Building a bright future after horror of Thatcher.

Byline: Paul Routledge

AT a brisk step, it took me seven minutes to cover the 660-yard walk on Frickley colliery's old muck heap.

For 90 years, miners dropped this same distance from the pit top to the lowest seam in a matter of seconds. Sometimes in heart-stopping free fall if the winder had had a bad night.

A path exactly mirroring the drop is the centrepiece of a new country park, built on the graveyard of miners' hopes.

Along the way are recorded the seams: Dunsil, Barnsley, Newhill, Shafton (but not Cudworth, which I once went through) and the depths they were worked.

Old men who won the coal at Frickley - a "big hitter" producing a million tonnes a year and employing 4,000 men in its heyday - ambled down the path reliving memories at the park's official opening last weekend.

A cool wind blew, but nothing like the withering Thatcherite blast that cut through in 1993 when the pit was closed.

But who says these pit villages are dead? Frickley country park, a pounds 7million investment by a Labour council and a Labour Government, proves there is still life in them thar muck heaps.

In recent days, doom-mongers have had a field day trashing these communities in the wake of appalling child-on-child violence in the village of Edlington, a few miles away.

But here there are real fields, full of wild flowers, with skylarks, kestrels and bee orchids. And a lake, cycle trails, long looping walks with scenic views of wooded hills.

Seventy thousand trees have been planted on the undulating 180-acre site. Frickley has a great past and its village, South Elmsall, has a real future.

Hundreds of new homes are planned on land next to the park. People want to live here.

Let's not get carried away. This is industrial South Yorkshire, not chocolate-box Wensleydale.

But it's an encouraging start to rebuilding shattered communities. Local people, some of them survivors of the Great Strike of 25 years ago, marched up the lane to the old colliery site behind the NUM banner and the renowned Carlton Main brass band for the opening.

There were many, many fewer than trudged this same route in 1986 when they returned to work after the Great Strike for Jobs.

I sensed a sadness among those who marched, and those who turned out to watch. It was a remembrance of things past, not just a celebration of the future.

There is also a political lesson here (with me, there always is). Local councillor Laurie Harrison, a moving force behind the park, joked "there are villains in the Government - but they're our villains." He appealed: "But for God's sake, keep faith with it or we shall all be lost."

Amen to that, Laurie. Under the Tories, there'd be no National Coalfields Programme to rebuild life.