Stuart’s Photography

When I’m discussing my Merthyr Road project with friends and colleagues who share an interest in local history, I’m often heard to remark that I’d love to be able to take my Nikon D200 with me back in time to take shots of what these places looked like in their heyday.  Alas, we don’t yet have a time machine (and current thinking is that, when we do have one, we’ll only be able to go back in time to the day the machine was first switched on), but we do have Photoshop.

Fellow Flickr user Capt’ Gorgeous has been busy with Photoshop, creating a tantalising shot of what the old bridge at Pontypridd might have looked like when it was first built, before the more modern (and flat) road bridge was built alongside it.  I think it’s a fantastic piece of imagination, and a great piece of work.

Here’s hoping that someone does build a time machine, so that we can go back and capture shots like this for real one day

I wasn’t around in the South Wales valleys when the mines were still here, but fellow Flickr user trelewis was.  She’s posted a set of photos of the Abercynon Colliery before it was closed and cleared (the Navigation Park business park sits on the site today).  Good historical photos that might interest anyone who enjoys my Merthyr Road series of photographs.

(I’ve only just come across this - I hope John will forgive me for being remiss at moderating the backlog of comments awaiting approval. I get a lot of spam, mostly because of how heavily read my blog was back when I worked on Gentoo Linux).

If I could have one wish, it would be to take my MacBook Pro, my Nikon D200 and the whole GPS satellite system back in time to visit the places I write about back when they were more than the mostly-lost memories that they’ve become today. I’d love to be able to see what the docks were like before the Glamorganshire Canal was emptied by an unfortunate accident in 1951. I’d loved to have walked under the Walnut Tree Viaduct before it was dismantled in 1969. Heck, I’d have even loved to have seen the old power stations that have completely disappeared from Taff Vale.

But I can’t. All these things were gone before I was born, and several decades before I settled in Wales in 2000 (yup, I’m one of those ‘orrible invading English from across the border )

Fortunately, there are folks on Flickr who are sharing their photos from these times. It’s an act of generosity that I really appreciate. I just hope the generation that follows us all one day learns to understand and respect the history of South Wales that we’re all trying to preserve before it’s gone forever.

John Briggs is one of those people kindly sharing their photos on Flickr. John’s photos, from his book Before The Deluge: Cardiff Docklands 1970’s, provide an excellent snapshot of life in the docks some twenty years after the Glamorganshire Canal had finally closed, and after the Bute West Dock too had closed.

Two photos in particular caught my eye this evening whilst taking a first look through John’s work, because they provide more information about the Junction Canal that still survives today.

Junction Canal to West is a great shot of the Junction Canal that used to link the Bute East Dock, the Bute West Dock, and Sea Lock Pond on the Glamorganshire Canal. The railway viaduct in the foreground is the Bute Viaduct, which carried trains across the Junction Canal to the western ank of the Bute East Dock.

This is the TVR Viaduct, which carried trains over Junction Canal and down to the eastern bank of the Bute West Dock (originally called the Bute Shipping Canal). From the curve, I’m guessing that this photo is looking west along Junction Canal, but I could be wrong

You can see more of John’s photos up on Flickr, or pick up a copy of his book Before The Deluge: Photographs of Cardiff’s Docklands in the Seventies.

View the photos of The Lost LifeTrail(tm) Stations as part of my Merthyr Road project on Flickr.

It isn’t just the wealth of South Wales that has declined since the closure of the Glamorganshire Canal, the iron works, the coal mines, and most of our railways. There has also been a dramatic turn for the worst in the health of South Wales. The nation as a whole is facing an ever-increasing burden of folks who are overweight and who just aren’t doing enough physical activity to maintain their health as they get older. When coupled with the rising average age of the working population, the UK as a whole is facing extra demand on its state-funded health care services coinciding with less people footing the bill.

The Welsh Assembly Government is trying to plan ahead with the twenty year Climbing Higher national strategy for sport and active recreation. Under this initiative, a number of Welsh councils have been buying the LifeTrail(tm) outdoor activity solution from US company Playworld Systems and installing them in local parks. Comprising of ten separate Wellness Stations, the LifeTrail system is aimed at getting the aging population to perform simple but effective exercises that will contribute towards their overall health.

And there just happens to be a few of these hidden away along an old railway line in Pontypridd …

Thoughts On The Day

This might seem like an odd topic for my Merthyr Road project, which to date has focused on the more historical locations between Cardiff and Merthyr Tydfil, but please indulge me. The LifeTrail(tm) stations have been placed along the route of the former Pontypridd, Caerphilly and Newport Railway, which opened in 1884 and was taken out of use in 1967. The Pontypridd, Caerphilly and Newport Railway connected the coal mines at Merthyr with the docks at Newport, running along the Taff Vale Railway to Pontypridd before crossing the River Taff just south of Ynysangharad Park, down the eastern side of the valley to Penhros Junction, and then east through Caerphilly, Machen and Basseleg and so down to the Newport Docks. To the best of my knowledge, some of the P.C. & N. Railway has been converted to form the Taff Trail route between Nantgarw and Glyntaff, whilst some of it has been lost under the A470 along with the Glamorganshire Canal. A third section, between the Treforest Ironworks Bridge over the Taff at Glyntaff and Ynysangharad Park, has recently been turned into a pleasant riverside walk, and it is here that the LifeTrail(tm) stations have appeared.

