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Here on the cycle trail on the Dove Valley section, the defunct Bullhouse Colliery has created a problem of leakage into the nearby River Don. After the colliery closed in 1918 water from the underground mine workings began to pour into the nearby river through one of the tunnels eventually reaching a rate of 40 litres a second. The river water became contaminated with a bright orange sludge, ochre, which slowly coated the river bed choking the life out of the river.
So the Bullhouse Minewater Project was set up to clean the water before it reached the river and since 1998 the contaminated water has been pumped from the tunnel exit up into the lagoon above. The ochre settles to the bottom of the lagoon and the clean water is syphoned off and pumped back into the River Don.
