I'VE written here before that I'm fascinated by old Durham colliery communities that were obliterated when their pits died. East Howle was one such, and I've just been talking to Thompson "Tommy" Dodds of Middridge. Now 82, he gave his place of birth as "Eden Pit".

I'd never heard of it before. Tommy tells me it was a collection of 36 houses which served the Eden Pit, a shortlived pit which was about three-quarters of a mile south of Middridge - a village sandwiched by Shildon on the east and Newton Aycliffe on the west. The Eden was sunk in 1872 beside the original Stockton and Darlington Railway but was abandoned by 1894. Its houses, though, weren't cleared for many decades afterwards.

The company which operated the Eden sunk a second pit in 1874 slightly to the north-west of Middridge. It was the Charles Pit and this one operated until 1914. It was obviously a big concern: in the 1890s it employed more than 400 men and boys.

The Durham Mining Museum - www.dmm.org.uk - is a mine of information (ahem) and it has a page devoted to the Charles. It tells how in its 30 year life there were 15 deaths there. Two, possibly four, of them were in very similar, and extraordinarily casual, circumstances. The cage was the lift that carried men up and down the shaft - I remember going down Wearmouth Colliery in Sunderland shortly before it shut about 20 years ago and being struck by what a rickety wire cage we were dropped down in, so 90 years previously it must have been a worryingly rudimentary affair. In the Charles Pit in the early 20th Century, the signal to get the cage to stop at your seam was two raps on the shaft. When you were inside, you gave one rap and up it went. Sadly, on at least two occasions - 1907 and 1909 - the engineman only heard one of the two raps. Rather than stop the cage, he lifted it. Therefore two men two years a part stepped into what they thought was the cage, only it had gone, and they plummeted 26 fathoms to their deaths.