To be honest, I had no idea that the LifeTrail(tm) stations were there - I was actually heading out of Pontypridd for a walk down to Taffs Well to gather more photos for a second article about Cardiff Railway. The first station can be found at the south-western corner of Ynysangharad War Memorial Park, and I found a total of five more stations along the route of the old railway line to Treforest. It’s difficult to describe what they are; the best thing to do is to look at the photos of the individual stations. Without trying to do them down, they’re basically simple but effective exercise equipment purpose-built for placing outdoors in parks. Online articles I’ve read since I took the photos suggest that they are aimed at the older adult population (by which I mean the over 40’s!), and that’s also backed up by the promotional material available on the manufacturer’s website.

I walked along the set of exercise stations with an adult couple who were probably in their mid-forties (my apologies to you if I’ve gotten that wrong ), looking at each of the exercises on offer and talking about the concept. We all expressed surprise at where the stations have been placed, and wondered whether they would have been more accessible and easier to find if they’d been placed in a trail around Ynysangharad War Memorial Park instead. I’m sorry to say that, at Station #2, we couldn’t work out whether the contractors hadn’t finished installing this station yet, or whether someone had already stolen the pedals from the exercise bike built into this station! We also all noticed that these stations are labelled for Tredegar Park and are branded for Newport City Council, an unfortunate oversight on someone’s part that gave me the title of this article

My overall feelings on these installations are mixed. On the one hand, anything that gets the under-active to do more healthy exercise is a GoodThing(tm). The UK in general, and Wales in particular, is heading towards a health crisis caused in part by folks doing less physical activity, and that’s not going to be fun for anyone - not the folks who will be (or are) suffering, and not for my generation who will also be footing the tax bill for it. On the other, it’s a shame to see Welsh tax money being used to buy an off-the-shelf solution from the US. This could have been a good opportunity for Welsh business and the various Welsh teaching centres, including the Welsh Institute of Chiropractic at the University of Glamorgan (who I’m personally indebted to for excellent treatment following a car accident some years ago).

I’m wondering where the other four LifeTrail(tm) stations will be built. There are six stations at the moment in Pontypridd (one of which is purely informational), leaving four additional stations if RCT are going to take the standard complement of ten stations. Station #6 is at the end of the track; it wasn’t obvious to me where any additional stations could be built. I’ll have to go back out to the site once work has been completed to see where RCT has placed the other four units.

On the day I didn’t know any better, but after researching the LifeTrail(tm) stations, I’m disappointed to find that RCT’s stations don’t appear at first glance to include the panels for disabled people. Just to explain - each station has three sides to it, or three panels. Each panel hosts a single exercise for folks to do. According to Playworld System’s website, normally two of the panels would have exercises for the able-bodied, whilst the third panel would either be used for information / sponsor purposes, or for exercises for folks in wheelchairs. RCT appear to have opted for a different configuration, using all three panels for exercises for able-bodied folks. In this post-DDA world, that might prove to be a bold move on RCT’s part.

(As a footnote, it will be interesting to go down to Tredegar Park one weekend to see how their LifeTrail(tm) stations compare to those installed in Pontypridd).

Post Production

The main job since taking the photos has been to try and find out more about the LifeTrail stations. Talking to a few locals who regularly use the path between Treforest and Ynysangharad Park, they’re as much a surprise to them as they were to me on the day!

Unfortunately, this has been easier said than done. There’s plenty of information online from other councils in Wales about the Climbing Higher initiative, and how they are spending tax payers’ money - but there’s precious little information available online from Rhondda Cynon Taff Council itself. Unfortunately, the online search on the RCT website appears to have been having a bad day, as even searches for basic terms like ‘Ynysangharad’ produce no results, and searches for ‘Climbing Higher’ list PDFs that don’t mention the WAG initiative at all

At the time of writing, I’m assuming that RCT is still in the process of installing the LifeTrail(tm) stations. That’s based mainly on the state of the six stations that I came across during this shoot, and that there’s been no launch of the stations to match the work that Newport City Council did when their stations were setup in Tredegar Park.

I’ve found it a little weird writing an article about a modern-day attraction. This is the very first one, and it certainly won’t be the last! Regular readers of my blog might be forgiven for thinking that the route between Cardiff and Merthyr consists of nothing other than a post-industrial wilderness littered with abandoned canals, railways and industrial workings. As well as celebrating what used to be here, I believe that my Merthyr Road project should also be playing a positive role in documenting what has taken the place of the industrial landscape of the 1800’s and 1900’s. There’s so little about this part of the world online, so anything that I or anyone else can do to chip away at that problem can only be a good thing!

Sources / See Also

• Wales top of Britain’s sick list, a news report on the BBC News website.
• Unhealthy Wales gets cash boost for fitness, a news report on the News Wales website.
• LifeTrail walking off with Welsh contracts, a brief news report on LeisureOpportunities.com.
• Lifetrail initiative launched in Tredegar Park, a press release from Newport City Council.
• LifeTrail Wellness Stations for outdoor fitness activities, on the Playword Systems web site.
• Planning a site layout for LifeTrail’s outdoor fitness equipment, on the Playworld Systems web site.
• Playworld Systems Newsletter 02 on the Playworld Systems web site.
• Strategy to get Wales active ‘making progress’, a news article on the NHS Wales website.
• Increasing Physical Activity, a report on the progress of the Climbing Higher initiative on the Wales Audit Office website.
• Climbing Higher - the Welsh Assembly Government strategy for sport and active recreation.
• Climbing Higher - The Next Steps, a report on where £7.8 million will be spent by the Welsh Assembly Government.
• Treforest, University links and connections, a project on the Connect2 proposals website from Sustrans.
• Track Layout Diagrams of the Great Western Railway and B.R. (W.R.) - Section 46B, by R. A. Cooke, published by Lightmoor Press.
• Pontypridd, Caerphilly and Newport Railway article on Wikipedia.

