American Clancy Sigal spends two weekends with his Yorkshire miner&painter friend Davie in his mining hometown of Dinlock in 1959/1960.

We get an outsider's documentary view into what life's like in a northern pit village, or at least a view into the life of the miners themselves. We're taken round the homes, union hall, 3 pubs, and eventually the pit itself that make up Dinlock. Along the way we learn about Davie, torn between the self-contained total community of the pit village and his desire to escape it for the wider world (London) to make it (or break it) there as a painter.

What sticks out about this account over most looks at pit life is Sigal is both truly foreign to this world, and is not trying to convince us of some heroic ideal of the proletarian , as so much writing on working class communities does. Embracing his aloof, outsider status as a visiting foreigner in his writing, he avoids the patronising eye that you'd expect with a book like this. In fact, the opening of Dinlock gave the impression Sigal was giving up his sunny California for a descent into the third world.

Though Sigal tries to avoid it, the miners see themselves as the labour aristocracy, shunning the non-miners of the village, and within the pit they form their own hierarchy of nobility of work, the peak being working at the coalface and reducing as you work further away from it. Pit life stems wholly from this dynamic. Hewers work in teams on the face, needing to work in perfect unspoken communication and trust with one another, for this can be life-or-death work. It's this bond that keeps the miners together, and keeps the rest of the world out. Social relations above the pit hinge on this - a pitman maintains and is maintained by the community, and all arguments, fights and affairs are worked through to maintain this bond. The great crime is leaving the pit, as our narrator's friend Davie wishes to. He knows his life is guaranteed within the confines of Dinlock, but he also knows his life is guaranteed within the confines of Dinlock. Breaking out of this for himself is also seen as breaking the community which has raised him, and he is treated as such once his desire is made public.