“The Bottoms” succeeded to “Hell
Row”. Hell Row was a block of thatched,
bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on Greenhill
Lane. There lived the colliers who worked in
the little gin-pits two fields away. The brook
ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by these
small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by
donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin.
And all over the countryside were these same pits,
some of which had been worked in the time of Charles
II, the few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down
like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and
little black places among the corn-fields and the
meadows. And the cottages of these coal-miners,
in blocks and pairs here and there, together with
odd farms and homes of the stockingers, straying over
the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.
Then, some sixty years ago, a sudden change took place,
gin-pits were elbowed aside by the large mines of
the financiers. The coal and iron field of Nottinghamshire
and Derbyshire was discovered. Carston, Waite
and Co. appeared. Amid tremendous excitement,
Lord Palmerston formally opened the company’s
first mine at Spinney Park, on the edge of Sherwood
Forest.
About this time the notorious Hell Row, which through
growing old had acquired an evil reputation, was burned
down, and much dirt was cleansed away.
Carston, Waite & Co. found they had struck on a good
thing, so, down the valleys of the brooks from Selby
and Nuttall, new mines were sunk, until soon there
were six pits working. From Nuttall, high up on
the sandstone among the woods, the railway ran, past
the ruined priory of the Carthusians and past Robin
Hood’s Well, down to Spinney Park, then on to
Minton, a large mine among corn-fields; from Minton
across the farmlands of the valleyside to Bunker’s
Hill, branching off there, and running north to Beggarlee
and Selby, that looks over at Crich and the hills of
Derbyshire: six mines like black studs on the
countryside, linked by a loop of fine chain, the railway.
To accommodate the regiments of miners, Carston, Waite
and Co. built the Squares, great quadrangles of dwellings
on the hillside of Bestwood, and then, in the brook
valley, on the site of Hell Row, they erected the
Bottoms.
The Bottoms consisted of six blocks of miners’
dwellings, two rows of three, like the dots on a blank-six
domino, and twelve houses in a block. This double
row of dwellings sat at the foot of the rather sharp
slope from Bestwood, and looked out, from the attic
windows at least, on the slow climb of the valley
towards Selby.
