Walking Cyfarthfa 2: Towards the "Cyfarthfa Heritage Landscape"

[Chartist Merthyr]

Reading the landscape: Towards the "Cyfarthfa Heritage Landscape"



One does not read the signs of a landscape without layers of information to act as a guide to interpretation. Information may draw our attention to certain features of the landscape that were not previously visible to us, and provide the means of connecting discrete sites to a wider pattern of significance. This is the role of the traditional tourist literature. In today's world in which GIS meets the Web, the new geoweb, we add a whole new layer of information to the landscape.

The practice of walking and the provision of a basic map and guide transforms our relation to the landscape into an active one; we act on the landscape, and the landscape acts on us, with the potential to transform our senses of place and identity in the process.

We may transform our relationship with the landscape from a de-narrated state of fragmented signs and fractured space, into a coherent narrative and sense of value of place. Hence we may engage a new cognitive map, redefining the physical and imaginary landscape before our eyes, in the mapping for example of the (actual) Blaenavon World Heritage Landscape or (my imaginary) "Cyfarthfa Heritage Landscape".


Merthyr Tydfil, "the Non-plus-ultra of Industrialism"

To the outside visitor a landscape is a largely unknown space awaiting eager exploration; as consider for example the current Lonely Planet guide to Wales' entry for Merthyr Tydfil and references to Cyfarthfa. For someone who lives in the area the landscape may well remain remote to one's interests and hold no mystery due to its everyday familiarity; in which case the reading of such a tourist guide might strike one either ways as unrecognisable, a revelation, or an irreverence.

The tourist guide is a taken for granted artifice nowadays, that finds its modern origins in the Romantic response to the landscape. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Iron Metropolis of Merthyr Tydfil was in fact a magnet for the intrepid tourist, in search of a new sublime experience in the shocking new industrial landscape. Soon finding that there was no real town centre of "Merthyr" to see, the visitor was rather advised that "you should see Merthyr at night" - when the great furnaces of the district lit up the night sky to produce a spectacle likened to Dante's Inferno. Merthyr was "the Fiery City of Pluto", in the words of the King of Saxony on a visit in the 1840s. Whilst noting "in the year 1847, the place is in a state of highest prosperity", C F Cliffe's The Book of South Wales (1847) encounters a Merthyr Tydfil that was less a developed town - with orderly streets and urban facilities - than a frontier industrial landscape still - defined by the presence of the iron works, a valley landscape dominated by monumental cinder tips, and displaying tramroads rather than streets:

"The town, which mainly consists of workmen's houses, is of an irregular form, and lies in the midst of a group of bleak mountains: Dowlais occupies the upper part, and is approached by a long street stretching for considerably more than a mile, up a steep ascent beyond the Pen-y-Darren works. | This narrow valley is blocked up to a great extent by enormous black banks of cinders &c. compared with which the largest railway embankments are mere pigmies. Additions are of course constantly being made to these banks, and it appears to a looker-on to be a hazardous operation to bring a horse and tram close to the edge of the lofty ends or "tips" for the purpose of shooting the contents over the precipice. | As the "tips" in progress are formed of hot cinders, they are on fire from nearly top to bottom -- glow like lava. Rivulets of hot water -- once a sylvan trout stream! -- wash the bases of these gloomy banks. | The scene is strange and impressive in broad daylight, but when viewed at night it is wild beyond conception. The mind aids the reality -- gives vastness and sublimity to a picture lighted up by a thousand fires. | The vivid glow and roaring of the blast furnaces near at hand -- the lurid light of distant works -- the clanking of hammers and rolling mills, the confused din of massive machinery -- the burning headlands -- the coke hearths, now if the night be stormy bursting into sheets of flame, now wrapt in vast and impenetrable clouds of smoke -- the wild figures of the workmen, the actors in this apparently infernal scene -- all combine to impress the mind of the spectator very powerfully. (...) Almost the only assemblage of houses in Merthyr deserving of the name street -- tramroads generally run along the lines of the dwellings -- is the High Street, in the lower part of the town, which is the creation of the last few years. In 1836, the site of the present commodious Market House -- which was built by two individuals -- was a fine hay field. Some attention is now being paid to appearances; but there is great room for improvement. The sanitary regulations are wretched, notwithstanding the natural situation of the town; bad ventilation, bad drainage prevail. Fever existed to a great extent during the winter and spring of 1847. The interiors of the workmen's houses have been improved within the last ten years; more attention to comfort is displayed."

