Blaenavon and Big Pit

The tour takes you 300 feet down into a coal mine's original tunnels, in a colliery that cut coal until 1980. Big Pit at Blaenavon, in the south Wales valleys, is a real mine that became a national museum, set on the heather moors of a valley UNESCO listed as a World Heritage Site because nowhere tells the whole industrial story so completely.

The pit opened in 1860 and cut coal until 1980, employing up to 1,300 people, and the underground tour led by former miners is the core of the visit; above ground the Pithead Baths carry a moving exhibition on miners and their families, the Lamp Room keeps live canaries, and King Coal takes you through a modern mine on screen. Down the hill the ironworks of 1789 keep their furnaces, casting houses, calcining kilns, workers' cottages and the water-balance lift of 1839, and around them lies the relict landscape of quarries, tramroads and lost settlements that carried coal, iron ore, fireclay and limestone across the hills to the canal and the world. The town itself is part of the site, with St Peter's church built by the ironmasters in 1804, the Workmen's Hall paid for by workers' subscriptions in 1894, and the old St Peter's School now the World Heritage Centre with a café over the churchyard. Keeper's Pond on the mountain above and the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal below make the outdoors half of the day. It is not pretty in the postcard sense, and that is the whole point; this valley made the modern world and still looks like it.