I’ll tell you a true story now.

I was just outside the house one day, I was throwing a ball up against the edge of the mill house. I’d say it could have been about the end of the war, about ’45, ’46. I might have been around five or six, I reckon. I was throwing the ball, and I looked round and there was a car coming up the old track. It pulled in by the garden wall. Two men got out of this black car and they armed our dad out of the back seat. He was on afternoons, and this would have been about teatime, about five o’clock. And them two chaps brought him home and armed him round – it was a nice day – and let him sit on the front doorstep. And they said, ‘Cheerio, Harry,’ and off they went.

Our dad was laid on our couch all night. He was paralysed. Now this is where the story starts.

He had gone to work, and as soon as he had knelt down and started to work, a big stone come down – wallop – massive stone, from near the top. And he was under that stone. One of the men he was working with said, ‘Looks like we better get some help,’ and the other man said, ‘Don’t rush, ’im’ve bloody had it.’ But he did go and get some help, and the other man sat on this big rock with a roll-up fag, and all of a sudden he heard somebody say, ‘I be’n’t bloody dead! I be still here!’

(Gordon Brooks, retired collier, Northern United Colliery, Forest of Dean)

That night I saw it softly blazing out of the darkness: nothing.

The aperture contracts: five feet by five, four feet by four, three by three, all fours, head down, iron rails under your hands. Phil is pushing a cart containing three lengths of old telegraph pole for roof supports: each is about three feet long – two posts and a ‘cap’. The eternal drip of water, like something inside your brain. A whiff of hydrocarbons – winch grease, chainsaw oil, oxidising coal. Newcomers are told not to look up, just as novice rock climbers are told don’t look down. Up you look: a roof of jumbled planks, offcuts and wedges packed between pairs of supports, above which are maybe 10,000 tonnes of sandstone, shale and clay. The forces at work upon the level do not only bear downwards. The Coleford High Delf, which is the coal seam being worked here, is prone to ‘heave’, the clay floor surging up to squash a working out of existence. Leave your mattock at the coalface and you might come back tomorrow to find it half swallowed. Nature, which it seems doesn’t want a mine to exist, is constrained only by the care of those who work here and their desire to make it home for dinner. After twenty minutes, we’ve crawled about 170 yards. Your neck goes, your back goes; you feel it, weirdly, in your flanks. You are, in a particular sense, debased. Then a spectral paleness, as if daylight is somehow percolating through the vast overburden: what the Old Men called ‘nothing’, Fibroporia vaillantii, a fungus that coats rotten timbers in cobwebby white wefts of mycelia.

Touch it and – puff – gone – nothing.

Finally real light, and you realise how hungry you have been for it – for light other than that projected by your own headlamp. Here, on his knees at the end of the tunnel, is Mike Howell. ‘He’s riddled with arthritis,’ his son had told me, ‘but put him underground and he’s a completely different person.’ Mike and his friend Phil Schwarz have been working side by side since about 1975, mostly here at Wallsend, a former colliery in a valley on the south-western edge of the Forest of Dean. They are both seventy-four and had long careers in engineering. For the past six years, they’ve been working to reopen part of a level that was originally established in the 1860s. This involves shoring up the roof and walls and clearing many tonnes of spoil. Finds in the mine: one nineteenth-century oil lamp, one clay pipe, one tallow-dip candle, ‘1898’ painted on a section of roof. Losses: one £3,000 watch, innumerable tools, various intangibles. According to the old mine surveyor’s plan, the level is likely to lead, eventually, to a large area of unmined coal. ‘We’ve brushed past some coal that was left,’ says Mike, ‘and it’s some seriously thick coal. Black from top to bottom. Black, glassy coal.’

He’s using a long crowbar to lever a half-tonne boulder of sandstone from a sloping blockage of rubble and clay. This is how far they have got after six years of on–off digging: 200 yards, equivalent to tunnelling under the length of a football pitch and most of the way back, much of it through collapsed workings, putting in a timber support, or ‘setting’, every foot where the roof is particularly bad. ‘Mining the Coleford High Delf is a game of patience. If you’re nosy and you poke your nose out, something is going to fall on it. If we can make a metre a week, we’re lucky.’

However closely you have consulted the old surveyor’s plans, however pointed your instincts, you can never be certain that a panel of coal marked as intact will be there when you break through. The Old Men were not reliable record keepers, especially when a royalty was payable to the Crown on every tonne. Mike and Phil’s objective is still 120 yards away. They’ll both be into their eighties by the time they reach it, at the present rate. But you never know. Maybe we’ll break through this fall and the level ahead will be as clear as the day it was dug.

The fields around Gloucester were flooded, field after field, but the sky was a pure, arid blue, and when I reached the Forest, steam was being driven from the roadside trees by the winter sun. It is in the nature of forest to hide the contours of the land from which it rises, even in leafless winter, but sometimes a surprise vista would open up as the road mounted the brow of a hill, and for a few seconds you were looking across a valley to a conifer-toothed ridge a mile or more away, and at those moments, the Forest of Dean – which at its widest is ten miles from edge to edge – felt as boundless as the Siberian taiga. A Forester could be forgiven for having an inflated sense of its significance.

On the car radio they were talking about COP28, the UN climate conference in Dubai. The agenda was partly devoted to coal. Accounting for about 40 per cent of fossil-fuel emissions, coal has been responsible for over a third of the average global temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution. The showpiece announcement, on what was called ‘Energy Day’, came from the United States: along with nine other new member states, it would be joining a UK–Canadian initiative called the Powering Past Coal Alliance, whose signatories commit to phasing out coal-fired power stations by 2035. Britain’s only such facility, in Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, is set to close this year, but as of December 2023 coal mining continued commercially at six UK sites, and planning approval has been granted for a seventh in Whitehaven, Cumbria. Since 2020, revised air-quality regulations have banned the sale of coal as a household fuel in Britain.

The Forest of Dean lies cornered-in by the rivers Severn and Wye on the far western edge of Gloucestershire, not far from the Welsh border. Historically, it was forest in both senses: an unenclosed hunting ground for the ‘princely delight and pleasure’ of the king; and forest as we know it, a place dominated by trees – oak, beech, ash, birch, holly. The oaks, broad and straight and strong, were so valuable to the Royal Navy that, according to the diarist John Evelyn, the commander of the Spanish Armada was ordered to raze the Forest upon making landfall. Its residents have always enjoyed certain common rights over it: to gather timber, to graze sheep, to quarry stone, and to mine iron, ochre and coal. The Lawes and Privileges of the Freeminers were first written down in 1610, having been granted, so tradition has it, by Edward III, in gratitude to the Forest miners who’d aided him in sacking Berwick by undermining the town’s walls. Subject to a royalty payable to the king, and the approval of the Crown, a freeminer was entitled to mine whatever ground he wished, except for orchards or graveyards, within an area roughly coterminous with the Forest. Since 1838, when it was decided that the customary rights should be codified in law, freemining has been governed by the Dean Forest (Mines) Act.