As the crews stroke the Elvet, and the Durham Cow ruminates on an uncertain future, it is time again to visit the Land of the Prince Bishops and note some changes. Some forty years ago the land was dotted with pit heaps, some 26 underground coal mines had been producing coal from seams perhaps 700 ft below ground for up to a hundred years or more apiece, and the spoil bands dominated the landscape. But coal and its miners were not popular, and so now, as one drives around it is hard to find much evidence of that history. The land has been restored, and fields of rape and tall wind turbines now control a landscape where coal mining references are found only in the names of the odd village, the halves of a pit wheel, buried at the end of a housing estate, or the lone statue of a pit pony and his tub, isolated in a roundabout.