Bergwerk Donar Ascheberg · Nordrhein-Westfalen · Germany

The Grubenfeld Donar lies beneath the territory of the communes of Drensteinfurt, Hamm, and Ascheberg, in the wider area of Westfalen east of the Ruhrgebiet. The geological basis for the field is an extension of the Ruhr coal seams into a previously unworked zone; successful probe boreholes were carried out in 1986. The field was originally conceived as the direct continuation of the Zeche Radbod mining licence, making it a component of the Radbod–Bergwerk Ost underground network. Two shafts — designated Radbod 6 (later Donar 1) and Radbod 7 (later Donar 2) — were sunk by the RAG in preparation for the development. Schacht Radbod 6 was additionally connected underground to the Grubenfeld Radbod by a 5-kilometre Querschlag at approximately 1,000 metres depth. The Teufgerüst (temporary sinking frame) that had served the sinking of Donar 1 stood in the former Zeche Radbod area and was noted by the Dorstener Zeitung in 2014 as a 'vergessenes Stück Bergbaugeschichte' — a forgotten piece of mining history.

Following the commercial closure of the Zeche Radbod in November 2010, the Donar shafts were separated from the Radbod operational context and constituted as the basis of an independent new mine. In April 2006 the RAG published a Planerische Mitteilung (planning notification) describing the intended Errichtung und Betrieb (construction and operation) of the Bergwerk Donar. At the time of this publication, a Umweltverträglichkeitsstudie (environmental impact assessment) was in preparation, expected to require several years. Annual production was intended to be approximately 3 million tonnes of Kokskohle, providing up to 3,000 new jobs over 30 years. The unusual element of the project was that it was conceived from the outset as requiring no subsidies, depending entirely on the world market price for coking coal; its viability was directly tied to whether the coal price remained sufficiently high to support the operating and capital costs of a new deep mine.

Despite the globally elevated coal and coke prices of the mid-2000s, no investor willing to finance the substantial capital costs was identified. By autumn 2012, the project was definitively abandoned: the shafts were backfilled, and the Bergbauprojekt Donar ceased to exist as a planned entity. In 2016, exploratory boreholes for natural gas were sunk on the site of the former Donar 2 / Schacht Radbod 7, but without commercial result. The headframe (Förderturm) over Donar 2 survived the abandonment and stood unused in the Ascheberg area for over a decade.

On 10 April 2024 the Förderturm became the centrepiece of a public art installation. The artist Kuray Cetinbaya installed a 2.5-tonne pink fibre-glass crown, titled 'Schach(t)Matt' (a pun on both Schachturm, the chess piece, and Schacht), conceived as the symbolic crowning of a 'king without a crown' — the mine that was never opened. The crown was organised by Werner Reumke as the opening element of a Gesamtkunstwerk intended to transform the former industrial landscape between the Hammer Zeche Radbod and the Donar site into an art landscape. An approximately five-kilometre underground connecting roadway at approximately 1,000 metres depth runs between the two sites, forming an invisible infrastructure connecting the two endpoints of the art project.