Coal from Camerton by Neil Macmillen and Mike Chapman

Lightmoor Press 2014  £15

This is the story of one village in the Somerset coalfield, which reflected life in this part of Somerset for over two hundred years. It was an area isolated from the other coalfields in the Midlands and South Wales until the coming of the railways and it would prove to be one of the most contorted and faulted in the UK, the seams of coal being thin and rarely level. Mining here would call for different methods from other coalfields. As a result of the difficulties caused by the coalfield being heavily faulted the introduction of underground machinery and other improvements was often delayed. As a result, extraction became increasingly uneconomic during the 20th century, although some four thousand million tons of coal still remain untapped in the Somerset coalfield.