please empty your brain below

There's a memorial nearby, beside the A257. It pays tribute to the miners' lives lost - more than 160 of them - during the period of operation.

dg writes: Moved here from Dover in 2010.
2B
Is Robert Jenrick the most crooked of ministers, or just the worst at covering his tracks?
Don’t for get the East Kent Light Railway at Shepherdswell. This was the line used to take the coal away.
Re: para 2 : unlike the others, Chislet closed in the sixties, so there weren't any clashes there during the eighties miners strikes.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the East Kent Railway, now a preserved steam line, which is only seven miles away although it never reached Betteshanger.
Southern Heights (Light Railway): the East Kent Light Railway served Tilmanstone, Hammill and Guilford Collieries. Betteshanger was served by a link to the Deal - Sandwich line.
We were indeed "educated" about this, via a brief mention of the Kent coalfield in a geography class at school. No further detail, however, so this is fascinating - thankyou. Even less-known is the Somerset coalfield south of Bath - it doesn't fit into the prevailing bucolic idyll version of the West Country I suppose.
I remember Kent's coal mines, though have never been down there to see where they were!

A shame they didn't preserve one colliery as a museum. Without the structures, the site might as well be used for something for useful, after all if we don't build housing on brown field sites, where will we build it?

Which isn't to say I necessarily approve on the proposed scheme...
An open space of that size and remoteness is just begging for a music festival (to defray costs of running the park). Expect to see one within a couple of years.

And maybe periodically a circus as well.
Coal mines and trains stranded for days in snowdrifts are my main unexpected items on the news from Kent back in the 70s.
Nice post. I'm always discovering something new on this blog!
They may well have failed to exploit the fossil angle properly. But the mining spoil, now forming the park and only covered with a meagre and patchy layer of brought-in topsoil, is fossil rich, so there is scope all over the park for amateurs with sharp downcast eyes to find the odd fascinating fossil. Or so I was told, though on my visit nothing showed up.
We had a school trip in the sixth form to Tilmanstone, if I recall correctly those of us who were under 18 were told to keep quiet! My main memory is how hot it was, plus the crawling through some of the tunnels to reach the coalface, where the noise level was enormous as they drilled into the coal to loosen it for collection.

Betteshanger Park was established by the failed Hadlow College group, so although Quinn is generally detested, in this instance it has enabled the re-opening of the park, which was festering unloved for a while.

PS
Chislet shut in 1969. Snowdown had already ceased production but was not shut by the time of the miners' strike. Kent was also visited by flying pickets from elsewhere, including to locations that were using coal, such as Sheerness Steel.
It reminds me of a similar former mine/now park - Gedling Country Park just east of Nottingham.
Don't forget Snowdown Colliery, not mentioned by anybody, near Aylesham.

dg writes: mentioned by two of us.
The last pit in the Somerset coalfield closed down in about 1973 I believe. Towards the end of its life the pits there were lumped in with the South Wales coalfield for administrative purposes by the NCB.
Glad some have mentioned the Somerset coalfield. Absolutely central to the work of the largely self-taught surveyor William Smith in the late 18th and early 19th century that had led to Adam Sedgwick describing Smith as the "father of English geology".










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