Descent into Welsh depths a winner

A young visitor learns about the Davy lamp at the Big Pit, the National Mining Museum of Wales.

Everyone falls silent as we descend in a rattling metal cage towards the centre of the earth. Sweat breaks out on the face of the woman next to me. It's not just because she is carting several kilograms of mining equipment - a hard hat and miner's lamp, and a leather belt dangling a battery pack and a gas respirator. She is struggling to control her fear.

As the light fails, she swallows - hard. We are descending to 90m and there's no friendly green sign indicating the exit.

Gas is the miner's worst enemy and to avoid creating sparks we have been divested of cameras, mobile phones, lighters and anything powered by a dry-cell battery. Our helmet lamps are powered by wet-cell packs. The respirator contains an hour of oxygen.

We may be tourists, and this mine defunct, but it's still potentially dangerous. We are kitted out exactly the same as our veteran guide, Tony Barlow, 47, a miner most of his working life.

The Welshman delights in telling gruesome stories. There are, he says jocularly, various gases below ground which are capable of killing you instantly or, depending in the gas, making you linger for 15 minutes before lights out. It hasn't happened to him in 31 years of mining but that's little comfort to my companion.

Stepping into a cave-like space about 4m wide and just high enough for us to stand, our lamps pick out a ceiling of dark Welsh soil. Timbers slick with moisture and mould-covered steel beams are holding the soil back.

The air is cool and dank; it smells musty, as if it hasn't been circulating. My breath creates a curl of vapour. Underfoot the soil is hard-packed but moist.

My companion is now speechless with terror. Panicky tears spill as she stands rooted to the spot, eyeing the lightless tunnels branching away. She's beyond cajoling, so is escorted back into the cage and up to the surface.

Claustrophobia in a mine is not unusual. It is the sort of place that outrages every ingrained survival instinct. The thought of working underground for hours on end seems unfathomable, but from the 1860s, men, women and children as young as five toiled here.

Turn off your lamp and the dark is so total you eyes hurt as they fail to adjust. For some reason we whisper.

We switch our lamps back on and start walking behind Barlow through the meandering tunnels, following the coal seams and often crouching low to avoid banging our heads. Occasionally something drips on our heads.

We can hear a rushing sound: rainwater that has percolated through the earth gushes through open pipes at our feet, its passage staining the pipes orange with ochre.

A total of 27 million litres a day runs downhill through this mine to a surface exit seven miles away, says Barlow. It is not useful to contemplate what would happen if one of the tunnels turned into a hydroslide.

Big Pit employed about 1000 miners for most of the 20th century. It has been left as it was when the last shift ended in 1981. We see the heavy, oversized chainsaw that used to be dragged backwards along the coal seams, the careless operator at risk of being crushed. Next to it is the conveyor belt which carried the lumps of coal to gurneys (wagons) from where people, horses and, later, electric winches, got them to the shafts. Dirty, dangerous and tiring.

We stop at a door as wide as the tunnel and made of what looks like wood and canvas. It's one of the system of doors that makes sure fresh air gets down into the tunnels and circulates, and that stale air and gases escape.

Barlow says that until the mid-1940s, five-year-old boys, too small for heavy work, were posted to the doors to open and close them as miners passed by. They worked in the dark, the only light came from those who passed.

The boys, says Barlow, clamped their day's food under their armpits to keep it from the ever-present rats. Cockroaches - "trappers" in miner-speak - would drop on their heads. Further along is a row of stalls. Pit horses, which pulled coal wagons, also suffered before safe electricity came to the mine in 1910 and made them redundant.

Up to 72 horses at a time lived below the surface, condemned to go blind from the lack of light, get footrot from the damp conditions and develop respiratory problems from the dust during their 12- to 16-year lifespan.

Above their stalls hang affectionately hand-lettered nameplates. "Topper", reads one. The troughs are long dry, the harnesses hanging cracked and empty. Someone has placed grinning toy horses in a few stalls, which just adds to the forlorn atmosphere.

Barlow demonstrates the Davy lamp, invented in 1815, that miners used to check the concentration of gas in the air. Depending on what's present, the flame changes shape or a mist rises above it; a concentration of just 5 per cent of carbon monoxide, says Barlow, will claim you in 15 minutes.

Coal itself produces flammable methane. But the most dangerous, says Barlow, is black damp, which sits at ground level. Bend and tie your shoelaces while it's present, says Barlow, and you're a goner. The gas sucks oxygen out of the air. A dead rat on the ground, he says, is a sure sign. The only way to disperse black damp is to blow fresh air on to it.

Still, he says, the last death in this mine had nothing to do with gas - in 1951 a miner accidentally clouted a colleague as he swung his mandral (pick). However, in 1913, there was a huge explosion in a mine nearby and 439 died.

All this, coupled with Barlow's black humour, sounds terribly bleak (the many schoolchildren who visit the mine love it). But it is utterly fascinating.

And Barlow can't imagine working in any other field. After leaving school, he says, he tried factory jobs but couldn't settle. As the colliery bus passed one day, he jumped on it.

It's the camaraderie that keeps him in the business, he says: miners have to work as a team to ensure each other's safety, and that forges a powerful bond.

"When you've got them sort of conditions," he says, "it's nice to come to work."

That said, he has nerve damage in his fingers from using pneumatic tools, and is unable to distinguish temperature and often doesn't realise he's burning himself.

Barlow no longer has a sense of smell from using explosives, and his knees are "knackered". He's also got emphysema. He has lodged several compensation claims but expects to be waiting a long time for resolution.

The first evidence of coal mining in this area dates from the Roman era. Big Pit started in 1860. Nine different coal seams were worked at different times during Big Pit's life and it produced first-class "steam coal" for which South Wales became famous around the world.

Above ground, all the colliery buildings, including the pithead baths, the winding engine house and blacksmith's workshop, have been restored; a sound system recreates the sounds of the miners at work. The pithead baths, built in 1939, house the main exhibition. This tells the story not only of the coal mines, but also of their communities.

Big Pit is a popular draw: last year 141,000 visited. The mine has won this year's NZ$260,000 Gulbenkian Prize for Museum of the Year, Britain's single largest arts prize.

One of the judges said: "Big Pit offers an exceptional emotional and intellectual experience. It tells the individual stories of its community better than any museum I have visited and makes you contemplate the scale, and even the cruelty, of an industrial past that inspired a spirit of camaraderie and pride."


Where is it?
Big Pit is the National Mining Museum of Wales in Blaenafon, Torfaen, South Wales.

When is it open?
The museum is open from mid-February to the end of November, seven days a week, 9.30am-5pm, and admission is free.

Underground tours
Underground tours run between 10am and 3.30pm and take about an hour. Those under 16 must be at least 1m tall and accompanied by an adult. Wheelchair users can go below ground, but need to book in advance.

The museum website is at www.nmgw.ac.uk (link provided below).