Place:Moira, Leicestershire, England

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NameMoira
Alt namesMoira Bathssource: Times Atlas of the World (1994) p 350
TypeVillage
Coordinates52.736°N 1.535°W
Located inLeicestershire, England
See alsoAshby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, Englandparish in which the village was located before 1894
Ashby Woulds, Leicestershire, Englandurban district in which it was located 1894-1974
North West Leicestershire District, Leicestershire, Englanddistrict municipality covering the area since 1974
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Moira is a former mining village about 2.5 miles (4 km) west of Ashby-de-la-Zouch in the North West Leicestershire, England. The village is about 3 miles (5 km) miles south of Swadlincote and forms part of the boundary with Derbyshire.

For centuries the area has been quarried and mined for coal, limestone, granite and brick clay, and its environmental damage was one of the reasons that it was chosen as the site for the National Forest, which is part of a Government-funded programme to create more woodland.

Moira was a village in Ashby-de-la-Zouch parish until 1894 when the new urban district of Ashby Woulds was formed from the area to the west of Ashby-de-la-Zouch proper.

The name Moira is derived from the Irish earldom of Moira, one of the titles of the Hastings family, which held Ashby-de-la-Zouch Castle. The former local colliery, Rawdon Colliery, also bore a Hastings family name. Moira is one of the few place names in England to end in an "a".

The Midland Railway opened its Leicester to Burton-upon-Trent Line through Moira in 1845. Moira railway station served the village until British Railways closed it in 1964. The building still survives and the line remains open as a freight route.

Rawdon Colliery was worked for about 150 years. Its seams extended 6 miles (10 km) from the shaft,and some had been worked twice, recovering lower grade coal. The pit survived Britain's pit closure programme in the mid-1980s that followed the miners' strike, but ran out of viable coal seams. Gases were rarely a hazard, but spontaneous combustion of coal dust was a potential problem.

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