Incline Winding Engine

"Lose yourself wholly; and the more you lose, the more you will find."
St Catherine of Siena

In researching my family history I found that my great grandparents both lived at New Pits (Bedwellty Pits) in 1866, when they married. The remains of the incline haulage winding engine, which provided stone from the hillside quarry above, still stands on the lip of the disused quarry overlooking the valley below, where newspapers reported "twenty-seven men and boys killed" following an explosion in 1865. Among them believed to be my 2xgreat-grandfather and a few boys, the youngest was ten, the same age as my grandfather when he joined his father down the pit. Leaving the comfort and warmth of home to lose myself in this place on a bleak windswept hillside with light flurries of snow somehow connects me more fully with life by reminding me of the far greater hardships they faced on a daily basis.