Heavy rain was beating down on the roof as John, a former miner, told us about the various activities that would have been taking place in the Lady Victoria Colliery until it closed in1981.  It would have been a very noisy place and full of coal dust at the Pithead with all the machinery and a stream of trucks of coal arriving before the coal was sorted then dumped into trains below.  The colliery is now the Scottish National Mining Museum  with exhibits and a recreation of an underground roadway and coalface to give an impression of the conditions of the time.  John spoke of the sorts of work that people did after the improvements in the 50s and the constant danger underground of rock falls, floods and lethal gases.  70 years ago over 1700 people worked there with thousands elsewhere in Scotland and in Britain.  Now in the whole of Briain there were only 363 in March this year. The emergence of alternative energy resources like wind and solar power ensures that the saying that “Coal is King” no longer applies.
Elsewhere the museum exhibits the history of coal mining and the working conditions throughout the ages including the use of young children and horses to pull the trucks of coal in narrow passages many feet below ground.  The life of the miner and his family was very hard and miners were happy to leave when the pit closed once they had the chance of different work nearby.