Blaenavon Industrial Landscape

Blaenavon Industrial Landscape lies in and around Blaenavon, high on the hillside at the head of the Afon Lwyd, also written Avon Llwyd, in Torfaen. The Welsh name Blaenafon means the head of the river, or loosely the river’s source. The town stands in the historic county of Monmouthshire and the preserved county of Gwent, on the north-eastern rim of the South Wales Coalfield. The inscribed ground covers 3,290 hectares, which is 8,100 acres, and it is also given as 33 square kilometres, or 13 square miles.

The World Heritage Committee inscribed it in 2000, at the committee’s twenty-fourth session. One account places that inscription in December 2000, and another in November 2000. It was the first cultural landscape recognised in the United Kingdom, and about £40 million was spent on it in the first ten years.

The ground holds the Blaenavon Ironworks, officially spelled Blaenafon Ironworks since 2024, and Big Pit, the last deep coal mine to work in the area. Around them are mines and quarries for coal, iron ore, fireclay and limestone, horse-drawn tramroads, tunnels and inclines, a canal, later steam railways, workers’ housing, and the social buildings of the town. The boundary follows historical land ownership and landscape features, and it leaves out ground that lacks historical authenticity. There is no buffer zone.

Twenty-four scheduled monuments and eighty-two listed buildings lie inside it, and the most important of them are in public ownership. Blaenavon town centre and Cwmavon are conservation areas, and a further conservation area has been proposed for Forgeside and Glantorfaen.

This was a landscape of the Industrial Revolution, the passage that began in Great Britain around 1760 and had spread to continental Europe and the United States by about 1840. Historians still debate the start, the end, and whether revolution is the right word. The textile mills came first, and high rates of growth in steam power and iron came after 1800. In Britain the change that mattered here was the replacement of charcoal by coke, and of water-blown bellows by steam.

In 1709 Abraham Darby used coke at Coalbrookdale, though that pig iron was fit for castings rather than wrought iron. Henry Cort’s rolling of 1783 and puddling of 1784, widely used after 1800, made structural iron more cheaply, and few puddlers lived to be forty. James Beaumont Neilson’s hot blast of 1828 cut the fuel needed for a unit of pig iron by about a third with coke, or by about two thirds with coal. In the United Kingdom, charcoal iron fell from 20,500 tons in 1720 to 7,800 tons in 1806, while coke cast iron reached 250,000 tons.

By the 1790s Britain had stopped being a net importer of bar iron. South Wales became the great iron and coal region of that age. Pig iron made in the region grew from 39,600 tons in 1796 to 666,000 tons in 1852, and the metal went into railways, factories and engines far beyond the valleys.

The South Wales Coalfield runs across Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire, Swansea, Neath Port Talbot, Bridgend, Rhondda Cynon Taf, Merthyr Tydfil, Caerphilly, Blaenau Gwent and Torfaen. The coal measures form a syncline whose uplands rise 300 to 600 metres, cut by steep valleys. Rank improves from east to west, from bituminous coal to the anthracite north and west of Neath. Iron ore was taken from the same measures, especially on the north crop, Merthyr Tydfil and Blaenavon among those places, with limestone nearby to use as flux.

Early coal came from levels driven into the valley sides. Deep mining became important from about 1850. Merthyr Tydfil grew from 7,700 people in 1801 to 49,794 in 1861. The coalfield’s own disasters, Risca, Abercarn, Abersychan, Cilfynydd, Senghenydd and Aberfan, belong to other pits and other years.

They are not the accidents recorded at Big Pit.

Iron was worked in the South Wales valleys in the Roman period. In the seventeenth century the Hanburys of Pontypool made tinplate on ground around Blaenavon. The land was Lord Abergavenny’s Hills. In 1788 Henry Nevill, 2nd Earl of Abergavenny, renewed a lease of 12,000 acres to three Midlands men, Thomas Hill, his brother-in-law Thomas Hopkins, and Benjamin Pratt.

Nevill had been born on 22 February 1755 and died on 27 March 1843. He was styled the Honourable Henry Nevill until 1784 and Viscount Nevill from 1784 to 1785, and the lease account names him as the second earl. The inscribed landscape is also said to rest on the large area the Blaenavon Company leased in 1789, a smaller figure than those 12,000 acres. The works themselves are dated in several ways.

