If only they’d waited…

In this week’s blog, Craig Whitney of the Global Centre of Rail Excellence sets out to explore the history of the former Banwen Ironworks near to the GCRE site

I thought I knew the history of the local area well.

From neolithic burial cairns to a (still existing) Roman road (Sarn Helen) and an adjacent Roman Army marching camp, the rich history of the landscape where I live in the Dulais valley was one I felt I had a good understanding of. But the story of the Banwen Ironworks was one that I was less familiar with.

While there is ample historical evidence of iron making and a brickworks at the Global Centre of Rail Excellence site from the early 1830’s onwards, this one stumped me. I’d heard local tales of a ‘lost’ ironworks, but in reality it’s not lost at all. Just hidden and overgrown.

Recently we were invited by Ian, a local farmer, to visit and photograph the remains of Banwen Ironworks that sits on his land. Ian farms 140 acres stretching down from Banwen to Ystredfellte, bordering the Pyrddyn river as it tumbles over waterfalls to meet the headwaters of the river Neath.

Located just over a kilometre east of the current GCRE site at Onllwyn at Tonpyrddyn Farm, the Ironworks provides further evidence of the long industrial heritage of the Upper Dulais Valley and the spirit of innovation that has hallmarked the area for many centuries.

Having met Ian at the farm, we donned our very necessary wellington boots and proceeded to scramble through waist high grass down an almost hidden access bank in the trees. The tramroad there was now a stream bed after one of the wettest July months for many years.

We descended the stream, clambering over large stones that once formed a railtrack bed and emerged blinking in the sunlight into an overgrown riverside meadow. There right in from of us were four large stone-built structures. I felt like an early explorer discovering Mayan temples for the first time!

The collapsed chimney stack for the engine house sacrificed much of its stone to build the initial structure of Ian’s farmhouse, hand built by his grandfather in 1927. Only a solitary capstone remained hidden in the chest high nettles. But the engine house remained proudly, thanks to a grant from CADW some years earlier to shore up the ruins. The two blast furnaces had partially tumbled down, but retained their imposing presence, beautifully constructed with dressed stone and tapering upwards from the base.

Most impressive of all was the large charging bank retaining wall, used to top load the furnaces. Standing some seven metres tall and fifty metres long, trees had grown through the structure, reinforcing the Mayan images already in my head.

Climbing the steep tramroad/streambed once more, we emerged back onto the farmyard. The stone cowshed next to Tonpyrddyn Farm was once the carpenter’s shop and smithy for the works along with a pond to supply condensing and boiler water to the blast engine remains to the rear. A small stone hut in a nearby field was a weighbridge house for the drams and the weighing mechanism itself survives intact, although buried. We discovered the weighing plate buried in yet more waist high nettles. To the south are the foundations and ruins of Tai-Garreg, small stone cottages to house the workers.

Banwen Ironworks is apparently the most complete example of an ironworks to survive on the South Wales anthracite coalfield. Financed and built speculatively in 1845-48 by the Banwen Iron and Coal Co during the ‘railway mania’ period of the time by Rowland Jay Browne, a London barrister with a home in nearby Ynysarwed in the upper Neath Valley.

The Ironworks were connected by a horse drawn dramroad to the Brecon Forest Tramroad which ran from the Swansea Canal at Cae’r-lan over the uplands of the newly enclosed Fforest Fawr, to the Tramroad Wharf near Sennybridge. It also connected via the network of local tramroads to a wharf on the upper most reaches of the Swansea canal at Abercrave.

Likely fed with high quality anthracite coal from the local Maes Marchog collieries, limestone from Penwyllt quarry, water from the Pyrddyn river and ore from a nearby quarry, now underneath the football pitch located behind Onllwyn Miners Welfare Hall.

Sadly, despite making some 80 tonnes of pig iron, the company failed to produce the amount required to meet the conditions of the lease, so went into receivership. In 1861 it was sold to Llewellyn and Son (Llewellyn and Co), with iron production ceasing on the site in 1862. It was then abandoned.

Ironically just a year later in 1863 the Neath to Brecon steam railway opened. It would pass through the GCRE site at Onllwyn just a mile from the now abandoned ironworks.

If only they’d waited.

My sincere thanks to Ian for his very knowledgeable tour.