Photo-a-Day  (Sunday, 19th September, 2021)

You cant beat a good walk around a graveyard.

I agree, Mick, actually! I love a walk round a cemetery or a churchyard, especially in Spring sunshine when there are daffodils both growing and also in pots on graves. I find them very peaceful places.

It's awful to think those men and boys went out to work that morning with their butties in a snap can never to return. Just the fact that gun powder was used in the process of hewing the coal should have been enough to put any man or boy off going to work, not to mention the surroundings of the deep dark pit. They knew it could happen but still they went down. I read the names of the dead it does bring it home to you what they experienced and on the doorsteps of where they lived. I noticed the names of 3 Morgan's who probably came from Wales as my Grt Grandfather did to work the mines. So very sad.

Yes, it's dreadful to think of them never coming home, as it was with the miners from the Maypole Pit in Abram. We put candles in our windows in Abram every year on the anniversary of the Maypole disaster. My grandad came from Wales too, Veronica, to work in the pits and married my Grandma who was from Spring View. He was a Griffiths, (my maiden name), and now I'm a Roberts so I still have a Welsh name. Unfortunately, my singing voice is from the Spring View side of the family and sounds like a cinder stuck under a door!

My Grt Grandfather John Bradshaw was killed in the King Pit disaster at Pemberton Colliery in Oct 1877.
His name is listed along with the other 34 men & boys killed. John Bradshaw of Half Way House left a wife & 3 children, the youngest was 1yr old.
He is buried at St John the Divine at Pemberton...his wife lived on husbandless into her 80's.
An account of the disaster can be read in Lancashire Mining Disasters 1835-1910 by Jack Nadin.

Couldn't agree with you more Irene, as that's what I once said and was promptly told "God also loves to hear His Crows not just His Linnets, so sing up man."

Horrendous to read the account of the explosion from using powder in a mine that gave off gas freely and the resulting fire, also the explosion when the mine was unsealed after a rescue attempt of the bodies was made, with flames seen shooting up from the top of the pit shaft for fifty yards there must have been a tremendous amount of gas build up.

Another picturesque photo of the memorial, this one in winter with a covering of snow, by Rev. D. Long. https://www.wiganworld.co.uk/album/photo.php?opt=3&id=18888&gallery=Mining&page=6

Just a PS.
Like Irene to walk round a churchyard & look at names, perhaps nothing to to do with you or your heritage is to remember these were people who lived, just like you & me. If you read their names they are never forgotten.

There is something about a cemetery Irene and Helen, that is so peaceful, and when you read names you think about their lives, and families.I think candles in your window Irene is a lovely gesture in memory of the victims of the Maypole disaster.