Earth moved for Ollerton in December

But if anyone felt the earth move its unlikely the tremors were to blame as the most powerful recorded had a magnitude of just 1.7 on the Richter Scale.

Brian Baptie, a seismologist at the Edinburgh’s British Geological Survey, said the small quakes presented no hazard at all and the most folk would have felt was a small swaying.

He said: “This is an area where we have seen a lot of earthquake activity in the past and it has been linked to the Thoresby mine.

“In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a period of a year when there were about 130 tremors reported by people in the area.

“Most of them, like these, were very small and none of them exceeded a magnitude of 2.5.”

Mr Baptie said the seismic events were set off when mining effected the stresses in surrounding rocks.

“In the 1970s about 25 per cent of earthquakes were in coalmining areas but since the industry’s decline we do not get anything like that amount.”

The last recorded earthquake in the British Isles happened in Ollerton on Monday at about 1.45am. It was a magnitude of 1.3.

The most powerful tremor in the Ollerton area was 1.7 in magnitude and happened on 16th December about 2.30am.