THE BOTTOMS’ succeeded to ‘Hell Row”. Hell
Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood
by the brookside on Greenhill Lane. There lived the
colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away.
The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by
these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by
donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin. And
all over the countryside were these same pits, some of
which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the few
colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into
the earth, making queer mounds and little black places
among the corn-fields and the meadows. And the cottages
of these coal-miners, in blocks and pairs here and there,
together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers,
straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.
Then, some sixty years ago, a sudden change took
place. The gin-pits were elbowed aside by the large mines
of the financiers. The coal and iron field of
Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire was discovered.
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