Above the Varteg Colliery Spoil Tips

 

You can find beauty in all kinds of landscapes and sometimes its in some unusual locations. I went to the Varteg on the weekend. I have family roots in this area and its a place that I visit every now and again but have never really explored too much. 

I took a look around Salisbury Terrace and walked up the steep hill towards the colliery spoil tips that lie above Pembroke Terrace and below the hill named Mynydd Farteg Fawr. The rough track flattens out and improves a great deal when you get to the tips.

I was amazed during my journey up the hill how alive the place was with nature. There was lots of wild flowers , birds singing and overhead a Buzzard was soaring. The weather was very warm and humid but the sky was quite hazy with cloud.

When I got to the tips I was amazed at how colourful the colliery spoil was. I am no expert but I guess the spoil contains all kinds of various rock and minerals such as coal, washery waste, sedimentary rocks and other rocks. 

The tips face an eastward direction and the mornings suns was really lighting them up and causing them to sparkle.

You could really see how nature was starting to envelope the tips and cover them with a cloak of green plant life. It amazing to see how nature gradually reclaims the landscape , even places as scarred by the mining industry as these tips.

I found a nice location at the top of one of the spoil heaps and put my drone up and took some pictures from above.

I was not on my own up the tips. There was a flock of Carrion Crows really giving  a pair of ravens a hard time. The Buzzard was still flying about and I was being serenaded by Stonechats, Skylarks, Meadow Pipits , Whitethroat , Chiffchaff and Willow Warblers.