A YEAR-long strike, marches, delegations to the capital, tough talking and reasoned persuasion - Murton miners tried them all to save their pit.

Like so many of their coalfield colleagues, the east Durham colliers waged battle not only for their jobs, but for the very future of their close-knit community.

But on November 29, 1991, the fight was lost when the men on the final shift came up from the depths to face a bleak and uncertain future.

Only days earlier, the Murton miners had stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a last-ditch bid to stop the closure.

British Coal ignored their pleas and, with indecent haste, shut the North- East's last remaining inland pit.

The village was shocked. For a while, the redundancy money cushioned families and the local economy but, as the cash ran out, cracks began to appear in the fabric of a village which, in its heyday, was all but self-sufficient.

When coal was King, Murton prospered. The village bristled with businesses, including a giant Co-operative store giving "divvie'' on goods from a pin to a piano.

There were shops of every kind, pubs, clubs, snooker halls, three cinemas, chapels, churches, a massive colliery welfare hall, a welfare park and the only olympic size swimming pool between Edinburgh and Leeds.

Sadly, most have now gone.

Without their economic mainstay the audiences at the cinemas dwindled, the players at the snooker halls stayed at home, other businesses went bust and the much-loved swimming pool became too costly to maintain.

More jobs were lost when the deteriorating local economy forced the closure of the large Co-op bakery, the Rediffusion works and the once- busy Northern Bus depot.

Rolling grassed areas replaced the blackened pit complex, and the familiar aerial bucket flights which once carried pit waste to the spoil heaps soon disappeared from the skyline.

For many of the ten years since the pit shut, optimism has remained in short supply.

But, while the population has steadily declined to the numbers of a century ago, those who stayed have remained ready to clutch at any straw which drifted their way.

Miraculously, a happy ending may well have been written for the village which wouldn't die.

Firstly, hope came in the shape of the £1.5m Glebe centre, a multi-purpose complex which, in replacing the Miners Welfare Hall, has put the heart back into the community.

Then it came in the victory by Easington District Council and local residents to secure approval for a £36m retail park at Dalton Flatts - bringing 1,100 precious jobs.

It is fitting irony that the life-saving shopping mall should be constructed on the site of Murton's old pit heap