A Little Piece of the Real Wales

Last Friday was Scrabble night, and while we were playing, I discovered that one friend shared my teenaged obsession with Wales. I mentioned that I had even bought a little Welsh-English dictionary. She topped that by saying she went to Brigham Young University because they were the only school in the U.S. that taught Welsh!

Anyway, it reminded me of reading How Green Was My Valley a few years ago (another one of those classic books I avoided while young). What a great book.

I read it partly in preparation for a short visit to Wales, which included a stop at Big Pit, the National Coal Museum, located in the town of Blaenafon, southeastern Wales, close to where HGWMV is set.


If you're ever anywhere near Wales, the museum is worth going out of your way to see. The people who conduct the tours were all miners there (the mine has been closed for about 20 years), and they take you down into the mine on the same elevator that carried them to work. Before going down, you have to hand over anything electronic in your possession, since it could cause a spark and blow everyone up.


This is the winding house, which controls the elevator as it descends into the mine.

The shower and locker room building has been turned into a display area, with information on both the labor history of mining and its environmental impact.


In the showers there was this surprise -- a naked man (with strategically placed towel) painted on a mirror. The showers were added in the mid-20th century. Before that, the men went home each night caked in coal dust and the women had a bath ready for them, laboriously prepared by heating water on the stove.

I hope I get the chance to go back to Wales for a longer visit. It's so much more interesting than the romantic, fantasy-land image I had of it as a young person.