Pennalta Colliery was my first planned port of call on my South Wales road trip. My plan was primarily to get a photo for my headgear typology and then get some from the adjacent housing estate that has recently been built on part of the site. I’d done some research on the internet to get a feel for how other people had photographed it and had scoped out the site on Google Streetview. I’d noticed that signs for another housing development had gone up on the fences around the land that the headgears sit on and had been there for a few years so I was hoping that I wasn’t too late.

However, when I arrived I noticed that the gate to the site was open and there were two site cabins there. Fortune favours the bold, so I wandered through the gates, knocked on the cabin doors (both locked) and as there was no one around, decided to explore the site until I was either done or someone told me to f@ck off.

The colliery was the last in the Rhymney Valley, and closed in 1991, but unlike the rest of the local pits, wasn’t completely cleared with the headgears, engine house and bath house being left. It’s been left in this derelict site for many years and the site has appeared to be increasingly overgrown over the past few years that it’s possible to go back on Google Streetview. So I was surprised to see that there were signs of heavy tracked vehicles recently (as in the past few weeks if not days) driving round site, suggesting that development had just started although there were none present on the site.

The recent / past 6 months of rain along with the tracked vehicle movements had left the site strewn with mud and puddles which I decided to capitalise on by adding texture and foreground interest. The constantly changing weather was something of a problem as my main objective was to get a photo for my typology, which ideally requires a clear sky but I can work with anything to an extent. At some point I will have to revisit all the typology images to try and harmonise the contrast as best I can. This isn’t ideal as they were all shot in different light, unlike the Becher’s who tried to always shoot early in the day under overcast skies. Unfortunately I don’t have the luxury of choosing my light conditions – I don’t do this professionally unlike the Becher’s who spent 6 months in Wales on a British Council funded trip.

As I wandered round the site, it reminded me of the mill demolition sites I’d wandered round over the years in my native Lancashire. All the coal mines in Bolton had closed well before I was born and although I remember seeing Agecroft Colliery in Salford from the train window when I was a teenager in the late 80’s / early 90’s going to Manchester, this too shut in 1991. The remaining collieries in the Leigh and Newton-le-Willows area shut within the next couple of years. Maybe if I’d have been a bit older I’d have photographed the last Lancashire collieries and wandered round sites like this. So I tried to capture that atmosphere in these photographs, a muddy, empty wasteland with just those two emblems of the industry left standing. Hopefully I’ve captured that feeling of desolation I experienced on the site.

https://evanpowwell.medium.com/penallta-colliery-rhymneys-last-deep-mine-49062353b28