A quick wander around the site initially in heavy fog which lifted after an hour.
You wouldn't think the site is non operational with everything still switched on, vehicles everywhere and active security doing regular patrols.
We did have two police vans arrive with full sirens and lights, turns out they were chasing one of the locals across a nearby field
History
The Ffos-y-fran Land Reclamation Scheme was a major opencast coaling operation to the north-east of Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. It was the last major opencast mine in the UK, and it shut down in November 2023 with restoration planned to start in 2024.
The contracted excavator/reclaiming company was Merthyr (South Wales) Ltd (previously called Miller Argent, which is owned by Gwent Investments Limited, a privately owned family business based in South Wales. The scheme development was the last part of the East Merthyr Reclamation scheme, and planned to extract 10 million tonnes of coal over 15 years starting from 2007, with the intention of using part of the revenue to redevelop the current former industrial workings into residential and recreational use.
The opencast coal mine has provoked criticism at a local and national scale, including objections on health and safety grounds as to the close proximity of housing to the site, concerns of the despoiling of the landscape, and global concerns of the contribution of coal to climate change. A number of protests have occurred on and around the site.
The license of the site expired in September 2022; an application for a 9-month extension was filed with Merthyr Tydfil Council. That application was refused in April 2023, meaning the site would have to close. In August 2023, the company announced that the mine will close by the end of November 2023. The mine shut down in November 2023 as planned.
Pics
Thanks for looking.
You wouldn't think the site is non operational with everything still switched on, vehicles everywhere and active security doing regular patrols.
We did have two police vans arrive with full sirens and lights, turns out they were chasing one of the locals across a nearby field
History
The Ffos-y-fran Land Reclamation Scheme was a major opencast coaling operation to the north-east of Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. It was the last major opencast mine in the UK, and it shut down in November 2023 with restoration planned to start in 2024.
The contracted excavator/reclaiming company was Merthyr (South Wales) Ltd (previously called Miller Argent, which is owned by Gwent Investments Limited, a privately owned family business based in South Wales. The scheme development was the last part of the East Merthyr Reclamation scheme, and planned to extract 10 million tonnes of coal over 15 years starting from 2007, with the intention of using part of the revenue to redevelop the current former industrial workings into residential and recreational use.
The opencast coal mine has provoked criticism at a local and national scale, including objections on health and safety grounds as to the close proximity of housing to the site, concerns of the despoiling of the landscape, and global concerns of the contribution of coal to climate change. A number of protests have occurred on and around the site.
The license of the site expired in September 2022; an application for a 9-month extension was filed with Merthyr Tydfil Council. That application was refused in April 2023, meaning the site would have to close. In August 2023, the company announced that the mine will close by the end of November 2023. The mine shut down in November 2023 as planned.
Pics
Thanks for looking.
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