One fieldwork note says they were set up in 1787 to use the local coal, limestone and iron ore. The town account says they were opened in 1788, with £40,000 invested and three blast furnaces raised. The landscape account, and the ironworks completed for coke and steam, put the opening at about 1789, or circa 1789, and call 1789 the year production began. The same works are called the first in Wales designed from the start as a multi-furnace site, with three furnaces, calcining kilns, workers’ cottages and a company shop.

A row called Engine Row is dated to 1778 in that fieldwork note, as cottages built to draw skilled men before the works were set up, which sits earlier than the 1788 lease.

The commercial point was that coal, iron ore and limestone all cropped out on the surface in the western valleys, so they could be won horizontally instead of by deep vertical shafts. Earlier ironworks at Pontypool had depended on charcoal and water. Blaenavon used coal and steam, neither of which had been used in the Eastern Valley before. Thomas Hopkins, from his Cannock Wood Forge in Staffordshire, persuaded skilled ironworkers to move.

Skilled men came mainly from West Wales, Staffordshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Somerset and Ireland. Unskilled men came with their families on the promise of work. William Coxe, archdeacon of Bemerton, born in 1748 and dead on 8 June 1828, walked the place in 1798 and 1799. He called the small town an opulent and increasing establishment, surrounded with heaps of ore, coal and limestone.

The district’s population grew from a little over 1,000 in 1800 to 5,115 in 1840, of whom 61 percent spoke Welsh and the rest English.

By 1800 Blaenavon was helping to make South Wales the foremost iron-producing region in the world. Output here was second only to Cyfarthfa at Merthyr Tydfil, then the largest ironworks in Wales. Two further furnaces were added over the next decade, so the building account reaches five, while the surviving remains are described as six blast furnaces, late eighteenth century and nineteenth century together, called the best preserved of their period in the United Kingdom. A forge was built at nearby Cwmavon in 1804.

By 1833 the company owned 430 houses and employed 1,000 workers. The trade swung between boom and bust. Wages were cut, men struck, and the protest known as Scotch Cattle appeared.

In 1836 the works were bought by the Blaenavon Iron and Coal Company, also called the Blaenavon Coal and Iron Company. The money came from Robert William Kennard, a London merchant born in 1800 who died in 1870, later a Member of Parliament. He had invested in the Falkirk Iron Company in 1830, and his consortium formed the Blaenavon company in 1836. He employed his son, the civil engineer Thomas Kennard, and his cousin George Swan Nottage.

Kennard was elected a Conservative for Newport on the Isle of Wight on 11 February 1857, was not returned at the general election that March, and sat again from 1859. James Ashwell, the new managing director, spent heavily, including the water balance tower of 1839. The investment was £138,000. The tower is a lift that uses water to counterbalance a load.

One account says it raised wagons 80 feet. Another says the lift carried pig iron from the foot of the site toward the Brecknock and Abergavenny Canal, which charged lower tolls to Newport than the Monmouthshire Canal. After that spending the works showed little profit, and Ashwell resigned in 1840. Mr Scrivener then managed them, and output rose for a short time.

Sales in 1845 reached 35,549 tons, of which 20,732 tons were sold, about 5,000 tons above the year before. By 1847 sales had fallen to 18,981 tons. In 1849 less pig iron was made, partly because the furnaces stood idle for three months. It was claimed that the men had refused a wage cut which the depressed trade was said to require.

In the years after Ashwell, iron rails from Blaenavon went to India, Russia and Brazil, and into work closer to home such as Crumlin Viaduct.

The company was relaunched in 1870 as the Blaenavon Iron and Steel Company. It was one of only six ironworks in south Wales that made the change to steel. By 1878 it employed 5,000 people, had overreached itself, and was failing against harder competition. A short respite came from Sidney Gilchrist Thomas and his cousin Percy Carlyle Gilchrist.

Thomas was born at Canonbury in London on 16 April 1850 and died in Paris on 1 February 1885. He had meant to be a doctor, but his father’s death cut the family income, and he worked as a police-court clerk until May 1879. At the Birkbeck Institute, George Chaloner remarked that the man who took phosphorus out of iron in a Bessemer converter would make his fortune. By the end of 1875 Thomas thought he had a method.