View the photos from A Walk Along The Cardiff Railway as part of my Merthyr Road collection on Flickr.

In 1885, the Marquis of Bute finally succeeded in assuming ownership of the Glamorganshire and Aberdare Canals. It was his intention to close both canals and re-use the land for a railway to compete with the Taff Vale Railway. However, he was unable to do so, and instead was forced to build his Cardiff Railway as a new route north to Treforest. The route ran from Heath Junction, through Coryton, across the Glamorganshire Canal at Middle Lock, and north from there through Taffs Well, Nantgarw, the modern-day Treforest Industrial Estate, and behind the Treforest Tin Plate Works at Rhydyfelin.

However, even the powerful Marquis had finally met his match. The Taff Vale Railway purchased strategically-placed land just south of Treforest, and so were able to prevent the Cardiff Railway from being connected to Treforest Junction. The Marquis was forced to consider merger talks, but when these broke down in 1909, it sealed Cardiff Railway’s fate. With no connection at Treforest, Cardiff Railway was a railway that went nowhere. Passenger services up to Rhydyfelin Halt began in 1911, but in 1931 they were cut back to go no further than Coryton.

The colliery opened at Nantgarw in the 1938 finally gave the railway the freight it was built to carry. However, with the war over, the Taff Vale Railway was able to divert even this traffic by laying a branch line to the colliery in 1952, and in 1953 the line north of Coryton finally closed for good.

Thoughts On The Day

I have something to confess. As a regular commuter between the valleys and Cardiff, I often wondered why the Coryton line didn’t connect up to the main route at Radyr Station. I often expressed the opinion that this would be A Good Thing(tm).

Now, thankfully, I know better.

The basis of this ignorance was the mistaken belief that the Coryton line must once have been connected to the main route at Radyr Station. I’d never heard of Cardiff Railway, and I had no idea at all that the Coryton line was the remainder of a railway that had made its own independent route up to Trefforest. I’d never heard of the Glamorganshire Canal, or the Local Nature Reserve at Forest Farm, and didn’t know that the Coryton line would have to take a destructive route through the Local Nature Reserve in order to reach Radyr.

Time has moved on and consigned the Cardiff Railway route to the history books. North of the M4, very little of the route survives at all. It was the last railway to be built in direct competition with the Taff Vale Railway. It had to jump through the most hoops in order to snake its way north, the most favourable land having already been taken up by the Glamorganshire Canal and the Taff Vale Railway.

In retrospect, the futility of the Cardiff Railway is best summed up by the viaduct over the Taff built immediately behind the Treforest Tin Works. Built in 1907, only a single token train ever crossed Rhydyfelin Viaduct, because north of the Tin Works the Taff Vale Railway did everything they could to prevent the Cardiff Railway ever connecting to it (a temporary connection was put in place in 1909, which allowed the single train to cross Rhydyfelin Viaduct, but this connection at Treforest Junction was removed in the same year after a merger between Taff Vale Railway and Cardiff Railway collapsed). Unused for 31 years, Rhydyfelin Viaduct was taken down in 1940 to be recycled for the war effort.

What’s left today is a pleasant walk, taking about half an hour, between Coryton Station and Longwood Drive. We parked on Longwood Drive itself, and made our way down the steps beside a surviving bridge to the cutting where the Cardiff Railway once ran. From there, we made our way south to Coryton, before returning via the same route.

View the photos from A Walk Along The Cardiff Railway as part of my Merthyr Road collection on Flickr.

Favourite Photo From The Shoot

This photo, taken on my first visit to Cardiff Railway and the Glamorganshire Canal Local Nature Reserve, remains my favourite photo from this shoot. I’d love to successfully develop this style of shot as my “signature shot”.

I also love this shot of the steps leading down to the trackbed, as well as the shot of the initials cut into the tree.

Post Production

Combining photos taken on two separate visits to form a single set of photos can be tricky, given the variance in the British weather. The main problem is always the same - skies and contrast. My main tool for dealing with any tricky situation is conversion to black and white. It feels like a bit of a cop-out, but sometimes I think the results look better than the original colour images.

To try and improve the quality of the black and whites this time, I’ve boosted the brightness and contrast on all of these shots, and then adjusted highlights and shadows to try and even out the differences between the shots. Overall, I’m very happy with the results, and I’ll probably try the same technique again the next time I publish a black and white set.

See Also

As always with these articles, I’m indebted to the information that has already been published about Cardiff Railway. Here’s a list of the sources that I used to compile this article:

• History of the Cardiff Railway and the Coryton Branch Line, Cardiff Railway on the Urban 75 website.
• Cardiff Railway on the Cardiff Rail website.
• Guided Tour of Forest Farm, on the Friends of Forest Farm website.
• The Glamorganshire and Aberdare Canals, Volume 2, by Stephen Rowson and Ian L. Wright.

Enjoy The View From The Garth as part of my Merthyr Road series on Flickr.

If there’s one part of the landscape that dominates views of both Taff Vale and Cardiff, it has to be the Garth. But what can you see from up on the Garth? That’s what I went up there to find out.

Thoughts On The Day

The day was a tale of two directions. To the south, towards the Vale of Glamorgan and Cardiff, conditions were very difficult for landscape photography, with the sun reflecting off the Bristol Channel beyond the South Wales coastline. The photos shot facing that way all suffered from limited contrast and colour; I ended up converting those to black and white to make the most of them.

