MineArchive

The Colliery (How Green Was My Valley)

Fictional record. This page describes a mine from a fictional setting, not a real place. Information is based on the cited canon, with adaptations and interpretation distinguished where necessary. It is kept separate from the real MineArchive corpus — see Fictional.

SettingHow Green Was My Valley (Richard Llewellyn)
LocationAn unnamed valley in the South Wales coalfield. Neither the novel nor its film adaptation ever gives the valley or the colliery a specific name; both are understood to be a fictionalised composite, with author Richard Llewellyn drawing on the real mining village of Gilfach Goch, where he spent childhood summers.
TypeCoal
WorkedNot dated; the narrative follows narrator Huw Morgan from childhood into early adulthood, roughly the later Victorian period. – Not stated; the story instead traces the valley's slow environmental and social decline as mining expands.
ExtentNo shaft count, depth or scale is given; the colliery functions as the valley's sole major employer rather than as an engineered structure described in detail.
Status Researched

Overview

The unnamed colliery around which Richard Llewellyn's 1939 novel How Green Was My Valley (and John Ford's Academy Award-winning 1941 film) is built — never given its own name in either telling, but the central, defining presence of the Morgan family's South Wales mining valley.

History

Huw Morgan, the youngest son of a respected mining family, narrates his childhood and youth in a South Wales valley whose entire life is organised around its colliery: his father Gwilym and his older brothers all work there. His brother Ivor is killed in a mining accident, a shock that sends Ivor's pregnant wife Bronwyn into premature labour. When the mine's owner cuts wages, the miners strike; Gwilym Morgan refuses to support the strike, a stance that alienates both his fellow miners and several of his own sons, who leave home over it. Later, taking part in a rescue attempt after a roof fall traps other miners underground, Gwilym is himself caught in a further collapse; Huw finds him and cradles him as he dies. Across the novel, the valley's hillsides — green at the story's start — are gradually buried under the colliery's growing slag heaps, the environmental and social decline that gives the book its title.

Workings

No specific technical detail on the colliery's workings — its shafts, depth or seams — is given in the sources checked for this pass; it is depicted throughout primarily as a social and economic presence rather than an engineered one.

Closure

Not stated in the sources checked for this pass.

What became of it

Not stated in the sources checked for this pass.

Canon & adaptations

Wartime conditions prevented filming in Wales itself; 20th Century Fox instead built an 80-acre replica Welsh mining village at Brent's Crags in the Santa Monica Mountains near Malibu, California, for the 1941 film — a real substitute location, not a claim about where the story is meant to be set.

Recorded claims

Each claim is marked with its basis — explicit canon, MineArchive inference, adaptation only, or fandom interpretation — and attached to the source(s) below. Where tellings disagree, both are kept.

Sources

  1. (interpretation) How Green Was My Valley (novel) — Wikipedia
  2. (interpretation) How Green Was My Valley (film) — Wikipedia

Record created: 27 August 2026 · Last researched: 27 August 2026