Tower Colliery

Tower Colliery stands in the Cynon Valley of South Wales, near the villages of Hirwaun and Rhigos, north of Aberdare. It was the last deep-coal mine in the South Wales Valleys and the oldest continuously working one in the United Kingdom until it closed in 2008. The first drift mine there began in 1864, named after the nearby Crawshay’s Tower, a folly built in 1848. A new shaft was sunk in 1941 to a depth of 160 metres, used for ventilation and transporting miners. The colliery once worked up to 14 coal seams across 221 hectares, producing good-quality coking coal washed on site. The colliery became famous in 1994 when 239 miners bought it back for £2 million after British Coal planned to close it. Led by NUM Branch Secretary Tyrone O’Sullivan, each miner pledged £8,000 from redundancy pay to restart production on 3 January 1995. Welsh mining engineer Philip Weekes advised the buy-out and became its unpaid chairman. The workforce ran the mine successfully for over a decade, but by 2008 the remaining anthracite seam was exhausted and the colliery closed for the final time. Visitors to the site now find a landscape shaped by reclamation after open-cast mining ended in 2012. The partnership between Tower Colliery Ltd and Hargreaves Services re-profiled spoil tips and removed old structures to restore the land. Plans for mixed-use development include housing, an industrial estate, and an industrial heritage museum. The area’s mining past remains visible in the regraded landforms designed to support new habitats and future uses.