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The Taff Valley narrows as the river runs down from Merthyr. By the time the river has flowed five miles, and reached the sibling villages of Aberfan and Merthyr Vale, the valley floor can be crossed in a five-minute walk, and the mountain sides rise steep on either side. The closeness of each mountain narrows the sky and restricts any direct sunlight that might reach the villages; the shadow of one mountain delaying the dawn, and the shadow of the other hastening the sunset.
Today this valley is verdant and looks unspoiled, even though in reality barely a square foot of it has not been turned over, tunnelled into or had coal waste heaped upon it. It is a man-made landscape, softened now by nature. In my childhood this landscape looked different. It smelled different. It even sounded different.
Like all the valleys in this part of the South Wales coalfield, the Taff Valley runs roughly north to south. It is capped in the north by the town of Merthyr Tydfil and terminates in the south with the village of Quakers Yard; barely more than a dozen miles from top to bottom. The lie of the land has always dictated the shape of anything that man has wanted to build here, and the villages of Aberfan and Merthyr Vale are no exception. When the Merthyr Vale Colliery was first sunk in 1869, the Victorian engineers were forced to divert the river in order to reclaim enough level ground to establish a pit head. In those days a colliery of that sort of scale might employ more than two thousand men, and there was an urgent need to provide housing for the new workforce and their families. Houses were thrown up quickly, in the cheapest and easiest way possible. This is why the two villages have the ‘linear’ shape so common in South Wales, with long terraces of houses following the contours of the ground, spooling out from the pit, and aligned roughly north to south. Those streets that connect them, running east to west, tend to be short and on a steep – sometimes very steep – gradient.
The housing was cheaply made and of poor quality. With the exception of some larger homes used by the families of managers (or perhaps the clergy) they sit, in general, on shallow foundations. Some were even built with proper brickwork or stonework featuring only at the front of the building, the rear walls being literally ‘thrown together’ by pouring a mixture of concrete and rubble between wooden boards.
These pit villages are not places like the towns of Breconshire to the north, or those of the Vale of Glamorgan to the south, settlements which evolved by slow accretion over many generations, all with their ancient place names and Norman churches, their local squirearchies and a mention in the Domesday Book. These pit villages were places that emerged fully formed, like mushrooms, almost overnight (indeed, there is a part of Merthyr colloquially referred to, to this day, as ‘Mushroom Town’ for this very reason). Houses, pubs, churches and chapels were all planned in from the very start, and all of them paid rent to the mine owner. Constructed in haste and on the shallowest of foundations, these were places always on the edge of anyone’s consideration, save for those who lived here.
The two new villages drew new people, sometimes from elsewhere in the coalfield, since some experienced miners would be needed, but also from further afield. People came to Aberfan and Merthyr Vale from all over rural Wales, from the west of England, from Ireland and even Spain and Italy. Both my mother and my father were born in Merthyr Vale, but into families of such incomers. The Pierces, my mother’s family, had their roots in the slate quarrying communities of north Wales. The Lewises, on my father’s side, had mixed Welsh and Irish heritage.
