Culm Banks

An excellent culm bank image from this page. We called them "culm banks" where I grew up, but I like boney piles or gob piles. William W. Lewis, in Black Rock, wrote this:

Now at the lower end of town we used to have culm banks anywhere from seventy to a hundred feet high. We, as young boys in this town, used to go to the colliery and get long pieces of sheet iron. We would curl up the end like a toboggan, put a wire on the back end of it, pull the sheet iron up to the top of the culm bank and then ride down on it.

Yup, only we used cardboard, which was more readily available in my day.

[quotation from Black Rock found on p. 139 of Angus K. Gillespie's Folklorist of the Coal Fields]