Another story from William Chapman as featured in the Teesdale Mercury in February 1927…
Next came an incident at High Copley Colliery, a landsale colliery, from which coal was taken in carts or on ponies with panniers. One day, when the colliery yard was full of horses and carts, some young men experimented with the ball of the safety valve belonging to the egg-end boiler, and they got too near the fulcrum, when it blew back and allowed the steam to escape with a tremendous force, as if the boiler had burst. Every horse in the yard took fright and ran. Seven with carts galloped across a field and sided over at the first fence. One broken-winded horse went about four hundred yards along the road and stopped for want of breath. One horse with half a load of coal went down the Lead Mill bank at full speed and round a sharp turn at the bottom with nothing any worse. Six donkeys from Barnard Castle went down the same bank yoked in a wagon, which they flung before reaching the bottom.
It may be mentioned that the coal from this colliery took the first prize at the Crystal Palace.
When working a Deputy at Woodland Colliery a hewer reported he had hewed into an old coffin. When Mr. Chapman examined it he found it was the trunk of an oak tree, 8ft. long, upside down in the solid coal. It was quite black, but sound. He has some of the wood left still, and some large pieces of congealed water which have been formed in the coal mines, and ring like steel when tapped with a light hammer.
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