It is odd how shy people are of seeking a real change when they take a holiday. The city man, who plays golf in the suburbs every week-end throughout the rest of the year, can think of no better change than to play the same game by the sea-side in his August vacation. The middle-class villager usually departs for another village; the doctor takes a locum; the town-dweller from North or South makes a straight line for some London-by-the-sea; the nurse stays with another nurse; and people in general choose a country, near or far, that is only a glorified repetition of the countryside with which they are familiar. Conscious at last of the lack of imagination hitherto displayed in my own holidays, I determined to go to a Yorkshire coal-field, not that I might spend my time underground, for I had already visited the tube railways in London, but to see the countryside in which the smaller coal-fields lie and to make acquaintance with their inhabitants.

I know the corn-fields and the hay-fields, the Downs, the Cotswolds, the Cornish coast and the moors, so it seemed well to visit the coal-fields, the romantic spots of industrial England, wherein the smaller pits are buried. I avoided the larger mining districts, with their acres of glum houses, because it was the miners’ countryside that I desired to see. Staying with a friend who has to drive about the country for his work, I was left with an hour or so to spare in more than one mining village.