My boss, the Area Geologist for the Western Area of British Coal’s Opencast Executive, South Wales Region, had prepared a proposal. It involved a budget for an exploration drilling programme for a potential coal project. Perhaps it was the start of a process which, like Cynddylan on his tractor, was unwittingly “emptying the wood of foxes and squirrels and bright jays”.
The proposal met with some resistance from management as it was, to say the least, speculative. The area was known to lie between two major geological faults, the Llannon and Trimsaran disturbances.
Unknown but probably complex
Carway Colliery had worked coal seams underground to the north of and stopped up against the former, and Trimsaran Colliery had worked coal seams underground to the south of and had stopped up against the latter. What was expected of the geology between the major faults was best described as “unknown but probably complex”, to borrow a phrase from the Geological Memoir of the Gwendraeth Valley.
The proposal was sent to my boss, a Welsh speaker, who adopted the name of a farmhouse close to the centre of the proposed site as its name. Allt Y Sgrech, he informed me, could be translated as the “screech of the jay”. Checking the phrase on Google translate recently gave me the rather less attractive “hill of the scream”. Further Google translation for the Welsh for Jay came up with “sgrech y coed”, “screech of the woods”, which rather restored the attraction of the original name for me.
Eventually a limited budget was approved by British Coal Opencast Executive (BCOE) Headquarters in distant Mansfield in order for a small number of exploratory boreholes to be drilled. The name Allt Y Sgrech, however, was vetoed by HQ on the grounds of (un)pronounceability, and the project was renamed.
An anthracitic aside
One of the first boreholes that was drilled intersected thick seams of Anthracite, so the drilling programme was expanded and the rest, as they say, is history. On the subject of anthracite, a recent piece in Bylines Cymru on universal basic income and Net Zero referred to Pentremawr miners and anthracite.
Anthracite burns more cleanly than bituminous coal, is almost smoke- and soot-free, and is also used in water filtration. It is currently included in the fuels allowed in domestic heating under recent Clean Air Acts. In 2021, the UK imported 46,000 tonnes of anthracite. I would like to see us continue to mine it domestically, at least while the present energy price crisis lasts.
Ffos Las to Gwendraeth
Ffos Las was named after a farm which had existed at the site before mining operations began. The English translation of Ffos Las is “blue ditch”. The Ffos Las opencast mine operated between 1983 and 1997 and was, at one time, the largest open cast mine in Europe. It was 500 feet deep. The open pit gave access to and displayed some very interesting structures, evidence of the immense turmoil to which the area had been subjected in its geological past.
It was estimated from the geological structure seen in the pit that the faulting was the result of some two kilometres of accumulated earth movement from south to north. The tragic earthquakes which have recently affected Turkey and Syria have been estimated, by way of comparison, to have had fault displacements of 10 to 12 metres.
Ffos Las is now perhaps best known for the racecourse which was completed in 2009, built on top of the back-filled and restored mine.
In the early days of exploration, while I was setting out borehole locations near Allt y Sgrech on foot, a fox circled some distance ahead. It looked back at me over its shoulder with what looked rather like resentment. Now that peace has been restored, I very much hope that the scattered “foxes and squirrels and bright jays” have returned to the tranquillity of the Gwendraeth Valley and the Trimsaran woods.
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