The Lost Chapel Beneath Huntington’s Mining Mountain

A wooded hill on the edge of Huntington hides an extraordinary piece of Staffordshire history. Littleton Leisure Park was once a vast colliery spoil heap, built from thousands of tonnes of stone and shale brought up from beneath the Cannock Chase Coalfield. Yet historic maps mark something much older beneath its eastern side: the site of a vanished chapel. A document from 1548 records a tiny chapel dedicated to St Margaret somewhere within the ancient parish of Cannock. It received only four pence a year, possessed “one little bell” and held just one Mass annually. Later historians connected it with the chapel site beside Huntington Farm—but the identification has never been conclusively proved. In this video, I investigate the evidence behind Huntington’s lost chapel, the legend of the dragon-defeating saint associated with childbirth, the growth of Littleton Colliery’s 173-foot spoil heap, its major slope failure in 1970 and the transformation of the industrial site into the woodland park we see today. Does part of the chapel still survive beneath the hill, or did the colliery destroy every trace of it? This is the story of a landscape that changed from medieval farmland to an industrial mining centre and finally into a place of woodland, wildlife and public recreation—with one unresolved mystery still hidden beneath its surface. If you have photographs, documents or family stories connected with Littleton Colliery, Huntington Farm or the chapel site, please leave a comment.