To the east, towards Caerphilly and Taffs Well, the light was much better (well, in between the rain drops ). I was able to get nice, crisp shots of most of my subjects, and I was able to leave those photos in colour.

To get up the Garth, I recommend hiking up the road from Gwaelod-y-Garth. A couple of sections of the road are steep, and like me you might find using a walking stick helps with these bits, but for the main it’s not too hard on the legs or the knees! You can reach Gwaelod-y-Garth easily from Taffs Well railway station car park by using the footbridge to cross the River Taff. Don’t be tempted to try a short cut through the new housing estate on the site of the former Pentyrch Iron Works; I couldn’t find a way through from there to the old village behind it, and had to double back

And, as to what you can see once you get up there …

Favourite Photo From The Shoot

This photo of the General Electric plant at Nantgarw is my favourite photo from this shoot. Being up on the Garth provided the perfect elevation to show how GE’s factory dominates the entire hill side and the communities that it surrounds.

I also like the photo of the War Memorial (simply because it’s a great demonstration how just how much reach the Sigma 80-400 mm lens has) and my shot of the Millennium Stadium in the heart of Cardiff (because it shows just how central the stadium is).

Post Production

Whilst I was up on the Garth, I also took 14 shots of Taff Vale to stitch together into a single panoramic image of Taff Vale. At Jon Pearse’s recommendation, I bought a copy of Calico to do the stitching, and I’m very happy with the result. The beautiful thing about Calico is that it does all the work for you, and (unlike some competing tools) it doesn’t complain when you want to stitch 14 images together

Now, getting the final panoramic shot uploaded to Flickr … that was far harder than generating the shot in the first place!

Found On Flickr

This old postcard provides a great view of the Walnut Tree Viaduct with the Garth beyond it. With a lot more care and thought into how the heritage of the South Wales valleys could be protected and developed, this could have been the view that greeted visitors leaving the M4 bound for the Brecon Beacons.

I think it’s a shame that it isn’t so.

I liked my original black and white shot so much that I went back a few days later and took this early morning shot with the Nikon. I took five separate exposures, and combined them into a single HDR image using Photomatix.

Cardiff’s Past: In the foreground is the Bute Dock Feeder, which took water from the River Taff and brought it down to the Bute West Dock. The Bute Dock Feeder was built sometime between 1830 and 1836.

Cardiff’s Present: Dominating the skyline is the futuristic-looking apartment block recently featured in the BBC’s Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood.

Cardiff’s Future: See those cranes just poking out above the bushes on the left? They’re hard at work creating the St David’s 2 Shopping Centre.

Want to know more? Read the blog entry that accompanied my original black and white shoot as part of my Merthyr Road series on South Wales history.

View “Cardiff’s Little Venice” as part of my Merthyr Road project on Flickr.

The success of the Glamorganshire Canal was always going to bring with it rival means of shipping the goods of the industrial South Wales Valleys out to a world eager for the iron, coal, patent fuel, and stone that were the currency of the Welsh industrialists. The canal was never going to have the capacity required to meet ever-growing demand, and so within 120 years of the canal opening, the marsh land south of Cardiff disappeared under no less than four separate docks, all competing with the Canal for trade. The invention of railway led to five separate railway companies all doing their best to keep up with the rate at which coal was being mined, and their iron tendrils snuck out past the congested Cardiff Docks to Barry, Newport and Swansea too.

Inevitably, it all came to an end.

Although the Glamorganshire Canal finally closed in 1951, it has taken more than fifty years to regenerate the parts of Cardiff touched by the former iron and coal trades. (The situation up in the valleys is bleaker, where full regeneration and recovery from the loss of coal mining may not happen in our lifetimes). It’s the Cardiff Docks that have taken longest to recover, and the recovery has come at what some consider a steep price (the Cardiff Barrage scheme, central to the redevelopment of the waterfront area, led to the loss of mud flats important to wildlife).

As part of the regeneration, the first dock to compete with the Glamorganshire Canal’s Sea Lock Pond has been almost completely erased from the landscape. Originally known as the Bute Ship Canal, all that is left of the Bute West Dock today is the Roald Dahl Basin down on the shore (a popular venue for events such as food fairs), and the Bute Dock Feeder that used to take water from the River Taff beside Cardiff Weir to help regulate the water level in the dock. With no dock left to flow into, the Bute Feeder has instead been diverted down to the old Junction Canal which once linked Bute West Dock and Bute East Dock.

What appears to be an entirely new waterway now flows south off of Junction Canal. Around it has sprung up the housing development known as Atlantic Wharf, transforming what was once a busy industrial dockland into a sort of Cardiff’s own Little Venice.

Thoughts On The Day

Daft as it sounds, I actually stumbled upon the Atlantic Wharf redevelopment by accident. I found myself with lunch hour to kill, and I decided to follow the Bute Dock Feeder as best I could to see where it goes today. I’m very glad that I did.

The path that leads south beside the Bute Dock Feeder from Herbert Street gives no inkling of the new waterway hidden beyond. Indeed, the Feeder quickly disappears into the overgrowth. My initial reaction was one of ‘Oh, well.’ Appearing and disappearing stretches of water are the hallmark of the remains of the Glamorganshire Canal and its associated waterways.

However, rounding the corner reveals the Junction Canal, which could never have looked as pleasant as it does today. Built to link Bute’s original Dock (the Bute West Dock) to his bigger deeper Bute East Dock, the only old photo I’ve seen of Junction Canal shows it to have been a miserable industrial landscape crossed by the remains of a ruined railway viaduct. Bute West Dock may be gone, but Junction Canal has not only survived - it has flourished.

