What is usually called the Cheshire coalfield is really pockets of carboniferous coal measures with small areas of rich coal seams that lie sporadically across the western flanks of the south Pennines. Mossley in the valley of the Tame is at the northern extremity, the outcrop of the Roaches at the southern end. In width it stretches between Macclesfield and Buxton.
What gave people the impetus to bother extracting the coal from many of these difficult upland sites was the nearby limestone extraction industry. Before the railways arrived this local coal was extremely useful for limeburning at the Buxton area quarries. Travellers on the lofty road crossing the watershed; between Buxton and Macclesfield up to 40 years ago were familiar with the pair of cottages set at 1,690 feet above the sea - called Bootham's Cottages. They were built 150 years ago for colliery workers and were undoubtedly among the most bleakly sited of any dwellings in the Peak District - not a stick or a bush grew near them to break the winds which could attack from any point of the compass.
The most conspicuous remaining feature of this coalfield's working life is the tall, stone airshaft of the Dane Colliery, tucked into the slope below the Buxton-Congleton highway, directly opposite Reeve Edge quarries. On a recent day of gusting wind and patchy cloud we passed this old sentinel before heading off along the track past Sparbent Barn and soon came to the head of the Cumberland Hollow. The sun now lit the long, green eastern flanks of Shutlingsloe beyond the trench of Wildboarclough. Here, where the track turns down into the Cumberland Hollow, there's evidence of shaley coal seams but little sign that this particular pocket has ever been worked.
It was a typical early spring morning; plenty of air movement, moody sunshine and heavily pregnant ewes in the lower fields beside the splashing Clough Brook. There was even stronger sunshine by the time we crossed the soggy moor beyond Shutlingsloe's summit cone, where the view across the Cheshire plain included a glinted reflection from Jodrell Bank's radio telescope and a suspicion of the Peckforton Hills and Beeston Tor through the blue haze beyond that, far to the west. As we went down through the old, ragged conifers of Macclesfield Forest we passed through a dead calm; the honking calls of waterfowl on Ridgegate reservoir reinforced the feeling of awakening spring.
