Trudging from the mineshaft, black with coal-dust from their plastic helmets to their steel-capped boots and naked legs, the Hatfield miners appear as a vision from a former age. The three-metre thick Barnsley seam they have spent the past eight hours clawing at is, in fact, merely half a mile underground. Yet the geo-economy which, over the course of three centuries, it has brought into being, sustained and sometimes blighted, in pit villages across South Yorkshire and machines, factories and power-stations across Britain, is almost dead now.
展开▼
