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Blaenavon

Despite once having been associated with the heavy industries of coal mining and iron working, Blaenavon is set in surprisingly pleasant countryside, which can be further explored by taking the Pontypool and Blaenavon Railway, the highest standard gauge track to have survived in Wales. Half the site lies within the Brecon Beacons National Park. The northern terminus, Whistle Halt, stands at 1300 feet and is the highest station in England and Wales. Adjoining the station is the Whistle Inn, which is famous for its extensive collection of miners’ lamps.

The oldest colliery in Wales, Big Pit Mine, closed in 1980, but has been reopened as the Big Pit: National Coal Museum, with former miners and engineers from the site giving guided tours accompanied by plenty of anecdotes. Visitors (children must be at least five years old and a metre tall), armed with helmet, lamp and battery pack, can travel down a 90-metre shaft in a pit cage and walk through the underground roadways, air doors, stables and engine houses that were built by past generations of mineworkers and where thousands of miners, some of them children, laboured in arduous conditions. On the surface at this site, designated Britain’s 18th World Heritage Site by UNESCO, there are more buildings to explore, including the winding engine-house, the blacksmith’s workshop and the pithead baths.

The other side of the town’s industry, iron working, can be discovered at the Blaenavon Ironworks, a marvellous site that not only represents an important aspect of the Industrial Revolution, but is also one of Europe’s best preserved 18th-century ironworks. Built against a cliff-face in the 1780s, and then at the cutting edge of technology, the ironworks, whose power came from a steam engine, became the second largest in Wales. Visitors to the ironworks and the Cordell Museum can see the whole process of production, including the row of blast furnaces and the ingenious water balance tower by which the material was transported. Here, too, the human element of the vast ironworks is covered, as a small terrace of workers’ cottages, built between 1789 and 1792, has been preserved.

The Parish Church of St Peter, built in 1804 and looking like an engine house, is the oldest building in Blaenavon and has many features made of iron, including tomb covers, a font and pillars. It was built by the ironmasters of the ironworks, Samuel Hopkins and Thomas Hill, and given to the parish.

Blaenavon is renowned as a book town, and now has many second-hand bookshops on its main street.