View from the Rhigos

After celebrating Mass at St German's this morning, I drove Clare and Auntie Daphne (who's holidaying with us this week) to the Ignatian mediation group at Tonyrefail Vicarage. Members of the group lunched together, and then we took the long way home - driving up Rhondda Fawr, climbing up over the Rhigos, then going east along the Heads of the Valleys Road as far as the junction with the A470 above Merthyr Tydful, then back down the Taff Vale all the way to Cardiff.

There's little remaining of the scores of coal mines which would have punctuated this route thirty years ago. Auntie Daphne quizzed me about the South Wales coal field, so I was challenged to explain the geology underlying the geography as we drove. The now closed and empty site of Tower Colliery outside Hirwaun is still visible from the lay-by up on the Rhigos.

The striking difference since we last drove up there is the sight of a hillside a few  miles to the west of the colliery, covered with over a dozen wind turbines. When I checked my photo archive for pictures taken on our last trip, I was astonished to find that it was seven and a half years ago.

We also noticed on the east side of the road past the colliery site, open cast mine workings where none existed before. A large sign declared that they belonged to Tower Colliery Ltd. Wikipedia informed me that after colliery closure in 2008, planning permission was sought to extract the coal in this area of land, formerly used by the colliery as a coal washery site. Six million tonnes of anthracite left to be extracted, and hopefully benefit local economy for a little longer.

The Heads of the Valleys Road to the west of Merthyr seems to have changed little in the half century from its launch as the new trunk road across the northern perimeter of the South Wales coalfield. The stretch from Hirwaun to Merthyr looks as if time has stood still and forgotten to move on, unlike the section to the east of Merthyr which benefited from a European Community funded upgrade a few years ago.

Travelling up and down two former mining valleys got me thinking about my father, with whom I'd travelled these roads as a teenage during school holidays, as he went about his job as a consultant representing a wire rope haulage company. I think he hated what the pits had done to despoil such beautiful countryside, and would be glad to see them looking fresh and green again. Even so, I wonder what he'd have made of the wind turbines?