Theatre, Ely Cathedral and Glamis Castle. Dibnah was the chairman of the Manchester Bolton & Bury Canal Society and an episode on the construction of Britain's canal network was therefore of particular interest to him. Toward the end of filming, Dibnah went to Bolton Royal Hospital for a check-up, where a tumour was found on his right kidney. The kidney was removed and the tumour was found to be malignant. He went to Christie Hospital in Manchester, where further growths were discovered around his bladder. On the same day, Sheila's father fell from the roof of his house and died. Dibnah underwent chemotherapy and once his treatment was finished tests showed that he was free of cancer. Filming for Fred Dibnah's Age of Steam began early in 2003, at the Trencherfield Mill, near Wigan Pier. The film crew visited a number of locations, including a steam rally in Cornwall and the Bluebell Railway in Sussex. Dibnah was travelling around the country working on a subject that fascinated him, visiting old friends and making money from his hobby. The restoration of his traction engine was almost complete; later that year, however, Dibnah had another checkup at Christie Hospital and was told that a large tumour had been found on his bladder. Dig with Dibnah Dibnah had another course of chemotherapy, but this time the treatment was unsuccessful. Undeterred, he began to dig a replica coal mine in the back garden of his home. Although the sight of pithead gear may have been considered by his neighbours to be unusual, as a child raised in Bolton, he had been surrounded by pits such as Ladyshore Colliery and had long harboured an interest in mining. He had already assembled the wooden pithead gear and was planning to sink a brick-lined shaft below this into the hillside. At the bottom of the shaft, a horizontal tunnel would have led out to the steep side of the valley above which his garden sits. The intention was to have a narrow gauge railway running along the tunnel, back up the hillside on a rope-hauled inclined plane, returning to the pithead. The ultimate aim was to be able to demonstrate the basic working of an early colliery. Seven years before his diagnosis, therefore, Dibnah had sourced drawings of suitable pithead gear and built a frame from timber and iron bolts. He had applied for and was given