Further to my recent uploading of some early 20th century photographs of Snowdown colliery on to my Facebook page “Old Nonington” I have decided to upload them to this website and add a brief description of what the location of the colliery was like before work began on the site in 1907 and during the following couple of decades.I hope to show how the surrounding countryside eventually disappeared under the colliery buildings and spoil heap. The maps and photographs included in this article are to help record the colliery’s gradual expansion. This article is not intended to be a history of Snowdown Colliery, which closed in October of 1987, there are very many other sources of information which more than adequately cover the subject of the colliery’s history and that of the nearby mining village of Aylesham.

Snowdown Colliery was sunk into what was known as the “Great Field” of the Holt Street estate located in the Manor of Fredville in the old parish of Nonington, which by the time work had begun on the colliery had evolved into Holt Street Farm. The “Great Field”, which measured some thirty-one and a half acres or so, and its neighbours to the east:Down Bottom and Close, Twwelve Acres, River Field and Broomhill Wood, all gradually disappeared underneath the colliery’s buildings and ever expanding spoil heap which eventually reached as far Nightingale Lane. Snowdown Colliery and the adjoining hamlet built to house colliery workers both took their name from the nearby Snow Down, which extends in a south-westerly direction towards Womenswold from close to the colliery site.

Above: an unedited section of the 1797 Ordnance Survey map showing Nonington.

Below: Nonington as shown on the 1797 Ordnance Survey map after AI clean up and renaming
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The “Great Field” on which Snowdown Colliery was sunk was shown, but not named, on the first Ordnance Survey map of the Nonington area published in 1797. This was the first properly surveyed map of Kent. The above is an AI enhancement of the relevant section of this map which retains all of its original features, but I have made some amendments to the naming as shown on the original map to avoid confussion over the location of various places.
By some cartographer’s quirk Curleswood Park Farm was shown on the original 1797 OS map as “Nonnington Park”, to my knowledge this is the only OS map on which this misnaming occurs.
The 1797 map also showed Holt Street as Old Street, and Esole Street as Hazle Street. In the old East Kent dialect, now sadly consigned to history, Holt Street would have been pronounced as ‘Old Strit and Esole Street as “Ayzle” or “Eyezle Strit”. The surveyors obviously wrote down phonetically the names they were given by local inhabitants. At this time native born inhabitants would have used the old Kent dialect, what was to become known as Received Pronunciation was used by the upper classes and those of the burgeoning middle classes who wished to imitate their social betters to appear more cultured.

In 1859 Nonington Parish Vestry, the precursor of the Parish Council, commissioned a survey for a map of the parish of Nonington on a scale of 25 inches to the mile to accurately record land and property within the parish for the purpose of taxation. The taxes raised were to be used for paying Nonington’s contribution to the Eastry Union. This map is known as the Poor Law Commissioners map.
Below is a section of the map which in addition to recording land and property also shows the route of the London to Dover railway line through the parish of Nonington that was not completed until 1861.

The black line on the map marks the extent of the spoil heaps, always referred to locally as “Snowdown Tip”, resulting from over seventy of mining from a depth of three thousand feet. The tip was once clearly visible from a distance but in the just short of forty years since the closure of Snowdown Colliery trees and plants have gradually grown and disguised the spoil so that even though it comes to within a few yards of Nightingale Lane the tip is now only obvious to those in the know as to its origins.