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Rhode Wood Shaft Mounds is a post-medieval and modern industrial monument in Wales, protected by Cadw under reference PE458. The site comprises shaft mounds resulting from coal and ironstone extraction, reflecting the region's intensive mineral working during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The underlying geology of Pennine and South Wales Lower Coal Measures—a complex sequence of mudstone, siltstone, sandstone with productive coal seams and ironstone bands—made this locality valuable for exploitation.
The shaft mounds visible today are surface manifestations of underground mining activity, their formation linked to the spoil raised during the sinking and working of extraction shafts into the coal-bearing strata. Ferricrete deposits within the bedrock indicate laterally weathered iron-rich zones that would have been targets for ironstone mining alongside coal extraction. The monument preserves evidence of the industrialisation that transformed the South Welsh landscape.
These earthworks represent a distinctive type of post-medieval monument common throughout the South Wales coalfield and adjacent industrial regions. Their physical presence, though altered by subsidence and weathering over intervening centuries, continues to mark the subsurface voids and mineral workings beneath. The site remains an important record of the extractive industries that underpinned regional economic development.
Rhode Wood Shaft Mounds is a scheduled monument protected by Cadw under reference PE458. View the official record →
Rhode Wood Shaft Mounds is a post-medieval and modern industrial monument in Wales, protected by Cadw under reference PE458.
Rhode Wood Shaft Mounds dates from the post medieval/modern period, and is classified as a shaft mounds. It is one of over 32,000 scheduled monuments protected across the UK.
Rhode Wood Shaft Mounds is a Scheduled Ancient Monument, legally protected by Cadw — the body responsible for designating and safeguarding heritage sites in Wales. The official designation reference is PE458.
Several scheduled monuments lie within 10 km, including The Watchtower (4.4 km), Little Hoyle Cave and Longbury Bank Dark Age Site (4.9 km), Sculptured Stone Cross in Church (5.3 km).
This page is just one thread. A full Aubrey report pulls together 13 strands of Rhode Wood Shaft Mounds's history, each drawn from the record and mapped to the exact spot:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
Rhode Wood Shaft Mounds stands on Pennine Lower Coal Measures Formation And South Wales Lower Coal Measures Formation (Undifferentiated), bedrock that formed in the Westphalian. The rock here is mudstone, siltstone, sandstone, coal, ironstone and ferricrete.