Pegswood, Northumberland

Pegswood is a mining village in Northumberland, England, and the site of the former Pegswood colliery. Pegswood is two miles (3 km) east of Morpeth and three miles (5 km) west of Ashington, with a population of around 3260. Pegswood is on a small hill above the valley in which Morpeth is situated, close to the River Wansbeck and to the river Brocks Burn.HistoryThe name Pegswood derives from 'Peg's Worth', meaning an enclosure belonging to a man named Pecg.. Pegswood started as a small farming settlement, yet with the discovery of coal and the opening of Pegswood colliery, the village expanded to accommodate miners in 1872. The colliery shut in 1969, however the village is still classed as a pit village. All that is left today are the Pit Heap, now a park, and the entrance to the mine shaft, now in the Bothal Court estate. Coinciding with the coal industry, there was also a brickworks in Pegswood, which has since closed down.Though the original colliery closed, mining was practised until quite recently: as late as 1997, mining company The Banks Group opened up a 170acre open-pit mine at Pegswood Moor, from which they extracted some 1.4 million tons of coal, with the help of a 236-ton face shovel made by Orenstein & Koppel. Also reaped was 84,000 tons of fire clay, a kind of high temperature resistant clay often found between coal layers. Mining there stopped in 2004, and the pit was converted into the Pegswood Community Park, which includes "a dedicated nature reserve, a new woodland and ponds." The second phase of the park's construction would also "provide a fishing lake, an amphitheatre sculpted out of the landform and a footpath link from Pegswood to Morpeth." Extensive open-pit mining still takes place in the area, but such operations remain controversial even when former sites are restored.