Location of Union & Cannop, Venus & Jupiter pits. (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Thursday, April 21, 2016, 20:28 (3131 days ago) @ MPGriffiths

George BALDWIN of Bream Eaves and
James BALDWIN of Camomile Freen
aforesaid

in equal undivided monities (as free Miners)

To Union
To Cannop Engine
and
To Venus & Jupiter

+ an Edward BALWDIN

Good evening MPG, great to see you back on the forum again, I hope you're well, and big thanks for the heads-up wrt the Thomas Sopwith online book.

The very best reference website for detailed history of individual FoD pits is the exceptional Lightmoor site, which refers to your Baldwin info on this page abt the "Union & Cannop" pits
http://lightmoor.co.uk/forestcoal/CoalUnion%26Cannop.html

(Incidentally, for newcomers such as Mary Lou, it took me some time to realise that the homepage menus for the Lightmoor site are accessed by clicking the black Headframe icons at base of each page.)

In later years these small pits had become "swallowed-up", both in terms of ownership and physically underground, by the Cannop Colliery, as the above webpage describes.
http://forest-of-dean.net/gallery/fod_variety_2/pages/page_77.html

The location of Cannop's pithead & shafts are shown on this map, labelled by their names c1894, but remember that by these later years the workings spread a long way underground, in some cases miles.
http://lightmoor.co.uk/forestcoal/EastDean.html
The Cannop Level pit is midway down the lefthand side of the map (coal mines are black spots, iron mines are brown). The heavy blue line running south down thro the area is the Severn & Wye Railway, the much thinner pale blue line next to it is Cannop Brook, which gave the valley it's name.

This map is just a portion of one of the whole Forest of Dean area, see link below. Clicking on it will enlarge each of it's portions. A "gale" is the portion of land under which the gale's owner can mine.
http://lightmoor.co.uk/forestcoal/Overviewmap.html

----

The villages of Parkend and then Whitecroft are only about a mile and a half south down Cannop Valley, look for Princess Royal to the left of the word "Whitecroft". This is the general location of the aforementioned small "Venus and Jupiter" pits, along with many other local pits their underground workings had been absorbed into Princess Royal by the time this map was drawn in 1894.
see http://lightmoor.co.uk/forestcoal/CoalPrincessRoyal.html
and also http://lightmoor.co.uk/forestcoal/CoalBeaufort.html

Like Cannop, Princess Royal would become one of the six "big" collieries left working across the Dean which were nationalised in the 1940s.
http://forest-of-dean.net/gallery/bream/pages/page_15.html

These maps show the Dean pits by 1949 http://www.cmhrc.co.uk/site/maps/gcmg_map26.html

Mary Lou, it may possibly interest you that this site has an extensive database concerning mining accidents across all the UK. If you search "Baldwin", for example, it lists 57 cases, a few of which were in the Dean area, altho of course that doesn't necessarily mean they're your ancestors.
use http://www.cmhrc.co.uk/site/disasters/index.html
Re it's search engine, like many it struggles if you enter too much info. I recommend just stick to a surname and then browse down the results, narrowing-them down by reading the "town", before clicking on an individual to reveal more detail. In the case of "Baldwin" all the quoted towns except one are not in the FoD area at all, but in the north of England, but this still leaves lots of entries to browse thro' where no town is given.

A detailed history of FoD mining across the centuries may be found here
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/glos/vol5/pp326-354#h3-0003