The Depths of Pwll Mawr

On November 19th, I took a day trip to Wales! For a previous blog post explaining the relationship between Wales and Cymru and Wales and England, click here.

The first place I went was Pwll Mawr, or Big Pit, a coal mine that was in operation from 1860-1980, and now functions as a museum.

The tour was really awesome. They outfitted us in hard hats, rebreather devices, and wet cell battery packs, which were pretty heavy. Then they cased us for anything with a dry cell battery. Dry cell batteries are strictly contraband in mines, as they can cause explosions. We squished into an elevator and descended nearly 300 ft down the shaft.

The green thing is the entrance to the elevator that took us down the shaft. This is where they took our dry cell batteries away, so no more photos of the mine. That's fine by me. Dying in a mine explosion I caused myself isn't high on my list of things to do.

Our guide walked us around the various tunnels, which have all been left in very real condition--no Mickey Mouse setups, or really much in the way of regulated walkways. He showed us the oldest part of the mine where Victorian children were forced to work in total darkness day in and day out, many never seeing the sun except on Sundays, as they went to work before dawn and came up after dark. In fact, it was this mine and these terrible conditions that led to one of the biggest pushes for child labor laws in the UK.

We also saw the stables. Horses were taken down at two years of age, and lived and worked in the mines 24/7/365.25 until they gave out. No Sunday sun-days for these poor horses. The stables still had the nameplates of the horses that were living there at the time it was shut down. I have to say, miners weren't very original with their horse names.

Back above ground, we traded in our wet cell batteries and rebreathers for our cameras, watches, and cellphones, and spent some time wandering around the various buildings on our own time. Not knowing much about mining, I'm afraid I can't tell you much about what anything is in these pictures, but it looked cool!