There are few accounts from the people who worked in the mines in the 1700s.  Most would not be able to read or write and it is likely that they had little time or energy for anything other than their demanding jobs.

What we do know comes mainly from onlookers or visitors who were brave enough to venture underground.
‘Few … are possessed of sufficient nerve to descend a pit.  A feeling of danger, combined with the inconvenient and disagreeable nature of the journey, generally deter all but the most inquisitive’.

Once underground the ‘… sound of the rushing or dripping of water, the clanking of chains, the rattling of “trams,” and the occasional report of gunpowder, enhance the strangeness of the stranger’s experience, if they do not awake a feeling akin to terror’.

During one of Carlisle Spedding’s trips into Saltom Pit ‘ … when he walked in the tunnels the distance of a mile, he came at length to a place where the water was obstructed by rubbish and he passed this place, casting himself, hot and covered with sweat, up to the chest in the water, nor in that freezing temperature did he change his soaking clothes for an hour; he was affected for two weeks after with intermittent pains, weariness and other symptoms of having caught cold.’

What we don’t have are first-hand accounts of the pain, the weariness, the hunger that were surely experienced by the miners.