Big Pit: The Welsh Coal Mine Where Ex-Miners Take You 300 Feet Down, South Wales

High on the heather moorland above the town of Blaenavon, in South Wales, stands a pithead tower and a cluster of old colliery buildings. For more than a century, this was Big Pit, one of the coal mines that powered industrial Britain. The landscape around Blaenavon was built for industry. Ironworks opened here around 1789, and mines and quarries spread across the hills to feed them with coal, iron ore and limestone. Big Pit was sunk around 1860 and grew into one of the area's major collieries, at its peak employing up to 1,300 workers. Until 1908, everything underground was done by hand, including cutting the coal. Only that year did a conveyor first arrive to help move it. Generation after generation of Blaenavon men worked the seams hundreds of feet underground. But Welsh coal was in long decline. On February 2, 1980, Big Pit closed, with the loss of more than 250 jobs. It was the last deep coal mine operating in the area. Big Pit could have been sealed and forgotten like countless other pits. Instead, people in Blaenavon fought to keep it. Torfaen Borough Council bought the site for £1 and handed it to a charitable trust to turn it into a museum. In 1983, Big Pit reopened, this time with visitors going down the shaft. What made it famous was who took them down. The tour guides were former miners, many of whom had worked these same tunnels. They still lead the tours today. Visitors put on a helmet and lamp, ride the cage about 300 feet down, and walk the old roadways, stables and coal faces while their guide explains what it was like to work there. In 2000, the Blaenavon Industrial Landscape, including Big Pit, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the first "cultural landscape" in the United Kingdom. In 2001 Big Pit became part of the national museum of Wales, and in 2005 it won the Gulbenkian Prize for museum of the year. Above ground, the land has been changing too. The old coal tips and spoil heaps around Blaenavon are greening over, and nearby, the Garn Lakes Nature Reserve has grown where industry once scarred the hills. The mine has been kept as it was, while the land around it slowly returns to the wild.