Percy Gilchrist, born on 27 December 1851 and dead on 16 December 1935, a chemist and metallurgist, was then a chemist at the Blaenavon works, described in one life as the former ironworks. Their trials succeeded. Edward Martin, the manager, allowed larger experiments and helped with a patent. The first public announcement was in March 1878 at the Iron and Steel Institute.

The patent came in May and drew little notice. A paper on the elimination of phosphorus was written that September and was not read until May 1879. Edward Windsor Richards, manager of Bolckow Vaughan at Cleveland, took the process up, and patents followed at home and abroad. The works at Blaenavon hosted the experiments between 1877 and 1878.

The basic process, also called the Gilchrist–Thomas process, mattered most where phosphoric ore was common, in Belgium and Germany more than in Britain. The extra slag became a phosphate fertiliser known as Thomas meal. In 1883 Thomas and George James Snelus, who had found a similar route and not developed it, received the Bessemer Gold Medal. Thomas worked himself ill, and a voyage and a stay in Egypt did not save him.

He was buried at Passy. William Ewart Gladstone, reviewing the memoirs in 1891, wrote of his enthusiasm of humanity. Thomas left his fortune to philanthropic work, including a police-court mission. An obelisk was raised in South Wales in July 1960 by the Newport and District Metallurgical Society with the Iron and Steel Institute.

In 1985 the former American Society for Metals set a plaque at the ironworks. The basic process let Germany and North America use their own phosphoric ores, and that speeded the decline of these furnaces. In 1880 the company opened Big Pit and, in that account, finally left iron production. Other accounts keep the ironworks at work until 1900, until 1902, or until production ceased completely in 1904.

Work started again briefly in 1924 and was not commercially viable. The forges on the site still helped to make steel shell in both world wars, and the yard was mostly a store for the National Coal Board.

Big Pit, in Welsh Pwll Mawr, is given both as a working coal mine from 1880 to 1980 and as a pit worked from about 1860 until 1980. Historians disagree about when it was first in steady use. It may have grown from Kearsley’s Pit, named in the company records from the 1860s, which lay at the other end of a geological fault from the Coity pits. Coity, reported in the 1850s, had two shafts 9 feet, or 2.7 metres, across, and they were hard to pump.

A mines inspector’s report of 1881 is the first to describe a mine called Big Pit, elliptical, 18 feet by 13 feet, or 5.5 by 4.0 metres, the first shaft in Wales wide enough for two tramways. On completion it wound the coal, and the older Coity shaft became the upcast for air. In 1878 the main shaft was deepened to the Old Coal seam at 293 feet, or 89 metres. Before the coal pit, an iron mine had been driven by hand around 1810 into the hillside, called Engine Pit Level, still visible on the bridge between Blaenavon and Garn Road.

Dynamite came about five decades later. No records of that iron mine are known. The iron workings sit above the coal. Engine Pit Level was for a time an emergency way out of Big Pit.

The escape route now is the River Arch Level. Miners exploring the level in the 1960s found an old flangeless wheeled dram. An Engine Pit Shaft is also known.

The coal workings were part of a network the Blaenavon company opened in the first half of the nineteenth century, among the oldest large industrial coal mines on this coalfield, and Big Pit was the most important colliery in the town. By 1908 it employed 1,122 people. In 1923, at the peak, 1,400 men worked there, raising house coal, steam coal, ironstone and fireclay from the Horn, No. 2 Yard, Old Coal and Elled seams. The peak was more than 250,000 tons of coal a year, sent as far as South America.

Until a conveyor arrived in 1908, the coal was cut by hand. The mine was among the first to take electricity, and by 1910 the fans, hauling engines and pumps were electric. Pithead baths in 1939 meant men no longer walked home wet and dirty, and families no longer filled tin baths with jugs of hot water in which children were sometimes scalded. Between 1857 and 1880, mine inspectors recorded more than sixty deaths in the Blaenavon coal and iron works, though these may not all have been inside Big Pit.

From 1880 the accidents are regularly placed at the pit. In 1891 a boy, Thomas Oliver Jones, was crushed in a roof fall. In 1894 and again in 1896 a miner was killed. On 11 December 1908 three men died in an explosion which a coroner found had been lit by a naked light.

On 7 April 1913 three more died in a local fire, a fireman, the face manager and the under-manager.

