Two hundred and thirty-nine miners stood in a Welsh valley in 1994 and decided not to go quietly. The government had closed their pit on a Friday in April, declaring it uneconomic and inviting them to collect their redundancy cheques. Instead the men pooled the money - eight thousand pounds each - and bought the mine. They walked back into the cage as owners, descended the same shaft they had ridden as employees, and cut coal for thirteen more years from a seam the experts had written off. Tower Colliery was the oldest continuously working deep-coal mine in the United Kingdom and possibly the world. The last one in South Wales. The miners owned it. And they made it work.
The name comes from a mock castle on Hirwaun common, Crawshay's Tower, built in 1848 by Francis Crawshay - one of those Victorian iron-and-coal magnates who liked to crown his estate with a decorative ruin. Locals had been drift-mining the hillside above Hirwaun since 1805, scraping at coal that lay nearly at the surface, but in 1864 the first proper drift opened and someone named it after the folly. Coal had been the South Wales Valleys' answer to almost every question for a century: how to feed a family, how to build an empire, how to power steamships from Cardiff to the Black Sea. Tower's coking coal was good - 14 seams worked over its life, anthracite at depth, a 14.8-kilometre lease around the pithead. By the 1940s the workings went 160 metres down. By the 1980s, an on-site washery cleaned the coal before it left. The pit fed a culture: rugby clubs, choirs, chapels, a particular kind of Welsh socialism rooted underground.
October 1993. The miners marched up onto Hirwaun common and raised a red flag, a deliberate echo of the Merthyr Rising of 1831, when iron workers had hoisted a red banner during the first great Welsh labour uprising. By the 1990s, the South Wales coalfield was a graveyard of closed pits, the great strike of 1984-85 a defeat that had become a legend. Tower was the last deep mine standing. The MP Ann Clwyd staged a sit-in underground in 1994, refusing to come up, accompanied by Glyn Roberts of Penywaun. None of it stopped British Coal. On 22 April 1994 the pit closed - uneconomic, the official notice said, in current market conditions. Most of the men took their redundancy and went home. Some did not.
The buyout that followed has entered Welsh folklore for good reason. Two hundred and thirty-nine miners, led by Tyrone O'Sullivan, contributed roughly eight thousand pounds each from their redundancy payments, raised additional finance, and bought the colliery from the government in January 1995. It was an act with no real precedent in British industry - workers purchasing the operation that had just sacked them and running it as a co-operative. They restarted production. The seam the Coal Board had called uneconomic produced coking coal again, freight trains carrying it down to Aberthaw Power Station, the washery turning out clean fuel. Even John Redwood, the Conservative Secretary of State for Wales who had pushed for the buyout from inside Thatcher's policy unit years earlier, later wrote that the miners 'demonstrated that free of Coal Board control it was possible, at least in their case, to run the pit for longer.' They ran it for thirteen years.
In January 2008 the workable coal finally ran out. The miners marked the closure not with anger but with a celebration - a brass band, a march, photographs of men in helmets emerging from the cage for the last time. They had outlasted every prediction. Aberpergwm down the valley, a smaller drift mine the Coal Board had shut in 1985, had been reopened by private interests in the 1990s; some Tower machinery moved there. The valley adjusted, as Welsh valleys had been adjusting since the war. After closure, the site entered its slow second life. Tower Regeneration Ltd, a joint venture, won planning permission in 2012 to extract roughly six million tonnes of remaining anthracite by opencast methods, on the strict condition that the land would then be reshaped, decontaminated, restored. The colliery tips would be re-profiled, the entries sealed, the mine workings removed.
From the air, the site sits in the Cynon Valley between Hirwaun and Rhigos, north of Aberdare, where the South Wales Valleys narrow into the Brecon Beacons. The Heads of the Valleys road runs nearby. The Bannau Brycheiniog rise to the north and west. What you see today is land in transition - a sloping landform being shaped to host semi-natural habitats, the spoil tips being levelled, plans being debated for housing, industrial estate, a heritage museum, tourism. The shareholders, who once were the workers, are still deciding what legacy to leave. For Wales, Tower is something more than an industrial site. It is the moment a community refused to accept that its work was worthless, that the experts knew best, that the only response to closure was acceptance. The miners pooled their money and proved otherwise. They mined the pit they were told could not be mined, kept it running for thirteen years past its death sentence, and walked out together when they were ready, not when they were told.
Located at 51.73°N, 3.56°W in the Cynon Valley, just north of Aberdare and south of the Brecon Beacons escarpment. The former colliery site sits on Hirwaun common at the top of the valley, with the Heads of the Valleys road (A465) running nearby. Cardiff (EGFF) is approximately 30 miles south-southeast. Best viewed at 3,000-4,000 feet AGL with the green ridge of the Bannau Brycheiniog to the north and the long industrial valleys cascading south toward the Bristol Channel.