Underground at Big Pit National Coal Museum

At its peak, the mine employed over 1,300 people and produced over a quarter of a million tons of coal a year. Big Pit closed in 1980 and reopened 3 years later as a museum.

Big Pit was a working coal mine from around 1860. Part of a larger network of coal workings established by the Blaenavon Iron and Coal Company, it was the most important colliery in the town. This is the winding mechanism for the lift, or pit cage, which goes down into the coal mine. When the mine was working, the pit cage carried miners underground and brought the coal to the surface. 

This building houses the winding engine, which provides the power to take the pit cage up and down. Though the engine is over 50 years old, it has been fully modernised with safety systems and computers controlling and monitoring its operation.

This coal tip was formed from waste dumped from the mine. Coal tips have been known to slide, sometimes with disastrous results if they are close to houses. This coal tip has been stabilised and is unlikely to slide.

This is Big Pit in 1910, when it was a working mine employing over 1,000 people. You can see the pit winding gear and drams, or carts, of coal.

During the course of a working shift, drams were filled with coal and taken to pit bottom from the coalface. Before the 1840s, women and children were responsible for pushing or pulling the drams of coal to pit bottom or out of the mine. This could happen hundreds of times a day.

Mined coal was put into drams—wheeled carts that ran on tracks—o be hauled to the pit cage and up out of the mine. The image shows a ‘journey’ of drams—a number of drams of coal ready to go. 

These miners are pushing drams on their track, but we know that horses were generally used to pull the drams at Big Pit. Mine railways came before the above-ground railways carrying steam engines that developed in Great Britain in the early 1800s.

Children as young as 5-years-old served as ‘air-door boys’ in the mines of South Wales. They opened a door in the pit tunnel to let horses and drams through and then closed it. Air doors were used to control airflow through the mine.

The coalface is the place where the miner worked, using various tools to cut the coal. Sometimes it was necessary to break up the coal with explosives. Drills like the one the miner is using were hand operated and used to create holes in which to place explosives to blast the coal or stone. This blasting was called shotfiring.

Here the miner is using a drill but the miners’ main tool was called a mandrel, which was a pickaxe with a point on each side. 

Shovels and ore buckets were also useful tools in the pit.

Inside the locker area in the pithead baths building, former miners have been memorialised with placards telling their stories.

Bert Coombes worked as a miner for more than 40 years. After witnessing the death of 2 friends in the mine, he was moved to write about the lives of miners. His autobiography is called ‘These Poor Hands’.

This was Ann Land’s locker. Although women were barred from working underground in 1842, they continued to work aboveground in some coal mines. From the early 20th century, these jobs included nurses, canteen staff and office staff.