Cwmdimbath; the partly fictional history of a real South Wales Valley, it's mining village, and railway.

[The Johnster]

Chapter 1.

 

Along the A4093 road between Blackmill and Tonyrefail in South Wales, which follows the valley of the Ogwr Fach river as far as the Gilfach Goch turnoff, a small stream, the Lechyd, can be seen emerging from it's own narrow valley in the mountain fastnesses to the north to join the Ogwr.  An unclassified lane loops northwards from Blackmill to Glynogwr to serve a few farms up there, Dimbath Lane.  This is Cwmdimbath, Dimbath Valley, a real place that exists.  It is worth a visit, especially on a bright autumnal day; park your car by the bridge that Dimbath Lane crosses the Lechyd by and take the northward leading footpath along the western bank of the stream into the woods.  You will be rewarded with a vision of the sylvan loveliness that characterised these remote and isolated central Glamorgan valleys before The Coal. 

 

By the middle of the 19th century, change was encroaching however.  Smoke from ironworks at Maesteg and Tondu could be seen in the sky and tramways were making inroads in the neighbouring valleys.  One can be traced from Blackmill into Cwmdimbath, up as far as a place called Daren y Dimbath on the OS, where there is a trace of an industrial working, probably a water powered forge. 

 

What had happened was that, 350 odd million years ago (100 million before there were dinosaurs), there was at this location on the planet's surface, south of the equator then but which has moved about a bit because of tectonic plate movement since, a tropical sea.  The bed of this consisted of vast numbers of sea creature shells, and formed into a rock now known as Carboniferous Limestone, the bedrock of the coalfield with is roughly in the form of depressed basin in South Wales; the limestone appears at it's rim.  As time passed, the sea became shallower because there was a land mass not far off and debris was washed down by it's rivers began to form layers of sandstones and mudtones above the limestone, but there were periods when the continent's coastline was fringed by extensive mangrove swamps and forests just inland, which were compressed between the sandtones and mudstones to form The Coal, seams interspersed with sand and mudstones, and topped by beds of brown sand, which we call the Pennant Sandstone.  The ages passed duly passed, as they are still doing, dinosaurs came and went, this part ot the crust was carried north and submerged beneath more layers of sedimentary rock culminating in the huge layer of Chalk, the bed of the Tethys Sea of the Cretaceous Period, which ended 65mya when the meteorite hit and disposed of the terrible lizards. 

 

Some 5mya after this, what we now know as the African Tectonic Plate was driven by currents in the Mantle northwards to collide with the Eurasian one.  This collision, still in progress (geologiacl time take a bit of getting your head around, if you find trouble with this don't bother with astronomy, your head will explode!), squeezed the Tethys into remnant seas; the Mediterranean, Black, Caspian, Aral, and Lake Baikal, and threw up huge mountain ranges in a sort of crumple zone, in a belt around the Mediterranean including the Atlas, Appenine, and Alpine ranges, and in the Caucasus, Hindu Kush, and Himalayas.  The effect felt a thousand miles north, was to push what would become the British Isles northwestwards, where it's sediments were folded and tilted against the more solid granites and metamorphic rocks of the Highlands of Scotland.  Massive mountain ranges thrust the Chalk maybe into the 10s of thousands of feet skywards, and it was quickly eroded to expose something resembling our current landscape by about 10mya.  Then, a series of Ice Ages occurred, the last one only releasing it's grip some 12kya.  The ice lay thick over the South Wales uplands down to along a line fairly exactly corresponding to the M4, built between Newport and Kenfig along it's terminal moraine because this stony land was less valuable to the farmers who owned it and thus cheaper to buy, while coinciding with the desired route.

 

So, the neighbouring valleys are straight and flatbottomed with precipitous sides where the glaciers gouged them out, and narrow and v profiled further south.  Cwmdimbath, however, is narrow, steep, and v profiled throughout; this has been eroded through the Pennant by Nant Lechyd since the ice melted in the last 12kya.

 

So much, so far, is real.  The following will my account of my imaginary mining valley here, overlaid on this reality.  There really is coal beneath the ground here, but Cwmdimbath is literally undermined by pits in the neighbouring Ogmore Valleys on both sides and Clydach Vale, a tributary of the Rhondda Fawr to the East. 

 

Chapter 2 is to follow, watch this  space!

[The Johnster]

Chapter 2

 

After the ice melted, and the sea levels began to rise, the area became largely deciduous woodland, the trees helping to stabilise soil on the precipitous valley sides, while the plateau into which these valleys are cut was mostly open moorland, blanket bog, and outcrops of the Pennant.  In the valleys where there had been glaciers, which included the Ogwr Fawr to the immediate west and the Garw to the west of that, the ice had gouged out corrie formations at the northern ends, the Blaenau in Welsh, meaning fronts, with rocky cliffs in semicircular formations.  Cwmdimbath, however, was more v shaped in cross section, formed by the stream, and has very little flat ground at the bottom of it; the mountainsides rear up at angles of between 70 and 80 degrees directly from the stream bed. 

