Qualla: Parc Slip Colliery

Parc Slip Colliery: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. It was the morning of the St Mary Hill Fair - the biggest local holiday of the year - and the men and boys who walked through the gates of Parc Slip Colliery at Aberkenfig on Friday 26 August 1892 expected to be back above ground in time to wash and change and go to it. The weather was fine. One hundred and forty-six of them descended that morning. The explosion came at twenty past eight. The villagers above heard it and knew. By the end of the day, 42 had been brought out alive, some of whom died later of their injuries. The final death toll was 112 men and boys. The hole in a single Davy lamp had ended a hundred and twelve lives, and ended Parc Slip's working life too, even if the pit hung on twelve more years before it finally closed.

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Parc Slip Colliery: The Pit Before the Disaster

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Parc Slip was opened in the 1860s by John Brogden and Sons, working the difficult geology near the southern outcrop of the South Wales coalfield. In 1872 the Brogdens merged with the Llynfi Coal and Iron Company to form the Llynfi, Tondu and Ogmore Coal and Iron Company, which fa...

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Parc Slip Colliery: The 26th of August

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The Davy lamp had been invented seventy-six years earlier specifically to keep firedamp - methane - from igniting in mines. Its principle was simple: a fine wire mesh enclosing the flame would cool any flammable gas passing through it below ignition temperature. The principle wor...

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Image: Public domain

Parc Slip Colliery: After the Pit

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Parc Slip Colliery closed in 1904. For sixty years the surface workings sat as ruined headstocks and slag-blackened ground, the way so much of South Wales sat after the deep mines went quiet. Then in the 1960s the National Coal Board returned and turned the site into something el...

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Parc Slip Colliery: A Memorial, a Marsh, a Place to Sit

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. What the Council eventually agreed to with Celtic Energy in 2016 was different from the original plan. Rather than fill in the flooded former opencast workings, they would be left as lakes, the size reduced, the surrounding tips reshaped, the whole landscape seeded and softened. ...

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Parc Slip Colliery: Where to Find It

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. From the air, the site sits about a mile north-west of Aberkenfig and the same distance south-east of Tondu. The old colliery footprint has been entirely erased by opencast and then by reclamation, so what you see now is a roughly oval cluster of green - grassland and ponds where...

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Image: Public domain