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Real Wales - Virtually Coelbren
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      <p> <img src="Coelbren4.jpg" width="100" height="155" border="1" alt="St Patrick at Banwen">
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          <p> <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Banwen Pyrddin, pit village 
            with today no sign of a pit, turns out to be nothing like I had imagined. 
            A couple of streets centred on Roman Road, a terrace of sixty four 
            houses, so badly maintained by the NCB when they were in charge that 
            one fell down so now there's sixty three. I'm driving round with George 
            Brinley Evans, former collier, author and eighty-two year old local 
            celebrity, strung about with cameras to record my visit, and top coats 
            to keep out the driving rain. We're in Norman Burns' battered Nissan. 
            The springs are squashed by our combined weight. Norman is the secretary 
            of the local history society and can tell you the past of almost every 
            stone. Morgan, delighted the fog has lifted and who has got me up 
            here to show me the places of his childhood, turns out to be known 
            locally as Brian. We reach the top of the village. It's taken us about 
            five seconds. End house is boarded up, the one next to it has a large 
            and dopy Alsatian spread out on the inside window ledge like a cat. 
            Midday. Upstairs a vision in pink tracksuit, fag in hand, has just 
            got up. A man in a cowboy hat comes out to start a car, fails, then 
            immediately gives up. The rain comes in along Roman Road like an army 
            of legionnaires. This was once Sarn Helen, clattering into Banwen 
            from the fort at Coelbren then roaring out, up over Hirfynydd to the 
            rest of the civilised world. Except that in those days there was no 
            Banwen, nothing. Almost like now, not even a scrape in the ground.</font></p>
          <p align="center"><img src="Coelbren1.jpg" width="450" height="362" border="1" alt="Virtually Coelbren"></p>
          <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">We've been up on the mountain 
            at Clwdi Banwen to see the famous fake rocks, the <a href="#gnoll">Gnoll 
            Stones</a> , high in the rained-on forestry. The fakes are of a fifth 
            century memorial pillar stone marking the burial of Macaritinus son 
            of <a href="#macaritin">Bericius </a>and of a pre-Norman wheel cross 
            showing a man in a <a href="#disc">kilt</a> . The originals are now 
            in the Swansea Museum. The fakes have been perfectly replicated by 
            Terry Briers from Carmarthen. Norman reckons that if you extend the 
            fragment of wheel that remains and then imagine legs below that then 
            the cross would have originally been three metres high. Not tall. 
            But bigger than us. We were going to have a compass added, Norman 
            tells me, showing what you can see from here. Fan Gyhirych Fan Fawr. 
            But the forestry have planted so many lovely trees that now you can't 
            see a thing. Bloody greenness. We stare out into the rain drenched 
            gloom. </font></p>
          <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Down in the valley, although 
            I have to say that as valleys go the Dulais and its juniors are disappointingly 
            flat, the landscape undulates and the air is always full of light. 
            Down here is another stone, put up two years ago with its metal memorial 
            plate already shot up by the local lost. The stone celebrates the 
            fact that St Patrick, who was an Onllwyn boy through and through, 
            was taken from here by marauding Irish when he was <a href="#tom">sixteen</a> 
            . George has us cluster so he can take a video of his visitors observing 
            the local sites. Patrick wasn't like David, he explains, speaking 
            as if he knew them both well. In fact speaking as if he'd just left 
            them both at the greengrocers down the road. Patrick always referred 
            to the Irish as foreigners, right up to the end. He was easy to get 
            on with. Liked a joke and a drink. Now David, he was much more distant, 
            not the same at all. Wanted us to abstain from overindulgence and 
            pray all the time. Things like that. Not an easy man. Should saints 
            be easy then, I ask? George smiles. </font></p>
          <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The cluster of towns here 
            run into each other. And they are hardly towns more like villages: 
            Banwen, Duffryn Cellwen, Coelbren, Onllwyn, Pant-y-Ffordd, Aberpergwm, 
            and beyond them, Seven Sisters. Birthplace of the poet Ruth Bidgood. 
