Big Pit National Coal Museum

Big Pit worked from 1880 until 1980 and reopened as a museum three years later with its winding gear, baths and workshops intact. The underground tour is the point: visitors are fitted with helmet, lamp and self-rescuer, surrender anything with a battery or a flame, and descend the original shaft ninety metres in the cage, then walk about a kilometre of roadways with a guide who is usually a former miner from this or a neighbouring pit. The guides describe the work from having done it, including the stalls, the haulage and the pit ponies that were stabled underground. Above ground the pithead baths hold exhibitions. Blaenavon's industrial landscape, including the ironworks and the surrounding quarries and tramroads, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2000. Entry is free.

History

The site began as an iron mine, its Engine Pit Level driven by hand around 1810, and Big Pit grew into the most important of the collieries set up in Blaenavon in the first half of the 19th century by the Blaenavon Iron and Coal Company to feed its ironworks, among the oldest large-scale coal workings in the South Wales Coalfield. It worked as a coal mine from 1880 to 1980, opened to the public in 1983 under the Big Pit (Blaenavon) Trust, and in 2001 became part of National Museums Wales as the National Mining Museum of Wales; it lies within the Blaenavon Industrial Landscape World Heritage Site (Wikipedia, Big Pit National Coal Museum).

Highlights

• The shaft descent - ninety metres down the original cage into working roadways.
• The former miners - guides who worked these pits, describing the job first hand.
• The pithead baths - the surface buildings kept and used for exhibitions.
• The UNESCO landscape - Blaenavon's ironworks, quarries and tramroads around it.

When to go

Year-round; underground tours run to a timetable and stop earlier than the site closes, so arriving in the afternoon can mean missing the descent. Winter weekdays are quietest.

Things to know

Nothing with a battery, including phones, cameras and watches, may go underground; lockers are provided. The tour involves low headroom, water underfoot and a period of total darkness when the lamps are switched off. Children under a metre in height cannot go down.

Nearby

Blaenavon Ironworks is a short drive; the Brecon Beacons rise north.

Key facts