Surface coal digging at Blaenavon began in November 1941 with equipment and skilled men from the Canadian Army. Another account places a large early opencast here from 1944, again by the Canadian Army, under a wartime order from the Ministry of Fuel and Power. On nationalisation in 1947 the National Coal Board took the mine from the Blaenavon company, which then employed 789 men. By 1970 the workforce was 494, and work had narrowed to the Garw seam, at most 30 inches, or 760 millimetres, thick.

A drift mine, agreed by the board, meant that by 1973 winding at Big Pit had stopped. Coal went out near the rebuilt Black Lion washery. Coity shaft was abandoned. The Big Pit shaft was kept for upcast air and for emergency winding.

The pit closed on 2 February 1980, with the loss of more than 250 jobs. It was one of the last working mines in the town. Blaentillery No. 2 Drift closed in 2010, and the Johnson Mine closed in 2013.

The coal left the hill by rail as well as by the older tramroad. In 1866 the Brynmawr and Blaenavon Railway opened, with sidings into the workings, and was at once leased to the London and North Western Railway, so coal could go to the Midlands by the Merthyr, Tredegar and Abergavenny Railway. By 1880 the line ran south to the Great Western at Abersychan and Talywain, then down through Pontypool Crane Street to Newport and the docks. In 1922 the North Western became part of the London, Midland and Scottish.

From the Second World War, Great Western engines worked from pit to port, and passenger trains stopped in 1941. After the other local pits shut, the northern connection was closed in the Beeching cuts from 1964. In the early 1970s the Coal Board paid to relay the line out to Waunavon, where the drift reached the old washery. The town had already lost its passenger stations.

Blaenavon High Level closed in 1941. The last train from Blaenavon Low Level to Newport, by Pontypool Crane Street, ran in April 1962, more than a year before the Beeching report, and declassified papers put that loss down to congestion at Newport after Llanwern steelworks opened. A viaduct built in 1790 disappeared and was dug out again in 2001 for the archaeology programme Time Team. The volunteer Pontypool and Blaenavon Railway now runs from Furnace Sidings to Big Pit Halt, on to Whistle Inn Halt at Garn yr Erw, and south to Coed Avon by the cemetery, a terminus and not a passenger stop, then back by the restored High Level station.

The line to Big Pit opened on 16 September 2011, and Big Pit Halt was officially opened on 6 April 2012.

Before that railway, the company moved stone and iron by horse tram. Limestone from Pwll Du went south over the mountain by cart road from 1789, and a horse railway from the Blorenge quarries to the ironworks was opened in 1796. The Napoleonic Wars, fought from 1803 to 1815 by European coalitions against the French First Republic and then against Napoleon I, emperor of the French, brought a surge in the demand for iron. Thomas Hill II, named as manager of the ironworks and distinguished by that numeral from the Thomas Hill of the 1788 lease, began what became Hill’s Tramroad from Pwll Du to Llanfoist wharf around 1815.

It was a plateway of 2 feet, or 610 millimetres, for horse-drawn trams, opened from end to end by 1821, and also dated as extended around 1817 to 1822. It ran through the Pwll Du Tunnel, past the Tyla and Pwll Du quarries, through Garnddyrys Forge, and about 3 miles, or 4.8 kilometres, north-east from Pwll Du round the Blorenge to Llanfoist on the Brecknock and Abergavenny Canal. Limestone from Tyla, mainly Tyle West, went to the furnaces. Cast iron went to the forge, and wrought iron went down to the wharf, then by canal to Newport docks.

Coal and limestone also went to the coalyard and limekilns at Llanfoist. At the quarry a water-balance lift, fed from a reservoir above, raised stone to the rails. That lift is not the tower of 1839 at the furnaces.

The Pwll Du Tunnel began as a coal and iron mine. What became the tunnel was driven from about 1782, northward and almost level, for about 0.75 miles, or 1.21 kilometres, into the hill. William Coxe gave that length in 1801. Thomas Hill extended it through Mynydd Garn Fawr, in a sweeping curve, high enough for a horse tram.

The horse railway in the tunnel was working by 1817. The finished bore is given as 1,875 metres, or 6,152 feet, and also as 2,050 yards, or 1,870 metres. It was the longest horse-powered tramway tunnel built in Britain. It rises 70 feet, or 21 metres, from Blaenavon to Pwll Du.

