Rhondda Heritage Park

Rhondda Heritage Park, Trehafod, Rhondda, South Wales is a tourist attraction which offers an insight into the life of the coal mining community that existed in the area until the 1980s.

Visitors can experience the life of the coal miners on a guided tour through one of the mine shafts of the Lewis Merthyr colliery. Tours are led by former colliery workers. Rhondda Heritage Park is an Anchor Point of ERIH, The European Route of Industrial Heritage.

Rhondda Heritage Park exists on the site of the former Lewis Merthyr Colliery as a testament to the coal mining history of the Rhondda Valleys, which until the end of the 20th century was one of the most important coal mining areas in the world; In an area of only 16 miles long the Rhondda alone at one time had over 53 working collieries.

Although coal was mined as early as the seventeenth century in the Rhondda for domestic purposes, the earliest recorded date that a safe coal level was opened and mined was 1790 by Dr Richard Griffiths who was also responsible for bringing the first tram road into the Rhondda. Subsequently, Walter Coffin opened and sunk the first pits paving the way for the discovery of rich and prosperous steam coal seams with many more lines to follow.

Two pits were opened in 1850 on what was to become the Lewis Merthyr site:

Both pits had to be abandoned early on due to the conditions of the workings.

In the mid-1870s William Thomas Lewis (later Lord Merthyr) purchased and reopened the two pits, mining the upper bituminous (household) coal seams, until Hafod closed around 1893 and Coed Cae in the 1930s.

By 1880 WT Lewis had sunk the Bertie shaft, and in 1890 the Trefor shaft (both named after his sons), by which time the company had become known as the Lewis Merthyr Consolidated Collieries Ltd, employing some 5,000 men and producing almost a million tons of coal annually. The two headframes and associated colliery buildings are now Grade II* listed buildings.

In 1904 the company sunk the Lady Lewis Colliery a mile to the North East in the Rhondda Fach. In 1905 the company acquired Universal Colliery at Senghenydd, which was later to suffer the worst ever mining disaster in British history. In 1929 the colliery became part of the Powell Dyffryn Group, and in the same year Coed Cae stopped winding coal. Hafod No 2 followed, and Hafod No 1 in 1933. The colliery was nationalised in 1947.

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Wikipedia