MM192

Remains of Race Colliery / Glyn Pits  

 

Designated  

Torfaen  

Pontymoile  

326563  

199829  

Industrial  

Colliery  

Post Medieval/Modern  

This monument is being considered for amendment. The monument comprises the remains of Nos. 1 and 2 pits from the former Race Colliery (also known as Glyn Pits) which was sunk by Capel Hanbury Leigh in the 1840s to provide coal for his iron and tinplate works in Pontypool. The site is located on a man-made terrace in an area of extensive mining and quarrying on the northern slopes of Mynydd Llwyd at 240m AOD. Race Colliery was one of the first in the area to use a steam engine to raise coal, facilitating a significant increase in production from the earlier water-powered systems. In 1845 Capel Hanbury Leigh commissioned the Neath Abbey Ironworks to build a single cylinder rotative beam engine which was housed in a Cornish-style engine house built from fine sandstone ashlar with a hipped slate roof immediately to the west of the two shafts. The beam engine would have originally fulfilled both winding and pumping tasks at the colliery, but by 1865 a dedicated winding engine had been installed. This was built within a square winding house constructed from sandstone ashlar, located on the opposite, eastern, side of the shafts. Race colliery was in operation until 1932 after which it was used as a pumping station for the nearby Hafodyrynys colliery, finally closing in the 1960s. The site contains the standing remains of the original engine house and steam engine with its later brick fan drift to the south-east, the winding house and steam engine, two capped shafts and ventilation tunnels and a pond that supplied water to the steam engines. Historic mapping and images show that the colliery contained multiple other structures through its working life which are likely to survive to varying extents as buried archaeological features. These include the bases of chimneys, boiler houses, workshops and storage sheds, tramroads and associated infrastructure as well as the foundations for the unusual double frame wooden headgear. The monument is of national importance for its potential to enhance our knowledge of 19th century coal mining and associated industrial architecture and technology. The surviving towers are amongst the best-preserved mid-19th century mining structures in Wales and are particularly significant in retaining most of their heavy machinery in situ and relatively intact from hundreds of extant or destroyed examples. These may be expected to contain archaeological information concerning chronology, building techniques, metal fabrication and the technological transition from water to steam power. Glyn Pits retains significant standing remains, with a strong probability of the presence of associated archaeological features and deposits, which along with extensive documentation have high potential to enhance our knowledge of the layout and development of the colliery. It shares and contributes to the group value or a larger cluster of contemporary industrial monuments in the Pontypool area. Originally scheduled as ‘Old Beam Pump and Winding Engine, Glyn Pits’ the scheduled area has been positively revised to better record the extent of the pithead structures and the surviving archaeology. The scheduled area comprises the remains described and areas around them within which related evidence may be expected to survive. The scheduled area is irregular in shape and measures a maximum of 73m N/S by 84m E/W, centred on NGR 326563 / 199828.