Your chance to visit an amazing place

Heritage Open Day on Saturday 10th September is your one and only chance this year to visit one of the oddest places around. Chatterley Whitfield is a strange collection of former colliery buildings - some beautiful, others ugly - on the edge of Stoke-on-Trent. Dense residential communities lie to the south and west, fields and eventually the Peak District to the east and north.

The colliery shut in 1976, and it was a mining museum until 1993. Since then, the buildings have been left to decay, and it is now an eerie, atmospheric place. Wildlife has adopted it - there was a large grass snake there a couple of weeks ago, and I watched a sparrowhawk wrestling with a pigeon on the ground. Trees grow out of the headgear (the wheels at the top of the mineshafts), and huge cracks have appeared in many brick walls.

Saturday will be the annual opportunity for members of the public to go on guided tours round the site (sadly going underground is not possible), but places must be booked in advance. Telephone Mark Homer at Stoke-on-Trent City Council on (01782) 232334. I advise you to do it quickly as numbers are limited.

(Photo from the Friends of Chatterley Whitfield website, courtesy of Tony Jones)