Much of Bailiff Bridge is built on former deep mines and former open quarry land although I have not found any records of recent mining activity in the village, however I have been able to find some old legal documents about parcels of land within the village that have been sold with the rights to abstract coal and ironstone from the land some records dating back to 1834, list some of the owners as ‘Physicians & Surgeons’ Arthur Homesfield who lived in Kettlewell and ‘William Whitteron Mines’ from Hampstead in the Borough of London, there is also records showing these parcels of land regularly changing hands along with the extraction rights into the early nineteen hundreds.
Agents acting for the Government and former British Coal Board still carry out regular checks on these old caped mine shafts for leakage and subsidence and in several parts of the village the houses suffer from water leaking from these old mineshafts in severe wet weather.
There is also reports dating from around 1960s that a family in Highfield Avenue woke up one morning to find a huge hole in their front garden and it took several loads of fly ash from the then Elland Power Station to fill the hole?
