched entrance for vehicles
and a smaller tunnelled entry for pedestrians. The pedestrian entrance has a
tiny, low doorway where the porter lived, with a peephole for him to vet
visitors. The first floor was used to accommodate visitors to the Abbey. Today
it used as rentable holiday homes. What a privilege to stay in something like
that.
Nunnery Gateway
The Nethersole Apartment Building was built in 1818 to replace an
earlier school house. It continued as a school until 1973 when the present
school opened at the other end of the High Street. It was then used for a
variety of community activities prior to its conversion to apartments.
The Tithe Barn has been extensively, but sympathetically renovated. Today
it houses the local council.
The village centre itself, has a nice variety of shops interspersed
with some very old buildings. We returned to the boat over the very attractive
1776 built, stone then-arched, road bridge over the River Anker.
We had planned another walk for tomorrow to Pooley Country Park.
However, with a threat of rain, we decided to do the walk today. We duly left
the boat and crossed the canal to pick up the footpath at the back of some real
tatty housing with rubbish dumped everywhere it seemed. Passing beyond the
housing and through a wooded area, we came to Pooley Hall, a Manor House built
in 1509. It is said to include some of the oldest brickwork in the country.
After the Hall, the road merged with a lane passing the Pooley Hall Colliery
War Memorial, and continued on to the Country Park. The Abbey bells had started
to ring out before we left the village this morning and had accompanied us thus
far. It is lovely to hear English Church Bells. Our walk took us back along the
canal passing the wharf that served Pooley Hall Colliery and the back of Pooley
Hall itself.
colours represent change from coal to nature and was designedby a local school child
Polesworth could be said to be typical of so many other pit towns and
villages. Although coal has been mined in the area on a small scale for
hundreds of years, it wasn’t until the advent of the Industrial Revolution and
the building of the Coventry Canal that was the scale of the mining, and
subsequently, the size of the village increased. There were three main pits in
the area, the last closing in 1987. The collieries around Polesworth actually
joined, underground, with collieries at nearby Tamworth and Amington, some 4
miles apart. Some feat.
Since moving onto Bridge Street we seem to have passed through many
counties associated with coalmining. Staffordshire, Derbyshire,
Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Warwickshire. All the pit towns and
villages that grew up around a pit would have had the heart ripped out of them
when the mines closed in the 1980’s and 90’s. While many have reinvented
themselves and moved on, like Polesworth, many that we have seen, have not, and
these places tend to have a desolate, desperate air of decline around them.
It is difficult today, to appreciate the size and importance of the
coal industry in Britain. Coal production in the UK reached a peak in 1913 with
287 million tons. The consumption of coal, mostly for electrical generation, fell
from 157 million tons in 1970 to 18 million tons in 2016, largely
as a result of initiatives for cleaner energy generation as power stations
switched to gas and biomass.
Until the late
1960s, coal was the main source of energy produced in the UK. Ninety-five per
cent of this came from roughly 1,334 deep-mines that were operational at the
time, with the rest from around 92 surface mines. The coal industry was the
UK’s biggest employer. Employment fell from a peak of almost 2 million in 1920
to 44,000 in 1993, and just 2,000 in 2015.
The
coal sources in the UK are said to spread beneath the North Sea to Northern
Germany, Poland and Russia. Coal imported into the UK today comes from
Columbia, Russia and the United States, and yet British coal mines achieved
the most economically produced coal in Europe, with a level of productivity of
3,200 tonnes per man year, and there is estimated to be coal reserves in the UK
to last 400 years. After modernisation of underground mining, a deep shaft mine
could produce 700 million tonnes annually. In 1986, Kellingley colliery in
North Yorkshire, achieved a staggering 404,000 tonnes in a single shift.
Of the coal mined in the UK in 2016, all was from open-cast coal
mines. The last deep coal mine closed on 18 December 2015. Twenty-six open cast mines still remain open.
We returned to the Abbey at 4pm but were really disappointed to
find it locked. Although we are moving on tomorrow, we will return once again
and try and gain access. We called into one of the village pubs. A bad move.
There were banners advertising ”under new management”. This always suggests to me,
a pub that has failed, normally because of a bad reputation that the new owners
are trying to rectify. These owners have failed. As soon as we walked in we
knew we had made a mistake, the place was an absolute dive and the only beer on
was Worthington’s.
We had a quick pint, left and went to another pub around the
corner. A much different atmosphere. A nice cosy local.
Leaving here, we called into a Chinese for a take-away which we
took back to the boat. A rare treat.
Weather: a pleasant day.
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