Qualla: Aberfan

Aberfan: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jaggery, CC BY-SA 2.0. It was a Friday morning. The children had been in school for about twenty minutes when the mountain came down. They had sung in assembly, hung up their coats, and were just beginning lessons in their classrooms at Pantglas Junior School. The half-term holiday was set to begin that afternoon, and many of them were thinking about it. At 9:15 a.m. on 21 October 1966, a saturated colliery spoil tip on the slope above the village of Aberfan broke loose and slid down. It struck the school. One hundred and sixteen children, almost a whole generation of that village, died that morning, along with twenty-eight adults. They were five years old, eight, ten. They were Brian and Dawn and Wendy and David. They were children. Aberfan is the name of where they lived.

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Image: Jaggery | CC BY-SA 2.0

Aberfan: Before the Tip

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Horn, CC BY-SA 2.0. Aberfan sits at the bottom of the western slope of the River Taff in the Taff Valley, a few miles south of Merthyr Tydfil. Before 1869, it was two cottages and an inn for farmers and bargemen working the Glamorganshire Canal. Then John Nixon sank the Merthyr Vale Colliery, and a ...

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Image: Graham Horn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Aberfan: 9:15 in the Morning

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Horn, CC BY-SA 2.0. It had rained heavily for days. On the upper flank of Tip No. 7, the saturated waste began to subside, three to six metres at first. Then, just after a quarter past nine, more than 150,000 cubic metres of black slurry tore loose and flowed down the mountain at speed. A farm went ...

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Image: Graham Horn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Aberfan: The Mountain and the Inquiry

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jaggery, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Tribunal of Inquiry, chaired by Lord Justice Edmund Davies, sat for seventy-six days. Its report, published in 1967, was unambiguous. The disaster was entirely the fault of the National Coal Board. The tip should never have been built over a spring. Warnings had been ignored....

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Image: Jaggery | CC BY-SA 2.0

Aberfan: The Place Where the School Stood

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Darren Wyn Rees at Aberdare Blog, CC BY-SA 4.0. Where Pantglas Junior School was, there is now a memorial garden. It is the size of the school footprint, gentle and unhurried, with benches and planted beds tended by people who remember. Up the hill, in the Aberfan Cemetery, a long line of white granite arches marks the graves ...

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Image: Darren Wyn Rees at Aberdare Blog | CC BY-SA 4.0

Aberfan: What Aberfan Asks

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Horn, CC BY-SA 2.0. Aberfan is still a village. Children walk to two primary schools, one of them taking lessons in Welsh. The colliery is gone, closed in 1989, twenty-three years after the disaster. The A470 thunders past the eastern edge of the village; the Taff Trail, a cycle path, runs gently do...

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Image: Graham Horn | CC BY-SA 2.0