How Green Was My Valley

The narrator Huw Morgan remembers his childhood in a South Wales coal-mining valley, in a close chapel-going community that the growing slag heap and the souring of the pits slowly destroy. Llewellyn set his idealised valley in the Rhondda, around Gilfach Goch: the terraced village and the Morgan house, the colliery that pays and kills, the slag tip creeping down the mountain to bury the green, the chapel at the moral centre, and the mountain top that survives above it all.

Huw Morgan

The valley village (the Morgan house)

Chapter 1

Huw Morgan looks back from the day he leaves it on the valley of his boyhood, when the river still ran clear and the terraced houses climbed a green hillside. The Morgan house, warm with family, chapel and song, is the centre of a world the book knows is already gone.

Chapter 1

inspired by The mining village and the Morgan family home are invented but drawn from the Rhondda valley around Gilfach Goch that Llewellyn named as his model; sited there in the South Wales coalfield.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗

Huw Morgan

The slag heap

Chapter 1

The tip of colliery waste, creeping year by year down the mountain to smother the grass and choke the river, is the visible sign of everything the coal takes. Huw frames the whole story around it, the black slag advancing over the green valley of the title as his own childhood recedes.

Framing narrative

explicit The slag heap that grows down the mountainside and buries the green is the book's title image and a real feature of every South Wales mining valley; sited on the slope above the village.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