My new work is uncovering the history of the early geologists and explorers of the Welsh coalfields.
Although coal mining has been ongoing in the Swansea area for at least a thousand years, the uncertainty about what coal actually is lasted until the 1920s.
In Swansea, the exploration of our coal seams began in the eighteenth century, but it was in the 1830s that pioneer geologist William Logan first started to examine the coal and sandstone layers on Kilvey and Town Hill to understand the physical arrangement of coal seams. When Logan met Henry De la Beche (sometime in 1833), the quality of Logan’s research was instantly recognised as being central to the geological mapping of the Swansea district and the wider Welsh coalfields.
The debates over whether coal was a rock or a mineral continued throughout the early 1800s, and early geologists struggled to understand what coal was and how it was created.
Below is a drawing from 1841 showing the complex plant structures within a piece of local bituminous coal. Close examination of coal gradually revealed the incredible numbers of plants and ferns that make up the millions of tons of coal that were exported from Swansea docks.
Nigel Robins 