Geoheritage is now becoming a broader term for our geographical and geological features that have significant scientific, educational, cultural, or aesthetic value. Swansea has an important place in the history of geological exploration and the development of the Welsh coal industry.
People who have participated in my many guided walks on Kilvey will already be aware of the value of the Kilvey Geoheritage sites and the contribution they make to the Biodiversity and Geodiversity of Swansea.
Globally, October is a month of celebrating and recognising the importance of the rocks and landscape underneath our feet. Swansea has more than most towns to be mindful of, as it is built on over a thousand years of coal mining history.
Geoheritage is now becoming a broader term for our geographical and geological features that have significant scientific, educational, cultural, or aesthetic value. Swansea has an important place in the history of geological exploration and the development of the Welsh coal industry.
People who have participated in my many guided walks on Kilvey will already be aware of the value of the Kilvey Geoheritage sites and the contribution they make to the Biodiversity and Geodiversity of Swansea.
Globally, October is a month of celebrating and recognising the importance of the rocks and landscape underneath our feet. Swansea has more than most towns to be mindful of, as it is built on over a thousand years of coal mining history.
Above: Foxhole Coal Staithes in the 1840s.
Following on from my recent book on Foxhole and the history of Swansea Coal, I’ll be giving a few guided walks and talks on broader aspects of Swansea’s incredible Geoheritage and Geodiversity.
On 4 October, I’ll be talking about the history of Swansea coal and the special place Foxhole on Kilvey has in the history of Welsh coal mining. My talk will be at Swansea Museum as part of the RISW and the Historical Association’s History Day 2025. I’ll also have copies of the Foxhole history book at a discounted price.
On 6 October, as part of UNESCO’s # InternationalGeodiversityDay, I’ll be leading a walk around the geological features of Kilvey Hill and explaining the unique place in Swansea’s history that Kilvey holds. The geological features of Kilvey have long been regarded as obscured or destroyed, but many have survived against all odds. Come with me and walk the land that was explored by Geology’s most famous local coal pioneers, William Logan and Henry De la Beche. Tickets will be available shortly. I’ll advertise them via Facebook and Eventbrite.
On 8 October, I’ll be at the Friends of Penllergare monthly meeting at Llewellyn Hall in Penllergaer. I’ll be talking about ‘Penllergare, Henry De la Beche, and early Geology in Swansea’. Lewis Weston Dillwyn was often at the centre of scientific and cultural events in Swansea. He was particularly prominent in the recognition of Swansea as a centre of research in the emerging science of Geology and the first understanding of the South Wales coalfields.
Above: Henry De la Beche. Pioneer geologist.
I’ll be doing a few more walks and talks throughout the month, and I’ll post here to let people know. If you want to know more contact mew for details.
I’ll also have my bookshop of all my current books in print at the History and Heritage Fair at the National Waterfront Museum on 27 September 2025.
I was particularly struck by a recent opinion piece in The Lancet Planet Health on the links between human health and wellbeing and diverse nature.2 It’s an approach that remains at the centre of my use of Kilvey/Cilfái as a landscape for teaching. Early on, I could see that an overemphasis on biodiversity to the exclusion of other aspects of the environment would inevitably lead to a partial appreciation of the landscape.
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In the autumn of 2022, the local Council announced their plans to remodel the ancient Kilvey Hill landscape for a new tourism development, which would destroy the traces of thousands of years of human habitation and endeavour. The impending destruction led me to do what I could to record the history, ecology, biodiversity and Geoheritage of what is a significantly under-recorded landscape with considerable potential for education, well-being and climate change management.
Documenting the history and biodiversity was relatively straightforward, albeit a challenge to perceptions regarding a large area of land that many people see but few have experienced and even fewer understand. I remember one comment from the local authority about ‘there is nothing up there’. A comment I later understood as a self-serving phrase to make the destruction and loss more comfortable for planning permissions.
Above: The thinly bedded sandstones of sandstone on Kilvey are part of a broad range of types of structure on Kilvey, along with massive beds heavily used for building stone and the bituminous coal seams that were so important to early Medieval Swansea.
I suppose my perceptions were different, having had the advantage of a geological education at school and undergraduate level, including a hectic month of field mapping coastal regions of the Isle of Wight back in the day. I hadn’t appreciated how much of that had stuck with me until I needed to explore the Geodiversity of the Hill through documents, fieldwork and the wonderful archive of the British Geological Survey.
The fact that the natural heritage of any country includes its geological heritage is now slipping away from us. The wonderful naturalists’ clubs of the early twentieth century, such as the Swansea Scientific and Field Naturalists’ Society, were a broad church to all aspects of nature, including geology. But they have disappeared in the swing towards wildlife rather than general nature conservation, which has permanently obfuscated much of our wonderful Welsh geological heritage. The process accelerated as Naturalists’ Societies changed their names to Wildlife Trusts.
The collapse of geology as a subject deemed worthy of learning and the dissolution of the geological part of the National Museum for Wales have meant that describing the significance of geological sites has become challenging, as basic literacy in the nature of rocks and the landscape is in freefall.
