This post is the second tracing my journey down the Afon Lwyd (see Down the Valley, posted 23/10 ). This post describes the last mile or so, along the western ridge, down from Varteg to Abersychan.
From Talywain, the eastern slopes revert to open country but the disguise is a thin one.
What has become a row of des-res country cottages is in fact the houses of the workers, and the much larger house of the Master, who used to operate the Cwmavon Forge at the bottom of the Varteg Incline. The Incline was begun in 1803 and was used to transport pig iron from the Varteg Ironworks to the forge. The Incline was extended in 1861 to reach the Varteg Colliery and was then used to transport coal down to the Monmouthshire Railway Eastern Valley section at Cwmavon station. In this form, like many of the relics of the industrial revolution, it was in use for a relatively short time and was replaced, less than 20 years later, (1878) by a branch line of the LNWR.
The mist can roll up the valley from the south in a matter of moments and the view quickly becomes one from the past;
Above the Incline, the slopes on the western side of the valley were extensively re-worked as late as the 1990s and the waste of later opencast mining remains on the surface;
In Varteg, the other great relics of the industrial revolution, the church and chapels, have fared no better than the collieries and the ironworks;
Many of the temples to Mammon are also in ruin;
But there is still the odd gesture of resistance and individuality;
And ordinary people go about their ordinary business;
However, in Abersychan, the ridge slopes down to meet the river again and just below where the traffic runs, the old road still exists, running alongside the river and here, for the first time, the valley appears as though it had been left entirely alone for the last 200 years;
On a brilliant autumn day such as this, it would be comforting to believe that some form of greening-over, not just of the landscape but of the history of the valley, was taking place or at least was possible; some kind of re-generation; a sense of the past returning to the earth where it belongs and something else growing or re-growing in its place.
The title of this post is a line from R.S. Thomas’ (1913-2000) poem, A Welsh Landscape. The poem crystallises Thomas’ conviction that his homeland was ‘a place of ruined beauty belonging to the past’; that the natural beauty of the landscape could never recover nor ever compensate for the wretched harm caused to it by the ‘machines’ of those who came to exploit its people and its buried treasures;
There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics.
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