There are two stone footbridges across Junction Canal. They are in sharp contrast to the other bridges over the new waterway that runs south through Atlantic Wharf, which are unmistakably modern in design and construction. At the time I thought that they might be original bridges across the Canal, but now I believe that they stand at the spots where the two railway viaducts - one for the TVR to the west, and the Bute Viaduct to the east - would have crossed the Junction Canal as they brought coal down from the Taff and Rhymney valleys to the Bute West Dock and Bute East Dock respectively.

The new waterway that runs south off of Junction Canal is what makes this such a pleasant place to take a lunch time walk. I don’t know what was here originally, but I’ve found no mention of Junction Canal ever being anything other than a straight forward stretch of canal flowing west to east and back again. There are houses here now on both sides, where the trains would have emptied their loads of coal to be transferred onto ships in both docks.

I found the place so charming that, if I ever move into Cardiff, this will be one of the areas that I’d look to buy a house in.

Favourite Photograph From The Shoot

I love this shot of the Bute Dock Feeder running south above Herbert Street so much that I went back there later on with the Nikon D200 to take another, more detailed version of the same shot. I’m planning on uploading that shot soon as a HDR shot. I think that this is the best angle to take a shot of that apartment building (built on the site of a former school); it really brings out the angular nature of its design.

I also love the contrast between the Bute Dock Feeder (a relic of the 19th century), the old industrial units from the 20th century on the right, and the apartment block from the 21st century.

Post Production

I had to go back for a second visit to take some additional shots. Unfortunately, after only three years my Canon Digital IXUS has started to become unreliable. It’s starting to look like it’s time to replace it with a newer model. (Anyone remember the days when we didn’t throw things away, but had them repaired instead?)

After the last two epic photo shoots, I was hoping to get this one published quickly - and then I started trying to find out more about the two stone bridges over Junction Canal

I’ve also switched back to publishing the photos - complete with their write-ups - and the blog entry simultaneously. With my last article, once it and the photos were published, I found myself frustrated by the need to go back and continue working on it. I wanted to look forward to the next piece instead.

Found On Flickr

The term ‘Junction Canal’ is one that has arguably been overused over the centuries, but even so Flickr couldn’t find a single photo that had been tagged with Junction Canal in Cardiff The map of geotagged photos is also pretty sparse, but I did find a couple of good photos on there.

• P2170082, a colour photo of the new waterway through Atlantic Wharf, by Aaron A. Aardvark.
• Fishing in the canal, a old shot showing two boys fishing in the Junction Canal, uploaded by Ben Salter. The bridge in the background of the photo is the Bute Street road bridge.

View all the photos from this set as part of my Merthyr Road collection on Flickr.

On 21st February, 1804, Cornishman Richard Trevithick successfully brought 10 tons of iron, and 70 men, down from the Penydaren Iron Works in Merthyr Tydfil to the Glamorganshire Canal’s wharves at Navigation by pulling the wagons along an existing tramroad using a steam-powered engine.

It was the first time, anywhere in the world, that a steam engine had been used to pull anything along a railed track.

The Penydaren Mining Railway, also known as the Penydaren Tramroad, or the Penydaren Tramway, or the Merthyr Tramroad, was the setting for this historical event. (Penydaren is also often spelt as Penydarren, and the tramroad is often called the Penydarren Tramroad. Which spelling is right I leave to others to decide). The tramroad had been built because the Dowlais Company’s railroad ran past the Penydaren Ironworks on a high level course, making it impossible to build a junction for the Penydaren Ironworks to use. In response, Samuel Homfray commissioned the tramroad to follow the eastern bank of the River Taff down to Navigation (modern day Abercynon). The tramroad was completed in 1802, and was in use until 1875, except for a period of uncertain length starting in 1815 (and maybe continuing to 1825) because of the collapse of a bridge at Edwardsville just north of Quakers Yard.

Although it was the route used for the first-ever steam-powered railway journey, those early iron rails couldn’t take the weight of the engine. Just as it had been before Trevithick, after he’d left South Wales (he was notorious for losing interest in his inventions; it was his great character flaw) the tramroad reverted back to using horses to draw the wagons down to Navigation.

To accomodate the horses, the tramroad didn’t use sleepers as we’re now used to from our modern railways. The rails sat on two lines of stones, allowing the horses to walk between the rails without difficulty. It also made things easier for the man who led the horse throughout the journey! There are several good examples of the tramroad stones still in existence along the route.

Today, the rails are gone, but the tramroad used in that historical journey still exists, and can be followed from Abercynon up to Merthyr Tydfil. The entire length up to Pontygwaith is part of the Taff Trail route of the National Cycle Way.

Thoughts On The Day

With blue skies overhead, this route makes for a very relaxing walk through some of the most beautiful parts of the Taff Valley. Although neither the A470 nor the Valley Line service up to Merthyr Tydfil are ever far from the tramroad, the calming lull of the River Taff bubbling along in the opposite direction more than makes up for the dull background noise of road and rail.

My original plan was to follow the tramroad all the way up from Navigation to Merthyr Tydfil and then catch the train back to Abercynon, but I didn’t make it all the way. I spent far too long along the way stopping for photos, which meant that a journey that takes the train just 9 minutes took me nearly six hours! (By contrast, it took me only two hours to make the return trip, including a photo stop at the Giant’s Bite). The other problem is that the tramroad unfortunately hasn’t completely survived. The section from Navigation ends at Merthyr Vale. It is possible to pick up the trail again from Troedyrhiw, but it seemed sensible to leave that for a follow-up visit, when maybe I wouldn’t get lost!

