Village History

Bishop Sutton is a small village within the Chew Valley in NE Somerset. It lies south of Chew Valley Lake and north of the Mendip Hills, approximately ten miles south of Bristol on the A368, Weston-super-Mare to Bath road. Bishop Sutton and the neighbouring village of Stowey form the civil parish of Stowey Sutton.

Here is a map of the village as provided by those nice people at Google:


View Larger Map

 

The Background Story

The main industry in the village was a coal mine owned by J. Lovell & Sons from 1835 to 1929, which was part of the Somerset coalfield. There was also a large flour mill, part of which was converted into flats. Coal mining Much of the exploratory survey work which identified the geology of the area was carried out by William Smith, who became known as the “Father of English Geology”, building on earlier work in the same area by John Strachey, who lived at Sutton Court.

The Pensford coal basin lies in the northern area of the Somerset coalfield around Bishop Sutton, Pensford, Stanton Drew, Farmborough and Hunstrete. The date for the first pits around Bishop Sutton are uncertain but there was at least one before 1719. By 1824 a collection of four bell pits were identified in field tithe No 1409, and four shaft pits in field tithe No 1428, but they were no longer working.

The Old Pit, which was also known as Sutton Top Pit or Upper Sutton Pit, was dug before 1799 and owned by Lieutenant Henry Fisher, who sold it in 1821 to Robert Blinman Dowling and several seams of coal were identified and exploited. After Dowling’s death the Old Pit was sold to Mr. T.T. Hawkes in 1852, but he defaulted on the payments and it was sold in 1853 to William Rees-Mogg (an ancestor of William Rees-Mogg) and his associates. The shaft reached a depth of 304 feet (93 m), but went out of production by 1855, when the “New” Pit which had been sunk in the early 1800s but then closed, was reopened and deepened to exploit deeper seams. The New Pit had two shafts of 4 feet (1.2 m) diameter, one for winding and one for pumping.

In 1896 it was owned by F. Spencer, New Rock Colliery, and in 1908 by Jesse Lovell and Sons. The pit finally closed in 1929.