Ripping things out of the earth is currently in bad odour thanks to laxness in the Gulf of Mexico, but we all live in comfort because of 2,000 years of accident-strewn mining, quarrying and general exploitation of the subterranean world. Geoff Coyle proves himself a timely guide to the sheer scale and variety of ways in which Britain has been "wounded", to use Naomi Klein's description of the BP well this month, by every kind of shaft, top-slicing and explosion which human inventiveness has been able to devise.
Despite such alarming sentences as "very interesting things happen when igneous rocks intrude into sedimentary rocks", Coyle's expertise ensures that the excitement and engineering skill behind such necessary schoolroom groundwork spill out constantly, like a lava flow. Mention early on of the Whin Sill rock fault excites the mind with images of the geology's man-made consequences such as Bamburgh castle and Hadrian's wall. Like the pantiles of North Yorkshire or the honey-coloured stone of Bath, they are not there by accident. To understand our lovely and complicated island landscape, we cannot simply look around. We must burrow. And so we have for two millennia and more, helped by men (and sometimes women) who came from all over the world to excavate our clay, our bismuth and our tourmaline. Romans from North Africa left lead ingots stamped in Latin; the Irish navvied everywhere; the Germans were so randy after a day's coppermining in Hechstetter's Nick, deep under Catbells, that they were barracked on Derwent Island to protect the women of 16th century Keswick. And Coyle explains how these valuable minerals are just a fragment of the whole picture. His table of the startling number of "main" British minerals, from alum to zinc, is worth taking on walks or car journeys with inquisitive children.
Take alum, the first alphabetically, and the centre of a fascinating episode in mining involving a papal monopoly, Vatican mining experts smuggled to England in barrels, and Londoners' urine, which was part of the production method and used to ballast coal ships returning to Newcastle. Alum's mother-ore, potash, has kept up the strange-and-wonderful tradition at Boulby near Whitby. Down the deepest mine in Europe, staff from the Institute of Underground Sciences keep watch for dark matter, that elusive substance proven to exist but never yet seen.
The Institute of Underground Sciences! Did you know there was such a body? Coyle must have done from an early age, when his curiosity took him into mining engineering from a family background in face-working for coal. His age was unfortunate; when he joined the National Coal Board in the 1960s, the prospects for an ambitious young man in that once great industry were already fading. Luckily his tutor, Alan Grierson, later Crown Estates' Mineral Agent another fine title used to tell his students: "A mining engineer can turn his hand to anything." Coyle proved the point in a Swedish copper mine and then academia, and the dictum also applies to his book.
The Riches Beneath Our Feet is itself a summary at 260 pages it could hardly be otherwise but it serves as a signpost to the literature available for those who want to dig more deeply. Its great value is Coyle's comprehensive swing through every sort of mining and its history, and a dispassionate view of a subject which, pace Deepwater Horizon, has generated endless bitterness, emotion and danger.
The foreword warns of the serious risks of exploring sealed-up workings. And as Cumbria grieves over recent loss of life, it is worth remembering that Whitehaven lost 136 men and boys in the 1906 Wellington pit explosion and 104 in 1947, when the William pit went up. Coyle covers such tragedies thoroughly, including the fictional Wheal Do-em pit invented by the author of The Coral Island, RM Ballantyne. But he is also fair to the entrepreneurs. The Fitzwilliams of South Yorkshire were so respected that the Yorkshire branch of the National Union of Mineworkers joined with them to try to protect the family's park (always open to the public) from open-casting vindictively ordered by Labour's Manny Shinwell in 1946.
He cannot fit everything in; take, for example, his brief but moving account of the Aberfan tragedy 20 years later, when 144 people, including 116 children in school at the time, were buried by a spoil-tip landslide. He tells how the alarm phone did not work because thieves repeatedly "mined" its copper wiring, but does not quote the language of the subsequent inquiry, among the strongest ever used by an official tribunal. Pit officials were described as responding to cross-examination "like moles being questioned about the habits of birds". It was a devastating exposé of complacency in an industry which has no room for that.
Coyle's book has a part to play in maintaining standards, for mining and quarrying are not a matter of history. Both flourish, on a reduced if more civilised scale. Salt for our tables and roads is carved out from beneath Cheshire; conservation requirements have led to a revival in the cutting of Lake District slate. Even coal is more productive, in terms of output per miner, albeit in a world which sees some 16m tonnes cut per year, compared with 200m a century ago. But the wheel turns; the UK has more than 2.3bn tonnes of reserves, and new technologies may allow coal to be converted into gas in situ, and then pumped to the surface.
And then there is oil, King Coal's successor on the mineral throne, but not included in this book. It needs a sequel of its own, from the extraordinary saga of the North Sea wells to little Tibshelf in Derbyshire. Best known for its service station on the M1, this is where Britain's first inland gusher was sunk in the 1920s, producing high-quality oil until the end of the second world war.
Martin Wainwright's True North: In Praise of England's Better Half is published by Guardian Books.
