29/05/2023
Sultan the Pit Pony
Caerphilly, Wales
There is huge sculpture built as a tribute to the pit ponies of Wales you might never have noticed. Sultan the pit pony is made from thousands of tons of waste material left behind when Penallta Colliery closed in the 1990s.
At 200 metres from hoof to muzzle, a galloping pony frozen in time is an imposing monument to the industry which drove Britain through the industrial revolution and put Wales at the centre of world shipping and trade.
Sultan the Pit Pony sits on the site of the Penallta Colliery, which is now a country park popular with dog walkers and families, a few miles north of Caerphilly. Its magnificent mane, hooves and slender body are shaped from the tons of waste coal shale rock that was left on the site when the colliery closed in 1991.
From ground level, the giant pony looks like an unremarkable set of small hills that you might walk right over without knowing what is right under your feet. However, with the recent growth in the use of drones, the true scale of the great sculpture is much easier to see, having remained difficult to view in its entirety since it was created in the 1990s. Designed by Welsh sculptor Mike Petts, it took three years to complete the earthworks between 1996 and 1999.
Sultan was designed to serve a dual purpose. As well as a path for walkers trailing along Sultan's spine, a seating area in its giant nostril and a bench in its ear, the imposing mass of the sculpture acts as a wind break to protect the Parc Penallta events area adjacent to it. Giant hoof prints are scattered around the field above Sultan's head. In rainy periods, these fill with water and become pools to attract wildlife to the park.
Sultan's body is covered in grass, but the black coal shale it is made of is exposed at points to give definition to the hooves, tail, mane and eyes.
The name Sultan comes from one of the last pit ponies in Wales.
When the sculptor of the Penallta pony designed the earthwork, the now-retired Sultan was still alive and a well-loved reminder of the lost coal industry. The sculpture was soon christened Sultan by people locally.
In total, 60,000 tons of coal shale rock were used to bring Sultan to life and be enjoyed by the descendants of the miners who hauled the coal out of the earth at Penallta to power steam engines in trains and ships. Great earth mounds made from millions of tons of waste material dragged out of the mines by men and ponies became massive slag heaps in the valleys of Wales and still dot the landscape to this day. Many have been incorporated into the scenery or planted with trees to keep them stable and less of a mark on the lush green hillsides of the valleys. They are a lasting reminder of the long-closed deep mines of Wales and the people and animals who worked in them.
The Penallta pony sculpture is perhaps the most imaginative use of a slag heap in Wales and is the largest earth sculpture in the UK. It is a fitting tribute to the thousands of hardy ponies that pulled millions of tons of black gold out of the bowels of the earth in the hot and dangerous work of coal mining in Wales during the 19th and 20th centuries. Pit ponies were used into the 1990's.
Coal mining was the driving force of the Welsh economy for decades, with thousands of miners working the country's deep coal mines until the last one closed in 2008. The industry left its mark on the cultural as well as geographical fabric of Wales, with over a million people in Wales working in coal in the 1920's. Today, the figure stands at just 5,000.
Sultan the Pit Pony will at least keep the memory of the pit ponies of Wales, and the miners who led them, alive, as an impressive and lasting tribute to their sacrifice.
Source: Wales Online
Image: Sultan the pit pony.
