Former Cornish pumping engine house at Hemingfield Colliery

Former colliery pumping engine house, 1843 for the 5th Earl Fitzwilliam under the direction of Benjamin Biram. Converted to domestic use in 1934 as part of a mine pumping station which operated between 1920 and 1989.

MATERIALS: finely-dressed, horizontally-tooled sandstone ashlar; a 1934 red brick extension and flat concrete roofing.

PLAN: the engine house is single-celled of two storeys, now with an inserted domestic staircase and room divisions. The brick extension on the south-east side provides an additional room to each floor and includes the current entrance to the building.

EXTERIOR: the south-west wall of the building is the bob wall of the engine house: the wall that supported the beam of the steam engine. This is built of very massive, very tightly jointed stone blocks, the wall being over a metre thick. To its centre there is a tall, narrow, bricked-up aperture facing the top of the pumping shaft immediately to the south-west. Attached to the head of the wall are the backstays of the reinforced concrete headframe above the pumping shaft.

The other three walls beyond the sides of the bob wall are built of smaller, but still well-dressed and tightly-laid, stone blocks. The north-west wall has a large, tall arched opening that would have allowed the insertion and removal of the large cylinder for the steam engine. This is blocked with matching stonework that was later cut into to form a large ground-floor opening with an exposed steel I-beam lintel. To the left, north-east, at both ground and first floor, there are smaller domestic window openings that also have I-beam lintels. At the time of the site inspection (2019), the large inserted ground floor opening was infilled with blockwork. The south-east wall is largely covered by the brick extension, but includes one inserted window to both floors, again with exposed I-beam lintels. The door and window openings in the brick extension also have I-beam lintels. The north east wall is now blind but the stonework suggests that this wall may originally have had a large tall central window to light the interior and the steam engine.

INTERIOR: C20 inserted stairs, partitions and wall-linings potentially concealing original features.

NOTE: the associated pumping shaft and concrete headframe, along with the rest of the former Hemingfield Colliery and the ground beneath the engine house are all included within a Scheduled Monument.