            But of her there's little mark. Industry has largely left too. Deep 
            coal mining is ovwr. The <a href="#harri">open cast </a>, however, 
            with its reliance on huge machines and a tiny workforce, still drags 
            up the black stuff and sends it to the washery at Coelbren. There's 
            a railway here, trucks with coal in them strung out across the landscape. 
            Yellow dumper trucks and floodlit yards. But the landscape stays green. 
            No tips, no smoke. We pass the site of the once famous Halfway Inn, 
            the Slope as it was called locally, the pub for the pits which had 
            one wall of its cellar right in the middle of the eight foot seam. 
            Barrels along three walls, coal on the fourth. Gone, not a brick left. 
            In Coelbren itself Morgan's brother-in-law, retired collier Moelwyn 
            Evans, shows me the far northern reach of the coalfield, a ridge, 
            a change in the colour of vegetation, that runs along the end of his 
            garden. We look out over the leafless winter landscape towards the 
            slow rise of the Beacons. This vista doubled as the Transvaal when 
            they were year filming Young Winston. They blew up a train right over 
            there. Terrible bang it was. In his garage Moelwyn has two ton of 
            anthracite stacked neatly in green plastic boxes and a mountain of 
            chipboard off cuts from the Remploy factory. Up here the temperature 
            is at least one pullover colder than the rest of Wales.</font></p>
          <p align="center"><img src="Coelbren2.jpg" width="450" height="365" border="1" alt="Coelbren"></p>
          <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">There is one shop in Coelbren, 
            the Co-op, and none in Onllwyn. We take a photograph of the bungalow 
            on Wembley Avenue, birthplace of Hywel Francis, MP for Port Talbot. 
            We pass an iron shale waste tip behind which was once a sixty-foot 
            quarry. Filled in and now allotments. To the right is a bright and 
            almost emerald green football pitch hand-excavated over the top of 
            another set of refilled iron workings. In the early 1950s <a href="#menon">Krishna 
            Menon</a> , Indian High Commissioner, came here to the tiny wooden 
            Onllwyn Sports Pavilion to speak to the miners and declare his non-violent 
            solidarity with the hoary-handed, hard labouring, Welsh working man. 
            Few of those left here today. </font></p>
          <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Where Onllwyn becomes Pantyffordd 
            the road signs face each other like gunfighters. For Morgan this place 
            is holy ground. To the north rising greenness and the grass-covered 
            top soil mountain from the Nant Helen Open Cast. When they're done 
            they'll put it all back and replant. Couple of years and the devastation 
            will be gone. Like nothing had ever happened. So they say. The rail 
            link from the Banwen Coal washery parallels the road. Morgan shows 
            me the field where he once played cricket. Not a field, no pitch, 
            a patch of bog and hummock, crossed by the meandering Dulais. The 
            fast bowlers would leap the water as they ran into the invisible crease. 
            Beyond them was Tin Town, a cluster of zinc prefabs erected to house 
            migrant miners and immigrant brick makers. Above was where the Brecon 
            Forest Tramway once ran taking newly-cast iron canon balls to the 
            Swansea canal. </font></p>
          <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">At Tonyfildre Farm the 
            farmer, Byron Jones, loads us into his four by four and takes us roaring 
            and skidding across two wet fields to see the Sequoia, a millennium 
            gift from George's Canadian nephew to the people of Welsh Banwen. 
            It's six years on today and the miserable one-foot sapling that came 
            in a plastic tube is now at least five-foot tall and looks like something 
            you'd put in your house at Christmas. Proudly George has his photo 
            taken standing in front. Below us is the Onllwyn Gaer, a Roman auxiliary 
            fort situated halfway between those at Neath and Brecon. You have 
            to use your imagination here, Norman says. These bumps in the ground 
            are all that's left. Although they did find a single shard of late 
            Iron Age/Romano-British pottery in a molehill on the northern rampart. 
