Walking Cyfarthfa: Landscape of industry

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Walking Cyfarthfa: Landscape of industry

John Wilson 

Walking the landscape of the Cyfarthfa Iron Works.

• Read more in this blog post on Chartist Network Cymru
  

"Merthyr Tydvil, a place never to be forgotten when once seen. The blackest place above ground; I suppose, the Non-plus-ultra of Industrialism wholly mammonish, given up to shopkeeper supply-and-demand;—presided over by sooty Darkness physical and spiritual, by Beer, Methodism and the Devil, to a lamentable and supreme extent!" (Thomas Carlyle, 1854)

Walk

Starting from the Cyfarthfa Retail Park, the following walk is based around three waymark points:

• [1] The Cyfarthfa iron works furnace bank
  
• [2] The Pont y Cafnau iron bridge
  
• [3] The iron master's residence Cyfarthfa Castle

Walk extension

We may round this off into a circular walk by continuing north to:

• [4] The Cefn Coed Viaduct
  

and then returning south via Cyfarthfa Castle to

• [5] The Ynysfach Engine House 

taking us back to near the Cyfathfa Retail Park.

"Cyfartha Iron Works were founded in 1765, and by 1806 had become the largest in the world, thanks to its having been the first in the area to change to the production of bar iron and adoption of other technologically advanced processes in the late 18th century. The fortunes of the works were more mixed in the latter half of the 19th century, in spite of a change to steel production". | Source: ggat.org.uk

"Pont Y Cafnau ... the world's oldest surviving iron railway bridge"

"Cyvarthva Castle and Park form a fine object above the town; and Pen-y-Darren House, with its gardens, is equally interesting at the other extremity. But the general aspect of the vicinity is unprepossessing, the face of nature being disfigured by towering heaps of scoria from the furnaces, which are undergoing continued increase, thus precluding the growth of vegetation upon them, and exhibiting from their nakedness, in combination with the columns of smoke emitted from the works, a repulsive appearance of rudeness and gloomy sterility". ( A Topographical Dictionary of Wales, 1849).