Stories From Round Our Way
A South Wales community café is responding to a major coal tip landslide
In this story we meet Ralph Connor and Tina Honeyfield, who live in Cwmtillery, a former coal-mining town in the South Wales valleys. They run Caffi Tyleri, a community café, and Pentref Tyleri, a local group that has become a focal point for tackling unemployment, food poverty, and the challenges of managing the upland landscape through natural flood prevention. In November 2024, after weeks of heavy rain, an old coal tip on the hillside above their home gave way. The landslide swept through around forty houses, including the one they had lived in for seventeen years. We spoke with them about what happened that day, and about what it means to live beneath the legacy of coal - about the closures of the mines, the underfunding that followed, and the slow accumulation of risk that remained just out of sight until it surfaced in the slip. They also spoke about Cwmtillery itself - he way the town holds together, and the kind of community spirit that emerges when everything else gives way, and which, they believe, will carry it through what comes next.