The south portal, called the Marble Arch, stands by Blaenavon. The Pwll Du end was a stone-lined trench, later covered, with two linked portals in a Y. Just inside, the western branch served the Tyla quarries and the eastern branch, probably built in 1816, served Garnddyrys and the canal. The gauge sat on stone sleeper blocks.

The tunnel carried heavy traffic for about forty years while the forge worked. Minerals on both sides were mined again in 1814, 1864, 1867 to 1868, 1894, 1898 and 1902. About 1850 the Dyne-Steel incline, also written Dyne Steel, was built over the hill above the tunnel, a double incline with a steam engine at the top to haul loaded trains. In later years stationary engines at each end pulled trains of fifteen to twenty trams, each holding about two tons of limestone.

Women from Pwll Du rode through the hill on the trams in bad weather rather than walk over the top.

Garnddyrys Forge, about 3 kilometres or 2 miles north of the town, was built by Thomas Hill II in 1816 and 1817, and worked from about 1817 until 1860. The iron market was very weak, so the spending was unusual. The plan put the forge in Cwm Llanwenarth, on the west side of the Blorenge, and replaced a steep tram from Blaenavon with the shallow grade through the extended tunnel. The tramroad passed the forge in a tunnel of its own.

By the 1840s about 450 people lived around the forge. Garnddyrys was isolated in 1854, when the railway reached Blaenavon by another route. A new forge, Forgeside, was built near that railway. In 1860 Garnddyrys closed, the forge moved to Forgeside, and the northern branch of the Pwll Du Tunnel was closed.

One account dates the abandonment of the tramroad from Pwll Du to Llanfoist to 1861. The tunnel itself still carried limestone to Blaenavon until the quarries closed after the General Strike of 1926. The site then stood empty, which is why the forge remains are archaeologically well preserved even though little is visible. In 1970 the foundations of the workers’ houses were excavated.

Two reservoirs, the sites of waterwheels, and the housing sites remain.

After the quarries shut, a survey in 1933 looked for coal. In 1933 and 1934 a party of fifteen to twenty men from the Blaenavon company drove a heading and found a workable seam 2 to 3 feet, or 0.61 to 0.91 metres, thick. Faults, water, and the risk of uncharted old mines stopped the search. A brick wall closed the Pwll Du end.

About 50 yards, or 46 metres, into the Tyla branch there was a major collapse, perhaps from water leaking out of the Pwll Du reservoir. About 40 metres, or 130 feet, into the Garnddyrys branch a bedding collapsed, perhaps from the same leak, or from opencast working above the tunnel in the 1940s. In 1999 cavers and industrial archaeologists announced that they would sink a shaft into the flooded tunnel beyond the roof fall, pump the water if it was not contaminated, and try to walk the full length. The Blaenavon mouth is now lined with brick and held by large timbers put in during the twentieth century.

Those plans of 1999 are not, in the accounts read here, a report that the whole tunnel was explored.

The town grew on the same lease. St Peter’s Church was built in 1804, given by Thomas Hill and Samuel Hopkins, and also described as the gift of the ironmasters. St Peter’s School was built in 1816 by Sarah Hopkins of Rugeley, sister of Samuel Hopkins, who died in 1815 and left her much of his money. She raised the Blaenavon Endowed School in his memory.

That school is also the building later restored as the first dedicated World Heritage interpretation centre in the United Kingdom, opened in 2008 in the former St Peter’s School. A town account says the endowed school has since been permanently closed, which matches a school that no longer teaches. The Blaenavon Workmen’s Hall was built in 1894 by the subscriptions of the workers. At the time of the Welsh revival the town also had sixteen nonconformist chapels.

Ty-Mawr, also called Blaenavon House, is dated both to 1791, built for the ironmaster Samuel Hopkins, and to 1798, built by Thomas Hopkins. In 1924 it became a hospital, paid for by the subscriptions of local iron and coal workers. In the 1940s the National Coal Board gave the site to the Ministry of Health. It was a cottage hospital until 1985, then a nursing home, and it was listed at Grade II in 1995.

