Looking across Pinxton Village from the churchyard, showing the War Memorial in the foreground. The Pinxton Colliery can be seen in the background. Coal was mined on a small scale in Pinxton since Tudor times. With the arrival of a branch of the Cromford Canal in the 1790's a localised industrial revolution began. Within a decade or so of the canal's arrival several deep coal pits, four lime kilns and a china works were in operation near to the Wharf. The wharf was the terminus for the canal, which was built to link the collieries to the river Trent.