The route’s in various conditions. From Navigation to Quakers Yard, it has become a single-track road serving a few houses that lie along the route. From Quakers Yard to Pontygwaith Bridge it’s a stony track, similar to many now used by the Taff Trail. I was struck by the difference from Pontygwaith Bridge to the southern end of Merthyr Vale, where the track is packed hardcore showing off the original stones that the rails sat on to perfection. And then you get to Merthyr Vale, where the tramroad is in various states of having been tarmaced over, or completely buried under some form of building work that I don’t recognise. At some point in the middle of all this, the tramroad actually crosses the railway line. I completely failed to spot this, and ended up walking along the old Merthyr Vale Colliery branch line instead until it came to an end. (I only realised my mistake during the post-production research for this article).

There are magnificient views to be had, especially through the Pontygwaith Nature Reserve. This hidden valley used to be crossed by three great viaducts. Two of them (the Joint Line’s viaduct to Cefn Glas, and the GWR’s viaduct to the Cynon Valley) no longer stand (they were demolished in 1969 - GaAC Volume 1 has a photo of both viaducts still in place taken in the 1950’s), but Brunel’s Goitre Coid Viaduct still stands, and is still in use by the Valley Lines service between Pontypridd and Merthyr Tydfil. Although all three viaducts were built to cross the tramroad, the best view is to be had from the top of Giant’s Bite on the other side of the valley.

The whole hidden valley takes its name from Pont-Y-Gwaith - the Works Bridge - which crosses the River Taff in the shadow of the A470. If you’re following the Taff Trail, the trail leaves the tramroad to cross Pontygwaith and duck under the A470 before heading north to Aberfan on the western side of the A470. If you’re heading south along the tramroad instead of north, you can cross Pont-Y-Gwaith, make your way under the A470, and then head up the hill to Giant’s Bite, or follow the dried up Glamorganshire Canal bed south around the foot of the hill.

Myself, I went up to Giant’s Bite, so that I could take some photos of the three viaducts from across the valley. I was pleasantly surprised with how close in I managed to get with just a 135mm DX lens (equivalent to a 200mm lens on a full-frame 35mm camera). When the sunny weather returns later in the year, I’ll have to head back up there with my Sigma 80-400mm lens to see what detail it can capture

Favourite Photo From The Shoot

This shot of the A472 road bridge is my favourite shot from this shoot. When composing photos, I’m always looking for lines that will draw the eye along, and this photo is a fantastic example of how converging lines catch my attention. Unlike the natural landscape shots that make up the rest of the shoot, this photo feels clean and uncluttered. I don’t know … it just makes me want to go out and take more photos!

A close second is this shot taken just before reaching the bridge at Edwardsville that carries the tramroad across the River Taff, just south of the Goitre Coed Viaduct. My recent shoot down at Sea Lock, whilst very satisfying to that part of me that is really enjoying the history side of things, had left me feeling that the photography was getting lost amidst it all. I’ve been playing around with this basic shot design - a plain subject in focus in the foreground, with the more interesting subject further back out of the depth of field - since I first thought of it during my trip up to Snowdonia in 2003, and it’s always my fallback strategy when I’m not enjoying my photography as I’d like to.

Also a close second is this shot looking south at Goitre Coed Viaduct. I always find the Viaduct a complete bugger to photograph - the best place to actually see the damn thing seems to be across the valley sat atop Giant’s Bite. The Viaduct’s simply too big, and the valley too small, to get a great picture from the tramroad itself looking north. Going under the Viaduct, and looking south back to Quakers Yard, I managed to snag this shot which I feel gives a good idea of just how the viaduct appears out of nowhere to completely dominate the scene. But don’t take my word for it - get out and about and go see it for yourself.

Post Production

After the eye-popping colours from my Sea Lock photoshoot, I didn’t want to do another set of photos looking like that. But equally I didn’t want to do a black and white shoot if I could avoid it. It was a great day, blue skies and hot sun, and I’d been careful to avoid burnt-out skies as much as possible (which is why many of the photos in this set are looking south even though my journey was heading north!)

It was during the post work on the railway car shot that I decided to try desaturating the colours in the photo instead of saturating them. It seems obvious now that the problem was the unbalance I was creating through boosting the colours, but equally the same colour boosting really improved the photos I took on the Sculpture Trail walk on Good Friday. Go figure! I managed to drag Kristi away from the gardening to help, and together we produced a set of Aperture colour presets to desaturate the colours in different ways depending on the scene.

I’m sure that the most important factor with these photos was that they were all taken on a bright sunny day, but after readjusting all the colours from the shoot using the new desaturated presets, this is the first colour shoot in the Merthyr Road collection that I’m happy with. I’m planning to re-publish each of these articles as a free-to-download PDF ebook; I’ll need to reprocess all the colour photos that I’ve already published before I do.

The write-up for this shoot has taken me a lot longer than any of the previous articles in the Merthyr Road series. This shoot consists of more photos than previous ones, and the Merthyr Tramroad touches so much of the history of the valley that it travels through that there’s simply so much more to see and learn about. I’ve added a new section to the article, listing all of the resources used to compile both this article and the write-ups for the individual photos on Flickr. I highly recommend that you visit all of referenced websites; they contain far more information than I can include here, and there are also many old photos from a time when the Merthyr Tramroad was still in use.

Although the history is such a major part of this project, looking through the photo set one last time before making it public, I’m happy that the photography hasn’t been lost this time out.