The nursing home closed in 2007. The house was stripped of lead, slates and interiors, placed on the buildings-at-risk register, and badly damaged by a fire in 2016 in the ballroom wing and the adjoining extension. It was sold in 2017 to private owners and is being restored as a family home. The Municipal Offices in Lion Street housed Blaenavon Urban District Council until 1974.

The population of the town is said to have passed 20,000 at one time before 1890, when steel and coal were both busy. It then fell at each ten-year census after the ironworks closed, a closure the town account dates to 1900. It was 8,451 in 1961 and fell faster after the mine shut in 1980. Part of that fall was a lower birth rate, not only people leaving.

The population now given for the community is 6,055. In 2003 publishers and writers tried to make Blaenavon a second book town after Hay-on-Wye. The attempt failed, put down to the remote site and to Hay’s established trade. The town keeps a male voice choir and a town band, and it is twinned with Coutras in France.

People born here include the actor E. E. Clive, the novelist Dorothy Simpson, and the rugby players Mark Taylor, Ken Jones, John Perkins, Chris Huish, Terry Cobner and Colin Evans. Ken Jones was also an Olympic athlete.

Nick Thomas-Symonds, elected Member of Parliament for Torfaen in 2015, was brought up in the town.

What a visitor sees at the furnaces is the late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century stacks, two of the original casting houses, ruined kilns where the ore was calcined or roasted, the base of the great chimney of the blowing-engine house, and the cast-iron pillars and brackets that carried the blast pipes. Clive Aslet called the place the best-preserved industrial relic of its kind. Three structures are listed at Grade I: the cast house and foundry, the balance tower, and the three blast furnaces. Grade II covers the chain store, the calcining kilns, a storage shed, the pay office, Stack Square, and a memorial to the Gilchrists.

The ironworks as a whole is a scheduled monument. Stack Square is a small group of workers’ cottages, also described as three ranges, restored and furnished. One account sets those rooms in the 1870s, and on to the 1970s. Another sets them in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The cottages were used in the television series Coal House. Since 2024 the service that cares for the ironworks uses the Welsh spelling Blaenafon, rather than Blaenavon, in English.

Big Pit’s surface buildings, winding gear and underground roads were still in excellent condition when coal stopped in 1980. For some years before the closure a working group of the Coal Board, local government, the national museum, the Welsh Development Agency and the Welsh Office had looked at a museum. Torfaen Borough Council bought the site for £1 and gave it to the Big Pit (Blaenavon) Trust. The first works cost £1.5 million, from the Welsh Tourist Board, the European Regional Development Fund, the borough and Gwent County Council.

The mine reopened to visitors in 1983 and made 71 jobs. On 1 February 2001 it joined the National Museums and Galleries of Wales as the National Mining Museum of Wales, and it is now called Big Pit National Coal Museum. Fewer than 100,000 people came in 1983. The peak of those early years was 120,000 in 1992, then fewer than 90,000 in 1998.

The plan had wanted 100,000 a year for the first five years. By 2000 an adult charge of £5.75 was not paying the costs. A lottery grant of more than £5 million in January 2000 paid for a large renewal of the visitor buildings. The site was rebuilt in 2003 to designs by TACP and the Brooke Millar Partnership.

As part of the national museum it became free to enter in 2001. In 2015 First Minister Carwyn Jones said there would be no payment for entry to any of the national museums. More than 140,000 people came in 2014 to 2015, and 150,176 in 2017. In April 2025 a charge was put on the underground tour, at first as a trial until July 2026.

One account sets the advance timed ticket at £8 and the on-the-day or concession price at £5. The museum’s own notice sets £5 for a tour bought on arrival, with no guaranteed time, and £8 for a timed ticket called Job-A-Knock, also written Jobaknock. Entry to the rest of the museum stays free. A Senedd committee said the charge broke the principle of free entry to the national collections.

In 2005 the museum won the Gulbenkian Prize, later called Museum of the Year. It is an anchor point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage.

The pit is still classed as a working mine and is under the mines inspectorate. The props and steel bands hold the roof. Water still runs down the tunnel, now in a channel rather than over the floor. Visitors on the underground tour wear a hard hat, a lamp and a belt of 5 kilograms, or 11 pounds, and a rebreather that can filter foul air for about an hour.

