AFTER nearly three years, a campaign to raise money to mark the mass graves of the victims of the region's worst pit disaster has reached its target.

The £5,600 needed to mark the trenches in Stanley, where many of the 168 victims of the West Stanley Burns Pit Disaster lie, has been raised.

There is even money left over to organise a commemoration event to honour the victims of the explosion in 1909 when the memorial is unveiled in March.

The appeal reached its target when the Coalfields Regeneration Trust donated £720 and promised a further £180.

Former Stanley pitman Bob Drake has become a hero of the campaign, which was launched by The Advertiser and The Northern Echo in 2001, on the February 16 anniversary of the disaster.

As well as raising money, Mr Drake spent more than a year checking different and contradictory records to try to work out where each of the 168 men and boys were buried.

Eventually, a chance discovery of an ageing document meant he could a produce a definitive list of where each of the victims were.

As the target was reached, he said: "This is just fabulous news. It has taken a lot of hard work from a lot of people.

"One of the best things has been all the extra information that has come through about real, family tragedies."

Scotts Memorials, of Consett, will be commissioned to make the memorial on the site of three mass burial trenches, behind St Andrew's Church, in Stanley.

The memorial will bear the names of 54 men and boys who were buried in the trenches but whose families could not afford headstones.

The names of a further 64 miners who were buried elsewhere at the graveyard will also be engraved on it.

The names of all the miners who died have already been commemorated in a Stanley memorial built in the years following the disaster and another erected in the mid-Nineties. But this will be the first time the mass burial trenches have been marked.