Big Pit National Coal Museum

When people talk of Wales they think about rugby, daffodils, male voice choirs and - of course coal, pits and miners. So when you come to the Brecon Beacons (hopefully staying in one of our self-catering cottages or B&B in our beautiful manor house), it is an excellent opportunity to visit one of the icons of south Wales - the Big Pit National Coal Museum.

Big Pit History

It was a working coal mine from 1880 to 1980 and was opened to the public in 1983.  For a woman, this is your only chance to go down a real pit, as women were barred from going down the working pits.

The shaft at Big Pit, originally known as Kearsley’s Pit, was sunk to the depth of 200ft by the Blaenavon Company in 1860. It was deepened in 1880 to its present depth of 300ft and became known as ‘Big Pit’ because of its unusually large elliptical shaft. Parts of Big Pit, however, date to the early nineteenth century. Big Pit was a massive employer in Blaenavon, some 1,300 men worked at the mine during the early 1920s. Blaenavon coal was shipped around the world, to as far a field as South America. It was also used by the Great Western Railway to fuel trains and engines.

Big Pit, like all coalmines, experienced a large number of accidents, some of which proved fatal. In November 1838 the Cinder Pits at Blaenavon were flooded and fifteen miners, including five children, drowned.  The worst disaster in the Eastern Valley took place in Llanerch Colliery, near Pontypool, in February 1890 in which 176 miners were killed in an underground explosion but the worst mining disaster in British history was experienced at the Universal Colliery in Senghenydd in 1913, where 439 men and boys were killed. Such incidents had terrible impacts on families both financially and emotionally.

One of the most significant improvements to miners’ lives was the building of the pithead baths in 1939! This had a huge impact on people’s lives. Before their introduction men would have to walk home wet and dirty after a long day’s toil, risking pneumonia and illness. Women would have to carry heavy jugs of boiling water to fill the tin baths for their sons and husbands and there were often scalding accidents.