 

So, when the first people came into the area perhaps 5kya, they did not penetrate much beyond the Cwmdimbath Lane bridge except for hunting or trapping; they grew their crops where the valley opened out into the Ogwr.  There may have been paths over the mountains to the adjacent valleys,  and some of them may still be in use; parts of this sort of landscape can be very ancient indeed.  History up here is vague until records began to be kept by parishes, and the first information regarding this area was concerened with forges and ironworks a little further south.  Coal was mined by the monks of Margam Priory in medieval times, and there were ironworks at Tondu (Tondu is important to the railway side of this story) and Maesteg by the 18th century, 

 

But industrialisation kicked in big time in the later 19th century as coal mines were sunk to satisfy the exponentially increasing demand, and that meant railways.  The line from Blackmill on the Tondu-Brynmenyn-Nantymoel Ogwr Fawr branch to Gellirhiadd on the Penygraig branch from Llantrisant was opened in 1866 (the branch to Nantymoel had opened a year previously), and a passenger service accessed Gilfach Goch on the Ogwr Fach to the east of Cwmdimbath from Bridgend by reversing at Hendreforgan; the coal traffic from Gilfach Goch ran via the Ely Valley line and Llantrisant.  In 1873 another branch, to Blaengarw from Brynmenyn, opened, and the GW assumed operation of all of these lines from 1876.  The Llynfi branck to Maested was extended to Cwmmer Afan in the Afan Valley by 1878 for freight and passengers 2 years later, reaching Abergwynfi in 1886, all in response to developing coal mining.

 

The coal in this part of the field is excellent steam coal, perfect for burning in steam boilers, and the worldwide expansion of railways and steam shipping stoked (sorry) demand.  *It was only a matter of time before the only valley left to develop succumbed to the headlong rush to make holes in the ground, and the village of Cwmdimbath, a few houses established around a foundry in around 1850 served by the aforementioned tramroad, became the site of the Ogmore Forest Coal Company's pit, sunk a few hundred yards south and down the valley from the old forge and the terminus of the tramway.   The OFCC built a couple of streets of tied cottages for their miners, some bigger houses for the formen and managers, and a general store and pub around what would be known as the village square despite it's being a wonky triangle shape.  These streets added to the 1850 cottages that had housed foundry workers, Lechyd Terrace.

 

There was at this time no road access to the village, and a look at the OS will show the precipitous mountainsides and lack of level ground at the bottom of the narrow valley that meant that for some time it was a matter of tracks and packhorses if you wanted any communication with the rest of the world.  That the tramway would be developed as a standard gauge railway by the GW, eager to tap traffic from the colliery which although it was not large in comparison to some of the big pits in the neighbouring valleys produced coal of a particularly low sulphur content and high calorific value, a premium product, was inevitable, and the branch from Glynogwr Jc opened in 1889 (if a remote and forgotten corner like Abergwynfi was served by a railway, there is no reason to assum that Cwmdimbath was going to escape connection). 

 

The owners of the OFCC were not keen on their workers travelling away from the village, and would have liked to have run the shop and pub as well, but were prevented from doing so by the 1887 Truck Acts.  They stringently resisted any form of Trade Union and, while the pit was not as dangerous as some due to favourable geology, wages were low.  They managed to persuade the GW not to introduce a passneger service for some time but the religious Great Revival of 1904/5 (there was no chapel in the village) meant that demand for travel on Sundays was considerable and the GW built a station.  This was sited a little further up the valley from the colliery connection, which had always been a 'kick back' even in tramway days in order to access the pit, which is perched on the mountainside.  So, coal trains, empty or loaded, have to come up to the platform road to set back into the exchange siding or be drawn out of it, and a running around movement is neccessary for both inward and outward traffic.

 

By 1910 the OFCC had been taken over by a consortium of major companies including Ocean, North's, and Cory, and unions gained a foothold, inevitably once the village was opened up to the outside world by the passenger service.  By 1912, all the trees had vanished underground in the form of pit props, which thereafter had to be brought in, and that winter, a landslip caused by their removal on the precipitous western side of the valley destroyed one of the miners' cottage terraces; fortunately, there was sufficient warning and no fatalities or injuries were suffered.  This meant that some men had to be brought in on workman's trains from further down the valley, and to the present time (1948-58) workman's services run at shift change times from Tondu. 

 

A road was built during the 1930s as part of a public works program instituted to relieve poverty and provide employment during the Great Depression; a number of such roads were built at this time including the 'Bwlch' road from Treorchy to Nantymoel and Abergwynfi and the 'Rhigos' road from Treherbert to Hirwaun.  This was, due to the topography, a single track road with passing places and is subject ot closures due to landslips, which means that the railway has survived the closures in neighbouring valleys.  Passenger trains to Gilfach Goch ended in 1930, but may have been reinstated to the Tremains ROF factory during the war, to Blaengarw in 1953, and Nantymoel in 1958, but traffic levels and the road problems mean that this branch will remain fully open for the foreseeable future (at least until Beeching!).

 

The station is a single platform with a run around loop and very similar to other termini in the area; Abergwynfi, Blaengarw, and Nantymoel are of this form, but here, because nearly everything comes in by rail, there are two goods sidings off the run around loop, one capable of accommodating 5 wagons or vans at the 'town' end with a loading platform and lockup store, with room for mileage traffic to be unloaded on the other side.  This has a small crane and an end loading dock.  The other siding is at the country end of the loop, and is a simple open mileage affair, capable of holding two wagons or vans.  The colliery exchange road is a kickback off the platform road, and the consortium modernised with a steam loco to replace horse shunting in the 1920s; the current loco is a W4 Peckett and a single road shed--workshop was built for it off the exchange road.  There is a platform on this exchange road with a warehouse and workshop for the colliery's needs, with a wooden hoist to access the first floor.  At the 'country' end of this road and the running line, a road overbridge with accesses the colliery forms what would be an excellent scenic break if anyone were ever to make a model railway based on this...

 

 

 

*It's pretty much fiction as far as  Cwmdimbath is concerned from here on in, but references to other places and events are factual.