At 515 metres, the Cat and Fiddle is England’s second highest pub (due to reopen in April, with a distillery attached) and bad weather is hardly unexpected. But the Met Office got its forecast right to the minute, even when the front had been over the Atlantic.
At 11 sharp, down came horizontal rain on freezing westerlies, but it wasn’t my miserable situation that troubled me. It was the thought that the same godforsaken conditions were once a daily reality for local workers. Because in the 18th century, come rain or sleet, Buxton miners had to trudge out to this bleak spot to make ends meet. For labouring 12 hours a day, six days a week, they received the princely sum of £32 per annum.
To the east of me are the head of the Goyt Valley and Axe Edge. Now they look nothing more than dreary mist-shrouded moorland, but there were once 238 mine shafts here, dug over two centuries, to reach seams of low-quality coal.
The miners worked with pick and shovel, bent-backed for lack of height in the tunnel, and lit only by oil- or candlelight. Yet spare a thought, too, for those working the winch at the shaft-head to raise the coal in wicker baskets or corves. Each corf held a hundredweight (50.8kg) and a score (20) of them weighed a ton. In their exemplary local history, The Coal Mines of Buxton (1985), Alan Roberts and John Leach describe how in 1790 one pair hauled up 200 score of coal in a fortnight – a load every two minutes over the whole 144 hours.
Many of the miners in the 1790 census had surnames – Ashmore, Bagshaw, Brindley, Mellor, Nadin, Salt – that you would find in any modern Buxton directory. I wonder what those same men might have said had you told them that the stuff they dug was made of sunlight 330m years ago; that their work would set us all on a path whereby humanity itself helps make the weather; that can, in turn, set fire to parts of Australia almost equal to the whole British landmass.
• This article was amended on 6 February 2020 to offer the exact metric conversion of a hundredweight (50.8kg) and clarify that 20 hundredweights make up one imperial ton, not “almost a [metric] tonne”.