Dry-cell batteries, watches and phones are given up before the descent. Automatic gas monitors and emergency telephones are set in the roads. The tour is given both as about 50 minutes at 90 metres, or 300 feet, below ground, and as a walk of about 700 metres lasting about an hour. The mine hired apprentices in 2011.

Staff walked out over pay in 2014, 2015 and 2016. On 2 September 1995 the powder house, the sawmill office and the electrical workshop were listed at Grade II, and the pit-head building, the headframe and tram circuit, and the miners’ bathhouse were listed at Grade II-star. The powder house had stored the explosives.

Conservation of the ironworks began in 1974, around the time statutory protection was extended to sites in the town, and a major restoration followed in 2001. Cast-iron columns about 160 years old were taken off the top of the balance tower, and the frame was recast and painted. In January 2020 a watching brief and three test pits were dug so that paths and walkways could be resurfaced. The metal rails, of a rare type and possibly unique to these works, survived very well.

The wooden sleepers had perished to something like muddy tissue paper. Pulverised fuel ash had been laid in the lower yard. It reacts with rainwater to make a weak acid that eats the railway lines. Scheduled-monument consent was granted to take that ash out, replace it with bound resin gravel, and conserve the rails, the work being proposed for completion in 2023 to 2024.

In 2026 a study described a group of features north of Blaenavon left by scouring the ground to expose outcrops and to clean iron ore, a common process that has rarely been studied. The novelist Alexander Cordell, the pen name of George Alexander Graber, born on 9 September 1914 and dead about 9 July 1997, set his novel Rape of the Fair Country at the ironworks and in the country round it, in 1959, at the height of the industrial years. He wrote thirty books, among them Hosts of Rebecca and Song of the Earth.

The landscape is planned by Torfaen County Borough Council, the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority and Monmouthshire County Council, under the Town and Country Planning Act of 1980 and the Planning Act for listed buildings and conservation areas of 1990. The Blaenavon Partnership, led by Torfaen and including those authorities and other bodies, manages the property. It keeps contact with the town council, voluntary groups, businesses, residents and the local tourist association, and a commons forum speaks for the open hill. Common grazing is treated as part of what keeps the hills open, and a commons group is supported in part by a small hydro scheme called Dragon’s Teeth.

A World Heritage Centre opened in 2008 in the old school. The architects Purcell Miller Tritton won the Gold Medal for Architecture at the National Eisteddfod of Wales in 2008 for that building. A World Heritage Day is held each June. A cost-benefit study found that the inscription had helped to regenerate the town.

New housing around the old mining town is visible from the higher ground, and further building is meant to be controlled so that the views and the relationship of the monuments are not lost. There is no buffer. Reuse of spoil, new opencast, and wind farms have been named as risks, and such proposals had been resisted under the planning policy. A sensitivity study was made for renewable energy, because of the possible combined visual effect of wind proposals that can be seen from the boundary.

The management plan approved in 2018 ran to the end of 2023, and a new ten-year plan was expected in late 2023 or early 2024. A youth ambassador programme takes in young people from 10 to 25.

The World Heritage Committee is the body that chooses places for the World Heritage List and for the list of sites in danger, and that allocates aid from the World Heritage Fund when states ask for it. Twenty-one states sit on it, elected for a term that the convention sets at six years and that many states cut to four. It meets once a year. Its advice comes from three bodies, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the International Council on Monuments and Sites, and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property.

Each member has one vote, and a simple majority decides. This landscape was one of the places that committee inscribed in 2000. The same public record of Welsh archaeology and of famous buildings also reaches subjects that are not in this valley, and they should not be folded into the ironworks.

Archaeologia Cambrensis is the annual journal of the Cambrian Archaeological Association. It prints essays, excavation reports, book reviews, society notes and accounts of field visits, and it has carried a great deal on the manuscripts, genealogy, heraldry, place-names, folklore and literature of Wales. Its range runs from the earliest prehistoric finds to industrial archaeology and landscape history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and sometimes to other Celtic countries. It is a journal, not a furnace, a mine, or a house in Blaenavon.

The Cadfan Stone, in Welsh Carreg Cadfan, stands inside St Cadfan’s Church at Tywyn in Gwynedd. It carries the earliest known inscription in Welsh, in Old Welsh. It was once thought to mark the grave of Saint Cadfan and of Cyngen Glodrydd, a late king of Powys, which would put it in the first half of the sixth century. Ifor Williams dated the letters to the eighth century.

