Big Pit: National Coal Museum

The underground experience

Big Pit is the UK's leading mining museum. It is a real colliery, which gives visitors opportunity to take an authentic underground tour and walk the same passages walked by miners, who for 200 years extracted the precious mineral that powered the industrial revolution.

Kitted out in helmet, cap-lamp and battery pack, you descend 300 feet (90 metres) to an underground world of shafts, coal faces and levels, roadways, air doors and stables. With just the light of your cap-lamp to light the inky darkness and an ex-miner with first hand knowledge as your guide, you get a real sense of life at the coal face.

On the surface

Returning to the surface, the colliery building, the winding engine house, the blacksmiths workshop and pithead baths complete the picture of a working pit that at its height employed 1300 men.

Tour details

Underground tours take approximately 1 hour and entry to this unique attraction is free.