Visit to colliery by Mining Institute of Scotland, August 1899
Established by the Bent Colliery Company on the east bank of the River Clyde at Bothwellhaugh in 1884, Hamilton Palace Colliery was operational until 1959. At its peak in 1948 it had a workforce of 605 employees and annually produced 137,500 tons of rich coal for house, gas and manufacturing use from two main shafts, each 291m deep. This colliery stood about 2km north of Hamilton Palace but the underground workings associated with its twin mine-shafts extended mainly in its direction, underneath Hamilton Low Parks. They were instrumental in creating structural instability and subsidence in the area, ultimately contributing to the demolition of Hamilton Palace in the 1920s.

This image shows members of the Mining Institute of Scotland assembled for a group photograph on the occasion of their visit to the colliery on 10 August, 1899. Immediately behind the group there are single- and two-storeyed ranges of colliery buildings, brick-built with arcades and margins picked out in paler-coloured brick creating a distinctive polychromatic effect. In the background, in front of a tall chimney, the headstock of one winding engine serving one of the mine-shafts and part of the second are clearly visible.

The visit of the Mining Institute probably reflects the fact that a number of the collieries in the Hamilton area were, for their time, technologically very advanced and attracted special interest. Earnock Colliery, for example, was among the pioneering sites, if not the first, in the use of electricity underground.