The Nantyglo Round Towers - Landscapes of power

[Chartist Blaina]

The Nantyglo Round Towers: built by the Crawshays as a fortification in the aftermath of the 1816 Tredegar-Merthyr disturbances, when iron workers marched from the Tredegar - Sirhowy iron works to Merthyr.

We may also note Crawshay's defensive tower built at Hirwaun in 1832, in the aftermath of the 1831 Merthyr Chartist Rising. Tower collery derived its name from Crawshay's Hirwaun Tower.



The tower: Landscapes of power

Throughout history the tower as a building type has served to dominate a landscape, both physically and symbolically, and has functioned variously as: a military construction: a monumental assertion of state, religious or secular power and authority: an ostentatious display of wealth and power: or a more whimsical sign of wealth such as a county estate's folly tower (as for example at Pontypool Park).

The Nantyglo Round Towers are a last standing survivor of the landscape of the early industrial revolution in South Wales. Today the Nantyglo towers stand sentinel over a de-industrialized landscape.

We might have expected them to be folly towers, but both the Craswhay towers at Nantyglo and Hirwaun served as military constructions built to oversee their adjacent iron works. Whilst the massive iron works have pretty well disappeared from the landscape across South Wales, the Nantyglo towers still stand as a stark reminder of the the frontier period of the iron industry - turbulent decades of worker's protest and the preparedness of the iron masters to arm themselves to defend their property and interests.

South Wales' outstanding architectural landmark of the iron industry phase of the industrial revolution is undoubtedly Crawshay's Cyfarthfa Castle, with its distinctive round towers. Whilst excercising a clear military function to dominate the landscape above the Cyfarthfa iron works, Cyfarthfa Castle was also a breathtaking case of architectural indulgence as the iron masters accumulated massive new fortunes and competed with one another to display their wealth.

As both the wealth and civic order of Victorian Britain consolidated, the young Marquess of Bute set about leaving his mark on the coal metropolis and nascent capital city of Cardiff. The Third Marquess of Bute, reputedly Britain's wealthiest individual at the time, indulged in a patron-architect partnership of truly Renaissance proportion in his Cardiff Castle Clock Tower project. Begun once the Marquis reached his majority and inherited the Bute estate, the richly decorated tower realizes a monument of the Victorian Neo-Gothic Revival, constructed by it's leading exponent William Burgess, along with the Bute- Burgess fantasy of Castell Coch north of Cardiff.

By contrast, one may muse on the motivation behind the round towers built by Chartist Dr Price of Pontypridd.


Further

Explore the architecture.tower group on flickr, "exploring the tower as architectural form and social statement, across history and cultures".

www.flickr.com More in architecture.tower pool

Acknowledgement

Access to the Nantyglo Round Towers site and permission to take photographs by kind permission of Mr Jones.

I have benefited from conversation with Neil Evans on Crawshay's Hirwaun tower ( when we were on a Chartist coach tour of the Monmouthsire valleys as part of the Annual Chartism Conference weekend, noted here)


John Wilson

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