Roofers in Wath upon Dearne

The roofs of Wath upon Dearne

Wath was already notable before coal: the poet James Montgomery called it "the Queen of Villages" in the early 1800s, and the Dearne and Dove Canal, cut through the town between 1798 and 1804, carried coal along a stretch so wide it was nicknamed the "Bay of Biscay". By 1907 Wath marshalling yard had become one of the most significant railway freight yards in Britain, with three separate stations once serving the town before Beeching-era closures left it with none.

What made Wath different from an ordinary pit village was Manvers Main, sunk on Earl Manvers' land on the edge of town from the late 1800s. Alongside the coal it held British Coal's own regional headquarters and laboratories, plus a coking and by-products plant that ran until 1981, making Wath the administrative and technical centre of the coalfield rather than only a place that dug it. Manvers Main and the neighbouring Wath Main Colliery, sunk from 1873, were amalgamated in 1986 and the whole complex closed on 25 March 1988. Since the mid-1990s the 45-acre site has been Manvers Lake, run by a charitable trust alongside the RSPB's Old Moor wetland reserve, a genuinely different fate from the business parks and housing that replaced most other South Yorkshire collieries.

The town centre around Montgomery Square, with All Saints Church and Montgomery Hall, sits inside a conservation area designated on 23 February 1977, while Wath Urban District Council's own 1950s Newhill Estate added more than 600 houses on the other side of town. Both sit within reach of the River Dearne: the Environment Agency keeps a standing flood warning area covering Mill Lane, West Street, Green Ings Lane and Station Road, on a river that reached a record 4.41 metres a few miles upstream at Darfield in the June 2007 floods.