Found on Flickr

I can understand a shortage of photos on Flickr about the Glamorganshire Canal, but I was surprised by the lack of photos covering the Trevithick Tramroad and the Pontygwaith Nature Reserve. Practically every other walker I passed on the day was carrying a camera. Maybe there’s something wrong with the way I search Flickr for photos?

Mmm. I did manage to find these two photos which I liked.

• Pont Y Gwaith, by locus_imagination
• Trevithick Tramroad, by locus_imagination

They both make me want to go back at the height of summer, when everything will be much greener than now.

Sources

If you’d like to learn more about Richard Trevithick, the Merthyr Tramroad, or the areas that the Tramroad runs through, the sources used for this article and the photo write-ups on Flickr include:

• The Glamorganshire and Aberdare Canal - Volume 1, by Rowson and Wright.
• Richard Trevithick: Cornwall’s Pioneer of Steam, by the South Western Electricity Historical Society
• ENGINEERS: Richard Trevithick the Cornish genius, by Cotton Times
• Trevithick 2004, a joint public/private/voluntary sector partnership to celebrate the 200th Anniversary of the Penydarren Locomotive - the first steam locomotive in the world to haul a load on rails.
• Cynon Culture, a website dedicated to the history and culture of the Cynon Valley.
• Victoria Bridge, Quakers Yard - Restoration Works Contract Payment, a report to Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council.
• Our Woods in Focus, a website by the Woodland Trust.
• Taff Vale Railway entry on Wikipedia.
• Map of the Taff Vale Railway, on the GWR modellers website.
• Isambard Kingdom Brunel 200th Anniversary Exhibitions, from the Heritage In Action (Herian) website.
• Discover South Wales, a map of heritage sites from the Heritage In Action (Herian) website.
• The Taff Vale Railway - Volume 1 by John Hutton, ISBN 1-85794-249-3.
• Newsletter 110 June 2006 [PDF], from the Institution of Civil Engineers.
• Merthyr Tydfil Tramroads and their Locomotives, by Gordon Rattenbury and M. J. T. Lewis, ISBN 090146152-0.
• Pontygwaith entry on Wikipedia.
• Bringing the people of Merthyr closer to nature, the Forestry Commission press release from 29 August 2003 announcing the plan to create the Pontygwaith Nature Reserve.
• Pontygwaith on Alan George’s website.
• Cefn Glas Tunnel, on the excellent Cardiff Rail website.
• Quakers Yard and Merthyr Joint Railway, on the excellent RAILSCOT website.
• The Taff Vale Railway by D.S.M. Barrie, published on the Trackbed website.
• The Edwardsville Viaducts on Alan George’s website.
• Building Control Regulations for Merthyr County Borough Council, which includes a list of listed buildings in the borough.
• Trevithick and the Penydarren Tramroad on Deryck Lewis’ WalesRails website.
• ST0799 on the Geograph.org.uk website.

View this set of photos as part of my Merthyr Road project on Flickr.

For most of its life, the Glamorganshire Canal reached the Bristol Channel via a Sea Lock built at Lower Layer, part of the tidal estuary formed by the mouth of the River Taff. Authorised by a second Act of Parliament (the Glamorganshire Canal Act, which passed through the Lords on 26th April 1796, a year which included such notable company as the Duty on Hats Act), this Sea Lock replaced an earlier lock (also known as Sea Lock) which had been operating since the 29th of June, 1793. (The earlier lock had stood on the river bend to the north of where Clarence Road now crosses the Taff). The new lock opened on 27th June, 1798.

Between the new Sea Lock and the southern end of St Mary’s Street was the stretch of canal known as Sea Lock Pond. Here, the wharves were built to transfer iron and coal, from the canal boats to the larger, ocean-going vessels that came into the Pond through the Sea Lock. Some of the land for these wharves fell under the compulsory purchase provisions of the Act, but most of it did not, guaranteeing local landowners (principly the Marquess of Bute) good incomes on what had previously been open moorland.

The northern end of Sea Lock Pond terminated at Cardiff’s South Gate. (Cardiff was a small walled town of little importance before the Canal and docks arrived). In 1802, permission was given to remove the Gate, and connect St Mary’s Street with the canal wharves beyond.

Trade down the Canal was to transform both Cardiff itself and the moorland south of the town. Bute Street was laid down in around 1830, forming the eastern edge of Butetown (work on which began in 1846). The new TVR railway (which still exists today as the rail link between Cardiff Bay and Cardiff Queen Street Station) made its way directly to the east of Bute Street. This, in combination with the two huge docks built by the Bute Estate to the east of the Canal, was eventually able to ship millions of tonnes of materials and goods from Cardiff Docks, as opposed to just hundreds of thousands of tonnes through the Canal.

Although the Canal gradually fell into disuse from the late 1800’s as both iron and coal began to run out, it was the aquisition by the Cardiff Corporation on 1st January 1944 which spelt the end of Sea Lock, and hence the Canal as a whole. The City of Cardiff looked on the Sea Lock Pond as prime land for redevelopment. By now much of the Canal was unpassable, effectively leaving Sea Lock Pond (or Sea Lock Pound as it was now known) as just another harbour in the Cardiff docklands, but wartime decree forced the Corporation to continue to run Sea Lock Pond until the early 1950’s.

Late at night on 5th December 1951, the sand dredger Catherine Ethel collided with the lock gates at Sea Lock. With the lock gates destroyed in this unfortunate accident, the Canal waters (which, by this time, appear to have only been the water left in the Sea Lock Pond) emptied out into the Taff in a tidal wave.

