BLAEN Y CWM, TYNEWYDD AND THE RHIGOS

So why go to Blaen y Cwm? It's the top end of one of the Rhondda valleys where the road stops, a point now being a turning circle for the bus. Once you get there, there is nowhere further to go, unless you want to walk along the path that takes you to the actual head of the valley. I am going because some years ago, following my uncle’s death, I was left a little bit of money which I decided I should spend on buying a painting in remembrance of him. I always associated him with the South Wales valleys and I had been looking for a painting that somehow represented this for me. One day in an art gallery in Swansea, I unexpectedly came across a painting that fitted the bill; - it held all my expectations about a representation of the Valleys - rows of terraced houses, cloudy skies and the hillside beyond the roofs. It was by Ceri Barclay, an artist originally from Tonypandy and it now looks good hung up at home.

Blaen y Cwm by Ceri Barclay

As I look at this painting daily there has always been a desire in me to stand at the same spot as the artist and see if my own looking at the scene has some link to artistic visualisation. Therefore, up to Blaen y Cwm or as it is on some signposts and on some maps Blaencwm.

From Cardiff the journey is quick to Pontypridd and then seems to slow down the further up the valley you go. After Treorchy the road was closed with a diversion through an industrial estate reducing the progress to a crawl. I drive on, followed by a bus whose destination board declares ‘130 Blaencwm’. I pass a road sign that informs me I am now in Blaen y Cwm still reassuringly followed by the Blaencwm Stagecoach bus. I reach the end of the road and park on the tarmac that is the bus terminal.

Camera in hand I walk around looking for the scene that is on my living room wall. I don't find it. There is something about the way the houses are depicted in the painting which is difficult to find on the ground. My painting has the backs of the houses facing each other with their short gardens in between, then as you look at the row of gardens in the painting there is the mountain, the valley side. This orientation is different to what I am looking at. I don't find the spot the artist stood on. I wonder at all the reasons encompassed by artistic license that explain why it is not possible for me to locate the site on this day. But then, perhaps the reason I don't find it is nothing to do with the artist but everything to do with me looking in the wrong place. I walk through the few streets and houses that make up this little, now ex-mining, village. 

I see the house where the novelist Ron Berry lived. A recorder of the lives of working men and women as the coal industry declined but with people breaking out of the economic shackles of the 1930’s and 40’s. The writers of Wales are not recorded with blue plaques which I now associate with England; no, the Rhys Davies Trust commemorate Welsh writers by having their names placed on associated houses carved on grey slate plaques. There are important ways in which we express our difference.

I sit on a seat by the bus terminal. Soon an older woman joins me and we begin to talk about the place. I ask about the correct spelling. Is it Blaen y Cwm or Blaencwm?

“Well here we all think it is Blaen y Cwm. That's the way in which we were taught and we keep on using it.” The lady tells me she has lived here all her life. “In the old days there was more Welsh spoken everywhere and the name is really the Welsh way. We were told in school that it got called Blaencwm because there wasn't enough room to put to ‘y’ on front of the bus.” We laugh at it being the bus’s fault.

“It used to be so dirty here, a small place with two collieries and all them trains going all the time. Everything was black; you couldn't get anything clean. Now it's so different. Everything changes.”

Somehow or other we get onto the theme of politics and she tells me she does not understand how people could vote to leave Europe. “They've given us so much here - I got my grants to do at my house from the EU. But I don't think we'll get much now because nobody is bothered about this place.” We part, she getting on the bus now labelled ‘Pontypridd’ and me getting into my car.

I go back down the Valley to the next village of Tynewydd. It is a hot day and I need a drink so I look for a shop. There a poor selection of what are now known as ‘retail outlets’ and most of them appear closed. 

There is one shop on the road with nighties in the window and fruit on the outside. It is a small shop that has obviously been put together on the superstore model - everything is included, fruit and veg, bakery, dry goods, a few medicines, wool for knitting, needles and threads, some clothes, school uniforms, nappies, it is an agency for dry-cleaning and oh yes some second hand books. 

I buy my drink and in a way continue my previous conversation.

“I suppose you’ve seen many changes?”

“Lots. Everything looks brighter now, but there are no jobs and no railway.”

I remember there was a tunnel just up the valley that ran through hill. A tunnel that went from Blaen y Cym through to Blaengwyfi in the Afan Valley and the railway line would have taken the train onto Port Talbot, Neath and Swansea. It is now the longest disused tunnel in Wales at 3,443 yards opened in 1890 and closed in 1968.

“Yes they want to make it into a cycle path now. It's a pity they can't make it into a road because it gets blocked up here sometimes in the winter and it would be a way out for us.”

I wondered if she ever took the train to Swansea.

“Yes it did go to Swansea but we always got off at Aberavon beach. It was a long walk to the sea but when you are a kid, you don't mind. There were no houses there then, just sand and the sea and kids enjoying themselves.”

I thanked her for her memory.

I drive on up to the Rhigos overlooking the Neath Valley with, in the distance, the rolling hills of Mid Wales lined up as waves approaching the shore of Offa’s Dyke. 

I walk down to the fence where people leave memorials to those who have passed away; dogs and grandmothers, brothers, grandfathers and sisters, mums and dads. An expansive place to come to hold memories of people and the sand and sea and just kids enjoying themselves. 

Behind me the wind turbine slowly rotates like the hands on a child’s clock marking the passage of its own time.

At this resting place
the wind turbines moves
with the monotony of languid time