Is it worth trying to get mine abandonment plans from the coal authority? I realise there is a charge for them. Would they clearly show the extent of any workings and the area affected?
That depends on how much detail you really want?
You can identify the extent of the workings by visiting the Coal Authorities online mapping tool here:
http://mapapps2.bgs.ac.uk/coalauthority/home.html On the RHS in the Data Layer menu, click the tab 'Surface Mining (past and current)'. This shows you the extent of the recorded opencast workings.
From this I can identify opencast workings in parts of Bullcliffe Wood and Margery Wood .There are opencast workings in the Hoyland Bank woods to the immediate south of Billham Shrogg (a superb name by the way ........ anyone know its origins?).
The extent of the workings shown on the Coal Authority interactive map viewer is the actual extent of the coal extracted. The actual extent of the excavations will be greater (allowing for excavation slopes and access ramps). In addition the area of disturbance was even greater as there would be a requirement to form overburden, topsoil and subsoil tips. The Coal Authority will hold abandonment plans for the workings which will detail the extent of coal excavated in individual seams (with geological details such as coal thickness, seam sections, faults etc) but probably have little information regarding the extent of excavations.
I know that the workings at Bullcliffe Wood date from around 1944 (more of that in a moment) so would have been carried out by civil engineering contractors under contract to the Ministry of Works (who began the modern opencast coal industry in 1943 to serve the national need). I suspect that due to the limited extent of these workings (effectively stripping the outcrops of individual seams) that they all date from the same period and were probably undertaken by the same contractors. As the works were completed under contract there would have been extensive records kept by the Ministry of Works (photos/plans etc) and it is very likely that these will have been kept in archive (most likely at the National Archive at Kew but possibly in archive of the West Yorkshire Archive Services).
The workings at Bullciffe Wood were underway in 1944 and being undertaken by Sir Lindsay Parkinson (who became Fairclough Parkinson Mining who operated amongst other sites the giant St Adains site near Leeds before being absorbed into the AMEC group and disappearing out of the mining business in the late 1990s). The workings can be seen in this film of the King and Queen visiting the Wakefield Area in 1944 [starting at 1:22]
Its a cracking film. The overburden appears to be stripped by a combination of dragline, with the final overburden layer being removed by a face shovel loading tippler wagons to be hauled to tip by a steam locomotive working on temporary tracks!