EAW015490 ENGLAND (1948). Billingley, Open Cast Coal Quarry south of the village, 1948. This image has been produced from a print marked by Aerofilms Ltd for photo editing.

We are looking broadly west.

EAW015504 is of Selby Abbey taken on the same day, 14th May 1948.

I wonder if the material being excavated is more likely to be something like Fullers Earth. How dark does that get? The overburden from coal tends to be shale, but this looks finer and "cleaner", like the Lower Greensand beds.

A bit of an educated(?) guess but I’m thinking that this is an open-cast coal mine site.

My reasoning is:

(a) Appearance in some of this set of images of a dark seam well below the original ground level and this dark material (coal?) being removed by lorry;

(b) LAING contractors sign on some earthmoving equipment (John Laing & Son had a contract for some such work round about 1948.

The location is far less certain but one POSSIBLE area is Heanor/ Carrington Farm/ Shipley Hall/ Mapperley/ Smalley area, west of Nottingham. There were a few open-cast mines being worked here in the late 1940s. One of them – Carrington – used a very large dragline excavator, on two ‘feet’ rather than caterpillar tracks. To see these, search BritainfromAbove using “opencast” as the key word.