Back

We’re back again, not because we didn’t want to stay longer in South Wales, but because my mother who is 91 was visited by her GP yesterday and needs to be admitted to hospital. Monday was taken up by something of which I’ll write about later but it certainly couldn’t be classified as a thing you go on holiday to do! So our only holiday bit was yesterday morning’s visit to Big Pit before we packed up and came home.

Big Pit is a real coal mine which is now a museum. What it most definitely is not is an adapted and altered coal mine giving a nice clean visitor experience. The highlight of the visit is the ability to take an underground tour and get right up to the coal face. Thank God no Health & Safety ‘expert’ can ever have taken a look at how and where the visitor walks, if they had I’m sure underground tours would be banned :-( As it is the floor is wet and pot holed with bits of railway track in it in some places, the headroom has not been increased anywhere, there are no emergency lights, no dimmed lights to show you the way. It’s unchanged from how it was the day they stopped actually removing coal from the coal face. Before going below you are kitted out with a helmet and lamp on the front of it (mine had a few more scars on it when I handed it back than it had when I started with it), a belt pack containing the battery for the light and a gas mask in a canister. Here are Essy and Tafadzwa about to descend below the earth’s surface.

bigpit

The descent from the pit head is by an original cage lowered by the winding wheel pictured here.

pithead

The underground tour lasts around 50 minutes and you walk something less than a kilometer but I was a little weary when I surfaced. I think both Essy and I resembled apes wandering the tunnels! Our legs were bent, shoulders hunched, leaning forward so much that it looked like we were scraping our knuckles on the ground :-)
I can’t recommend the place highly enough and it would certainly be worth 100 times the entrance charge which is ……… nothing!

Thanks Chris for a superb suggestion.