            The rain moves in sideways. Rampart? I can't see a thing. Just blur 
            and grass. There's a marching camp nearby and that's six times the 
            size. Do you want to have a look there? Do I? Anything more to see 
            than wet grass, I ask? Norman shakes his head. </font></p>
          <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Back in tough Banwen we 
            have a valley's lunch at Caffi Sarn Helen, baguettes, latte, Panini, 
            and pizza slices in a building converted from the offices of the National 
            Coal Board Open Cast. This is the Dove Centre, a community venture 
            providing computer suite, day nursery, garden, re-education and training 
            facilities and a home for the miners library. Founded by Mair Francis 
            in the teeth of the 1984 strike this is an example of women reclaiming 
            their heritage. The all-women miners support groups hanging on. Agents 
            for change, re-educators, sustainers of life. Lesley Smith and Julie 
            Bibby take me round, laughing, bubbling with enthusiasm for what they 
            do. There's more life here than anywhere else I've seen in the whole 
            Dulais Valley. On the wall are framed jackets from George's books. 
            <i>Boys of Gold</i>. <i>Where The Flying Fishes Play</i>. A living 
            connection with an underground past. During a break in the dampness 
            we go outside for George to show me where the pit head once was. A 
            bumpy green field with a wrecked car in its corner. The line of the 
            Roman Road rises beyond, smashed by open cast and forestry planting 
            but still visible, just. Then the rain, friend of reclamation, once 
            more increases and we go back inside. </font></p>
          <p></p>
          <p align="center"> <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <img src="Coelbren3.jpg" width="450" height="350" border="1" alt="&lt;font face=&quot;Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif&quot;&gt;&lt;font size=&quot;2&quot;&gt;George Brinley Evans, Morgan Francis &amp;amp; Norman Burns "><br>
            <font size="2">George Brinley Evans, Morgan Francis &amp; Norman Burns 
            in Banwen</font></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"></font></p>
          <p align="center">&nbsp;</p>
          <p align="left"> <font size="2"><a name="gnoll"></a>1. The Gnoll Stones, 
            originally uprooted and moved to the garden of Gnoll House, Neath 
            by Lord Macworth in 1790</font></p>
          <p align="left"><font size="2"><a name="macaritin"></a>2. MACARITIN- 
            FILI BERIC [-/HIC IACIT (?)] Originally standing close to the line 
            of Sarn Helen near the north-eastern end of Hirfynydd, at a point 
            where the Roman road begins to descend towards the fort at Coelbren.<br>
            <br>
            <a name="disc"></a>3. Fragment of a disc-headed slab cross, characteristic 
            of west Glamorgan in the 9th and 10th centuries. Found near Capel 
            Coelbren<br>
            <br>
            <a name="tom"></a> 4. attested to by American historian Tom Clark 
            - Banwen is the best bet. <br>
            <br>
            <a name="harri"></a>5. The area is described by the poet Harri Webb 
            as &quot;The opencast capital of Europe&quot; (The Big Job). &quot;Everything 
            comes to the surface at Banwen&quot;, writes George Brinley Evans 
            (letter to the author) &quot;You could pick a bucketful of iron nodules 
            off the bed of the stream that runs through my garden in no time.&quot; 
            <br>
            <br>
            <a name="menon"></a>6. Krishna Menon 1897-1974. Home rule supporter 
            and enthusiast for the People's Republic of China. Held the record 
            for the longest delivered speech at the United Nations - eight hours 
            in support of India's stance on Kashmir. <br>
            <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"></font></font></p>
          <div align="center"> </div>
          <p align="center">&nbsp; </p>
            <p></p>
            
          <p align="center"> <b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Peter 
            Finch</font></b> 
          <p align="center"> <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><a href="realwales.htm">back 
            to Real Wales</a></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br>
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            <a href="#top"><small><small><font size="2">back to the top</font></small></small></a> 
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    <td width="15%"  valign = top align = left><font size = "2"> &#32 <FONT COLOR ="#000080" FONT FACE="arial, helvetica"> 
      <h2>Actually<br>
        Banwen </h2>
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