"TERROR-stricken they ran, tripping over a body" and the carcass of a pony that had been blown from its limbers, only to find one route blocked by a collapse.

"The gas was rising; Harry Pace fell, and though dragged by his friends, died in their arms." Twenty-four men died at Wingate Grange Colliery on October 14 1906. Their average age was 51; their bodies were laid out in a joiners' shop in two long rows for identification.

The current calamity to hit the mining industry is only one of a long history of disasters.

The rise and fall of County Durham's pits is told in a new, finelyillustrated book by Norman Emery, a Durham mineworker's son who is an archaeologist at the university.

The county was literally "founded on coal" The first evidence of mining is at Escomb near Bishop Auckland in 1183; the North-East's seams were formed 280m years ago.

But it was not until the industrial revolution at the start of the 19th Century that the region's great landowning families Londonderrys, Vane-Tempests, Peases, Lambtons began to exploit the black gold beneath their feet. Their early efforts were difficult. At The Hutton seam at Murton, for example, water rushed in, and it was not until the invention of powerful pumps that the shaft could be "tubbed out" (supported and waterproofed).

The men who went down these shafts or into these drifts were mainly local. Some Irishmen came over during the 1840s potato famine,joining the Welsh and Cornish (hence streets like Truro Avenue in Murton) attracted to the region.

It was a cradle to grave existence. "My mother used to carry me on her back to the pit heap, and then I descended the mine to act as a trapper boy," one miner recalled of his boyhood in Philadelphia in 1834.

A trapper boy would, for 13 hours a day, sit holding a string tied to a door. When anyone wanted to pass through he would pull the string, open the door, and then close it.

He would graduate to being a ponydriver and, at about 16, a putter, providing the hewers at the coalface with all they needed and removing their coal.

Hewers were the coal-winners, and their next promotion was deputy. These were first down at the start of a shift, igniting the lights, checking on safety and production production being particularly important as the miners were paid by results.

And if the miner ever made it to retirement collapse, fire, flood, explosion were likely to claim him in a moment, numerous lung diseases over a longer period of time he would be booted out of his colliery-owned home and into the workhouse. It was not until 1896 that philanthropic movements provided retired miners with a free home and coal supply. Of course, the miners had tried for strength through unity. The Durham Miners' Mutual Association was formed in 1869; the first mass meetings were held in 1871, and the Durham Miners' Gala began in 1872.

The 1879 recession brought lay-offs, strikes and violence to the county, leading a female speaker at a rally at Hebburn Colliery to say: "They say it is a free country and that our men are free. But I say not; I say it is a land of slavery. We are driven like the plough and horses in the fields of a foreign country." The rise of socialism this century saw the development of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, but the whole trades union movement suffered a severe setback when the 1926 General Strike collapsed leaving the miners to fight alone.

Author Norman Emery continues his social history through the founding of the NUM in 1945, the nationalisation of 1947, the crisis of the earlySeventies and the defeat of 1984-5. From the heyday of 304 pits and 165,246 employees in 1913, he concludes his story with just one mothballed and two working pits in the whole county.

Now there's just one still at work, and an enormous Governmental U-turn will be needed if he is to have enough material for even one more chapter.