The Canal’s 158 years of operation had finally come to an end. Within 50 years, the rest of the Cardiff Dock area too would close, leaving Cardiff - a small town that became a capital city on the back of its links between the industrial valleys and the sea - to once again revert back to being a market town.

(As always, I’m indebted to the historical research published in the excellent Glamorganshire and Aberdare Canals - Volume 2, by Stephen Rowson and Ian L. Wright. If you want to know a lot more about Sea Lock, or any other aspect of the Canal, I can’t recommend their award-winning books highly enough).

Thoughts on the Day

It will come as no surprise to hear that Sea Lock itself, and the whole Sea Lock Pond are no more. Sea Lock, the Pond, and Butetown have suffered that most terrible of fates - they have been redeveloped. Despite numerous efforts - including such extreme lengths as siting the Welsh Assembly down in the Cardiff Docks when it should have been sited somewhere like Aberwyswyth) - the whole area south of Cardiff’s old town wall continues to feel disconnected from the rest of the city. I’ll look at the regeneration of Cardiff Docks in a later article in this series.

Sea Lock itself probably lies underneath the bridge that carries the A4232 across the river estuary. That matches up with the last photo published in GaAC Volume 2, on page 352. To the south of the bridge lies the Cardiff Yacht Club and the new wetlands created as part of the official vandalism that created the Cardiff Bay Barriage, whilst the river bank immediately north of the bridge has been redeveloped into Hamadryad Park. It’s actually possible to get from the wetlands to the park by walking under the bridge, and I highly recommend it; the park is a very peaceful place indeed.

Trying to trace the route of the Sea Lock Pond by the surviving buildings is very difficult indeed. Unlike in Taff Vale, where many of the original buildings that were built along the side of the Canal still exist, down here redevelopment and regeneration has swept most of the history away.

The majority of the length of Sea Lock Pond has been turned into an open space called Canal Park. You won’t find this space listed on Cardiff City Council’s website, but it’s there. From Sea Lock at the southern end up to the back of St Mary’s Church in Butetown in the north, Canal Park runs along the route of the old Canal and its wharves, and if you look closely enough, there are memories of the former canal hidden away in plain sight.

Sadly, I couldn’t find a single sign to commemorate the canal. What signs there are are notice boards for the local community. The kids growing up in the area today, and playing in the park itself, have nothing to read to remind them of the past. All that’s left to stimulate an interest in the history of the Canal is the name of the park itself, the names ‘Sea Lock’ and ‘Glamorganshire Canal’ laid out in brick at the point where James Street crosses the Park (the sight of a former swing bridge across the Canal, although to look at it today I think anyone would be amazed to learn that there was once a bridge at that spot), and not much else.

Heading north through the park towards Cardiff city centre, I found a few things to remember the canal by, ranging from the obvious to the obscure. At the obvious end of things is this play area flanked by mooring capsterns. If you look closely at the paving, the outline of a narrow boat has been incorporated into the design. About half-way between obvious and obscure are some of the old buildings that border onto the park. There aren’t many left, but there are just enough to show where the wharves might have originally been. My favourite item, though, is this obscure post set into a concrete base. This is the base and crown post from one of the canalside cranes (see GaAC p. 293), although how anyone growing up in the area is supposed to know that isn’t immediately obvious.

I’m not sure what the merit is of preserving a piece of history whilst at the same time not leaving a message to tell the next generation what has been preserved. It’s a maddingly frustrating story that’s repeated all along the route of the canal, and one that the folks I meet on each of these trips wish would come to an end.

Cardiff should be proud of what the Canal (and the railways that came afterwards) did for the place.

Favourite Photo From The Shoot

This shot of Canal Park is my favourite photo of the shoot. I like the amount of depth to the photo, thanks to the large number of subjects in the shot, but at the same time the use of a longer focal length has flattened everything. My photo of Windsor Esplanade, Lecuna, and the A4232 road bridge is a close second, as is the shot I took from underneath the A4232 road bridge.

Three Lessons From The Shoot

• It often pays to go back to the same place two or three times before doing a shoot. I’m not someone who can just look at a location in a book, and then head straight there to get everything in one go. I’d been down to Sea Lock a couple of times before, and matched up what I’d seen for myself with what I’d read in GaAC Volume 2 before heading down for the final shoot. I’m glad I did - I wouldn’t have thought to include the shots of the A4232 bridge (which stands on the old Sea Lock location) otherwise.
• Google Earth is a real gift for projects like this. It was instrumental in matching up photos published in GaAC with the street layout today to help me find Sea Lock itself.
• During a shoot, take as many photos as you can. Don’t ignore something just because you don’t know what it is at the time. I didn’t find out what the canal crane post was until leafing through GaAC Volume 2 several days after the shoot. It would have been very easy for me to have not photographed it.

Post Production

It was a cheery sunny morning, and I wanted these photos to reflect that. Butetown is one of those parts of Cardiff that has a certain reputation, and I was very worried that another black and white set would do nothing to show a different side to the place. Canal Park is the major open space in Butetown, and for that I think it’s fantastic.

Looking at the photos a week or so after processing them, I’m not happy with the colour. It’s too eye-popping, and doesn’t sit well with all the black and white shots from other sets in the Merthyr Road series. Time for a re-think before I publish my next article!

Found On Flickr

Whilst there are plenty of photos on Flickr about Cardiff Bay, I had no luck in finding many modern pictures of Canal Park. But I did manage to find a photo of the Sea Lock area taken from a kite, plus two older photos that also appear in GaAC Volume 2.

• Kite photograph of Cardiff Bay, by nick_russill
• Glamorganshire Canal, by Ben Salter
• Cardiff Docks, by Ben Salter