This same period, Thomas Carlyle - the person who coined the term "industrialism" - was particularly struck, looking down upon Dowlais from the cinder tips; and of Merthyr he wrote: "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. My emphasis).

The picturesque sensibility of the the author of A Topographical Dictionary of Wales of 1849 contrasted the pleasing landscapes of the iron masters' residences and grounds of Cyfartha Castle and Penydarren House - both recently built in fact - with the despoiled industrial landscape of smoking furnaces and monumental cinder tips: "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".


The signs in the new digital landscape


Map | Google Maps | Google Earth (KML) | Flickr
Geograph British Isles | SO0306 | SO0307 | SO0407 | SO0406


We inhabit a new digital landscape. With today's linking of GPS data with cameras and Internet-enabled mobile phones one glimpses the future promise of the geospatial web ( or, geoweb; and x); a new digitally-encoded landscape with a new fluid geography of location-aware information that's available to us whilst on the move. - Which direction to Chartist Cave?

The above four waymark points for the Cyfarthfa locale can be readily formatted into a map that's available online, hence available for download via an internet-enabled mobile phone for use as as a local walking guide; and as an example I've created this basic Google Map for Walking Cyfarthfa ( - this is viewable in a web-browser; and viewable in the Google Earth application by downloading the KML file here). With the growth of online communities with photo-sharing and mapping features, one may begin to engage a new shared sense of place and new forms of knowledge-building.

- It's simple, really: looking for a photo of Merthyr Tydfil, or Cyfarthfa Castle? then a search on the photo-sharing website Flickr highlights 1,748 photo results (for text search; and 1,106 results for tags search) for Merthyr Tydfil and 153 photo results (for text search) for Cyfarthfa Castle (- accessed 24 Oct 2008). Such is the richness of Flickr as a visual archive that businesses and public authorities now use it to source images for their own use (: for example, the present author received a request for permission to use a photograph on the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea website in 2006). Here for example are the 265 search results for "Cyfarthfa" on the Flickr photo-sharing website (- mostly views of Cyfarthfa Caslte), of which these 28 are issued for sharing under a Creative Commons license. And here is the Flickr "Places" aggregation of user-generated content for Merthyr Tydfil. This aggregation of content for a particular place highlights local patterns and clusters of imagery ( user's photo tags are a useful device) and enables the formation of communities of interest ( through joining a Flickr members' photo group).


Landscape, space and place: Towards "the first industrial nation"



This short walk and sample of sites in the Cyfarthfa locale highlights how we may engage a new and active sense of place, to connect with the unique industrial landscape of Merthyr Tydfil and Industrial South Wales, "the first industrial nation".

Yesteryear's landscape of industrial abandonment, decay, and neglect may even be transformed into tomorrow's World Heritage site or landscape, as in the recent case of Blaenavon (see here , here, and here), to become a catalyst for post-industrial regeneration.

In walking Cyfarthfa we have explored some signs in the landscape, from the obvious to the unexpected perhaps (- most people will be familiar with Cyfarthfa Castle, but were we previously aware of the Cyfarthfa furnace bank? the Pont y Cafnau iron bridge?); re-locating these discrete sites within the wider landscape network of the Cyfarthfa iron works. Hence connecting us to Cyfarthfa's historic landscape of production - a return to Carlyle's "Non-plus-ultra of Industrialism"; a far remove from the reified, late capitalist landscape and spectacle of consumption of the Cyfarthfa Retail Park.


+ Walking Cyfarthfa 1: The landscape of the Cyfarthfa iron works
+ Walking Cyfarthfa 2: Towards the "Cyfarthfa Heritage Landscape"
+ Walking Cyfarthfa 3: The signs in the new digital landscape


Copyright | Text and photos copyright John Wilson and licensed for re-use under this Creative Commons licence.

( Posted by - John Wilson )