Geoheritage and Geodiversity featured strongly in my first book on the history of Cilfái, not least because it was good history as well as good geology (Robins 2023a). I sought to highlight the significance to local heritage of the geology by separating ecology, biodiversity and climate change into the second Cilfái book (Robins 2023b). However, I felt my treatment of Geoheritage in the first book was not enough. I included a more substantial piece on Swansea’s coal history in my book on the Swansea Foxhole Coal Staithes, but the rich history of William Logan, Hendry de La Beche and Aubrey Strahan clearly deserves more (Robins 2025).
‘Every outcrop has the potential to be great’ (Clary, Pyle, and Andrews 2024) was an opening line to a recent special publication from the Geological Society. It’s a great opening line, and it sets a very positive note for a lively discussion on Geoheritage on a landscape scale. It’s a sentiment that is less positively upheld in Wales where our process of listing or recording sites of geological interest is haphazard and starved of interest and funds.
Above: An extract from one of William Logan’s many notebooks from the 1830s. Logan made regular visits to the outcrops above White Rock as he sought to understand stratigraphy and dip of the beds for coal exploration.
Nevertheless, the listing of a Kilvey site visit on the coming UNESCO International Geodiversity Day is a good opportunity to explore and reassess local Geoheritage. In preparing information for the International Geodiversity Day, I was particularly struck by a recent article linking Geoheritage and Cultural Heritage (Pijet-Migón and Migón 2022). The authors have introduced a model of themes at the Geoheritage-Cultural Heritage ‘interface’. It’s a very useful summary of what to explore or be aware of when revisiting geological sites. It helps move forward from traditional geological guides and texts (Owen 1973), which, although very useful, need to be modernised and broader in scope and engagement for a new generation.
Although the Pijet-Migón model doesn’t fit everything, for example, it can be broadened to explore the link between Biodiversity and Geodiversity, it is very useful. Here’s the Cilfái Geoheritage Landscape filtered through an amended model:
Clary, Renee M., Eric J. Pyle, and William Andrews. 2024. ‘Encompassing Geoheritage’s Multiple Voices, Multiple Venues and Multi-Disciplinarity’, Geology’s Significant Sites and Their Contributions to Geoheritage, no. Special Publication 543, pp. 1–7, doi:10.1144/SP543-2024-34
Owen, T.R. 1973. Geology Explained in South Wales (David & Charles)
Pijet-Migón, Edyta, and Piotr Migón. 2022. ‘Geoheritage and Cultural Heritage – A Review of Recurrent and Interlinked Themes’, Geosciences, 12.98, doi:10.3390/geosciences12020098
Robins, Nigel A. 2023a. Cilfái: Historical Geography on Kilvey Hill, Swansea (Nyddfwch)
——. 2023b. Cilfái: Woodland Management and Climate Change on Kilvey Hill, Swansea (Nyddfwch)
——. 2025. Foxhole River Staithes and Swansea Coal (Nyddfwch)
In researching the geology of Kilvey Hill, several issues quickly come to light.
The first is how little geology is actually being taught or even followed as a hobby any more. This is quite remarkable given the massive part Swansea’s geology has played in the history of the town. Swansea’s underlying coal resources were a massive factor in the development and growth of the eighteenth-century town. Without coal, there would have been no copper smelting, and Swansea would probably have remained the ‘Brighton of Wales’ (Boorman 1986). All the more remarkable when you consider that geology was an immensely popular subject for study in Swansea from the 1830s, and a century later, a large part of the University College of Swansea (Owen 1973; 1974). The geology of Kilvey became a training ground for William Logan when he taught himself about Swansea coal and rocks in the 1830s. Some of this will be a central theme in my guided walks for UNESCO Geodiversity Day in October.
The rocks of Kilvey contain a mass of plant and animal traces from the past. Understanding these past ecosystems and biodiversity allowed us to understand and exploit the coal reserves of under Swansea and the wider South Wales Coalfield. These rocks overlie the Tormynydd Coal Vein on the seaward side of the hill above Port Tennant.
Although people are now fully aware of the importance of biodiversity to our lives, less is appreciated about the non-living side of the equation — the Geodiversity of the underlying rocks and soils. Geodiversity is the foundation of the ecological life on the hill. The underlying soils, waste tips, streams, and geological features all influence the recovery of life after the cataclysmic pollution that killed everything on the hill in the nineteenth century.
The links between Geodiversity, Biodiversity, and Climate. Human activity has fundamentally altered the relationship between all three elements. (from an original in Tukiainen et al. 2023).
Biodiversity, Geodiversity and Climate are all interlinked to give us the environment we live within, or are responsible for (Tukiainen, Toivanen, and Maliniemi 2023). Kilvey’s ecosystem was destroyed by industry, coal mines destroyed the water table, and the recovery process has been long and uncertain, but in some places spectacular. It remains a tragedy that some of the recovered green areas of the hill will shortly be destroyed again by the local Council.
Boorman, David. 1986. The Brighton of Wales: Swansea as a Fashionable Seaside Resort, c.1780-1830 (Swansea Little Theatre Company)
Owen, T.R. 1973. Geology Explained in South Wales (David & Charles)
—— (ed.). 1974. The Upper Palaeozoic and Post-Palaeozoic Rocks of Wales (University of Wales Press)
Tukiainen, Helena, Maija Toivanen, and Tuija Maliniemi. 2023. ‘Geodiversity and Biodiversity’, in Visages of Geodiversity and Geoheritage, Special Publications, 530 (Geological Society of London), pp. 31–47
Nigel Robins 