Pant Glas

On a miserable day in October, 1966, I arrived home from school for my lunch to find my mum in tears in front of the television. The news was just coming in, in stark black and white, from a mining village in South Wales called Aberfan. A swollen underground stream beneath the coal tips from Merthyr Vale Colliery had destabilised the waste which had slipped down the mountainside and engulfed houses and Pant Glas, the village school. 144 people died, 116 of them children in the school, aged just 7-10 years old. Five of their teachers were also killed. It was the last day of school before the half term holiday.

I was ten years old at the time and I guess the awfulness of the tragedy fixed in my child's memory and stayed with me. We orienteered north of Aberfan today and, on the way back from the event, called in to the Garden of Remembrance, built on the site of Pant Glas School, to pay our respects.