Kenneth H. Jackson suggested the late seventh or the early eighth. A date anywhere from the seventh century to the ninth is also given, and Nancy Edwards placed the stone firmly in the ninth. It once stood more than 2.3 metres high.

It now measures 2.18 metres by 0.25 and 0.2 metres. It is not a monument of this coal and iron ground.

Canterbury Cathedral, formally the Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Christ, Canterbury, is the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in Canterbury in Kent. Augustine founded it in 597. It was rebuilt between 1070 and 1077 under Lanfranc, after a fire in 1067. Thomas Becket was murdered in the north-west transept on 29 December 1170, and a fire in 1174 led to a Gothic rebuilding of the east end for the pilgrims to his shrine.

The cathedral, with St Augustine’s Abbey and St Martin’s Church, belongs to a World Heritage property in Kent. Nothing in its history places it in Torfaen.

The Cantiorix Inscription is an early post-Roman grave marker found near Ffestiniog, at the place called the Graves of the Men of Ardudwy, and now kept at the church in Penmachno. It is the first known historical reference to the kingdom of Gwynedd, and it uses the Latin words for citizen and magistrate. Thomas Charles-Edwards dated the lettering to the fifth or sixth century, not before and not after, and translated it as saying that Cantiori lies here, a citizen of Gwynedd and a cousin of Maglus the magistrate. John Rhys in 1877 had read a similar text and was unsure what citizen meant.

Later historians disagree on whether the words show a Roman style of government after the legions left, or only a memory of Roman language. John Edward Lloyd placed the stone in the sixth or seventh century. The stone is in north Wales, not on the Blorenge.

The Capel Garmon Firedog, in Welsh Pentan Capel Garmon, is a late Iron Age andiron from Capel Garmon in Conwy. It was found deeply buried on its side in a field at Carreg Goedog Farm, with a large stone at each end, a placing that has been read as an offering. Another account says it came from a peat bog in Denbighshire in 1852, was kept at Voelas Hall, and has been known to students of Iron Age art since J. Romilly Allen published it in 1901.

It is thought to have been one of a pair at the hearth of a chieftain’s roundhouse. The animal heads may be a horse, a dog, or a mythical beast. X-rays made during the casting of a replica showed about eighty-five separately shaped pieces, a weight of about 38 kilograms, and a making time estimated at about three years. Colonel J.

C. Wynne Finch lent it to the national museum in Cardiff for two years from April 1939, and it later passed to that museum in lieu of tax. It is prehistoric ironwork from the north, not a fitting from these furnaces.

Carew Cross, in Welsh Croes Caeriw, is an eleventh-century cross in Carew, Pembrokeshire, listed at Grade I on 14 May 1970. It is believed to commemorate Maredudd ab Edwin of Deheubarth, brother of Hywel ab Edwin and joint ruler with him, who died in 1035, and the cross is thought to date from about that death. It is first known at Carew from about 1690. Where it stood before that is unknown, and it may have been brought as an ornament for Carew Castle.

The flaking of the stone happened before 1690. In 1811 it stood on a low plinth, which was altered about fifteen years later when the road was lowered. The head came loose in 1844 and was reset with lead. The cross was moved off the road in 1925, taken to the castle for safety in the Second World War, and put back afterwards in a new place by the road.

It is 4 metres, or 13 feet, tall, in two parts joined by a tenon. The head is Carmarthenshire sandstone and the shaft is an igneous stone from Preseli. The west face is inscribed, and the patterns are abstract. It is similar to the cross at Nevern.

The cross inspired the emblem of the service that cares for historic monuments in Wales. It has nothing to do with the lease of 1788 or with Big Pit.

Taken together, the furnaces, the mine, the tunnel, the forge sites, the canal wharf and the town show how iron and coal were won, moved and lived with in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth. The basic steel process was proved here and then helped other countries to overtake the works that had hosted it. The rails of 2020, the ash that was eating them, and the scouring features described in 2026 are the latest physical evidence read from that ground. The stone at Tywyn, the cathedral at Canterbury, the grave marker at Penmachno, the firedog from Capel Garmon, the cross at Carew, and the journal Archaeologia Cambrensis are other subjects.

They are not parts of Blaenavon Industrial Landscape.