MORNING SERIAL
CONNECTED first by canal and then by rail with the ports of Cardiff and Barry so that these resources could be exported, great wealth began to flow out of the area. And not much of it ever flowed back.
By the time I was born, nearly a century after the sinking of the pit, the valley I was to come to know so intimately in childhood had its hillsides piled high with coal slag, the waste product of a hundred years of toil by hundreds of thousands of men deep down in the narrow coal seams reached from the pithead of Merthyr Vale Colliery. The tips were shaped either conically, like black volcanoes, or were laid out in broad strips, following the contours of the mountain sides, just as the houses did. They were heaped up, endlessly, by a system of conveyor belts and ‘drams’ that ran from the colliery, clanking and rumbling around the villages all day long. Some of the volcano shapes were impossibly steep and piled so high that their tops rivalled in altitude the natural mountains on whose sides they had been dumped.
Coal had originally been extracted here to feed the ironworks at Cyfarthfa and Dowlais, after the area had been deforested and the supply of charcoal had been exhausted, and new technology came along that allowed the smelting of iron using coke. The steam coal extracted at Merthyr Vale fuelled thousands of steam engines as they drove the industrial revolution. It powered the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy through the decades of Empire and for the duration of two world wars. By the 1960s it was being fed into power stations and was still being used for domestic heating in almost every home. All this while, day by day, the tips had grown larger and their summits higher. All coal mining areas across the world have produced such tips but the South Wales coalfield is unusual, geologically, because it is also mountainous with next to no flat ground available for dumping. If you look today at old photographs of the mountainsides as they used to be, it seems ludicrous that anyone could have thought such a situation either sustainable or safe, with ribbons of terraced houses, shops, hospitals and schools dwarfed by the monstrous tonnages heaped up on steep slopes, right above them.