PhD landscape walk - walking the ghost topography of Cwmbran new town

This is a description of one of a series of landscape walks through my PhD case study areas. Here the walk navigates a route around the post-war planned new town of Cwmbran in south-east Wales, developed over the former lands of Magna Porta, the 'home' manor of Llantarnam Abbey during the medieval period.

The walk commences at the church of St. Michael’s in Llantarnam village at the southern limits of the new town, taking in the cul-de-sac lane opposite running parallel with a silted-up ditch draining into a culvert under the main road. This ditch forms part of a system of leats which fed the now demolished corn mill in the village and likely date to the monastic period.

From here a long straight stretch of Llantarnam Road is followed, leading directly from the old lane to the abbey into the centre of Cwmbran. This road follows the line of the route between the abbey and its granges and manorial lands to the north and also forms the start of the pilgrimage way from Llantarnam to the shrine at Penrhys further to the west in the Rhondda valley. Now a main route into the town, this old road is utterly suburban, lined by ribbon development, a mix of some larger Victorian and Edwardian houses, unremarkable housing stock from this period and the mid-twentieth century, and modern day additions.

The mill leat opposite the church (Source: author).

Llantarnam Road looking north-west (Source: author).

Part-way along the road the memory of the abbey's Scybor Court grange (latterly Court Farm) rises. The school built on the site of the demolished farm during the development of the new town in the 1960s has now itself been replaced by a housing estate, ‘St. Michael’s Gate’ (this name a reference to the local church but perhaps a missed opportunity to remember the medieval grange). Further along the road, the grange is memorialised in the 1950s council housing of the ‘Court Farm Estate’, including Court Farm Close and Court Farm Road (is this association with social housing the rationale for the new estate utilising a different name?). Further progress along the road brings more nomenclature linking the area to the abbey: Llantarnam Dental Practice, Llantarnam Primary School, Court Road Industrial Estate etc.

The land farmed by the medieval grange here is uniformly flat, forming the broad flood-plain of the Afon Lwyd a few hundred metres to the east. The old flood meadows of the grange that have not been concreted over form one of the recreational areas created as part of the planned new town, now the site of a large boating and fishing lake and a golf course.

Court Farm Close, part of the 1950s estate built on the agricultural land of the monastic grange of Scybor Court (Source: author).

Passing the green space of Oakfield Park, sited on an area of woodland at a junction of old roads and populated by remnant oak and ash. Further greenery is observed at a roundabout marking the junction of the old road with one of the new access routes through the town. This is the marshy place bordering the lands of Scybor Court grange to the south and the abbey’s Gelli-las grange to the north: the industrial zone along the riverside here interspersed with more open green space and mature trees.

New town roundabout looking north with entrance to Court Road Industrial Estate to right (Source: author).

Across the roundabout a remnant field, crossed by the embankment of a disused railway line, also contains a hollow which may have been the line of the stream bounding the territory of the two granges.

Remnant field at boundary of Scybor Court and Gelli-las granges (Source: author).

Grange Road (Source: author).

The old track up to Gelli-las (still called Grange Road) is passed, now a residential street and service road for a supermarket and industrial units. Approaching the centre of Old Cwmbran, the small industrial settlement that preceded the new town and the housing stock becomes a mix of mid-nineteenth century cottages and late century worker’s terraces; the area now somewhat down at heal.

As the post-war trunk road into the centre of the town is bridged the old road curves westwards and climbs up the small hillock on which the medieval chapel of St. Dial’s, a stopping place on the pilgrimage route to Penrhys, stood. As the hill is climbed the character of the route changes, St. Dial’s Lane, bounded by an old wall and then hedge-lined, is now lined by fields: a rural snapshot amidst the urban new town. From a field containing a ruined barn, the site of Llanderfel pilgrimage chapel and the surrounding grange can be seen high on the side of Mynydd Maen looming in the distance to the west. This low river terrace hillock provides a prominent viewpoint and landmark in the landscape, probably explaining the location of the chapel here.

Section of old wall on lane up to St. Dial’s (Source: author).

The rural character of St. Dial’s Lane (Source: author).

Looking west towards the uplands of Mynydd Maen towards the site of Llanderfel chapel on the distant hillside (Source: author). 

The steepness of the northern slope of St. Dial’s descending to the adjacent town centre has preserved it from development. The jumble of post-war buildings forming central Cwmbran, complete with distressed concrete multi-story car park and landmark tower block, now overlie the grange farm of Gelli-las.

Central Cwmbran on the site of the Gelli-las grange (Source: author). 

A further stretch of ‘country lane’ hollows below tree-lined banks. Desire paths through an overgrown field are explored, bushes and trees now reclaiming the site of the long-demolished St. Dial’s House and most probably the medieval chapel. The approximate site of the old settlement along the lane is now unremarkably taken by a small Victorian terrace and a bungalow. As the lane strikes north alongside allotments, the open space to the south is the scene of a rising housing development, part of the Cwmbran neighbourhood which takes its name from the medieval chapel.

The site of St. Dial's House - and probably the medieval chapel - looking southwards (Source: author).

Descending from St. Dial’s, the lane runs alongside one of the modern roads through the new town to a roundabout. From here the line of the pilgrimage route continues westwards towards Llanderfel as a series of walking and cycle paths. This route will be picked up again later in the walk but now a diversion westwards through the remaining woodlands of the Freshwater suburb is followed. Here, remnant trees and dingles are intermixed with the housing of the new town, pathways running through the green spaces and linking residential areas with roads, schools and other infrastructure. The retention of significant woodland within the new town fabric is the result of a mix between idealism - the creation of the liveable, spacious neighbourhoods such as Fairwater and Greenmeadow with plenty of green areas – and pragmatism, with tree cover largely confined to the more difficult and marginal terrain alongside the courses of streams and steeper-sided gulleys.

  

St. Dial’s Lane beside the modern road through the western suburbs of Cwmbran (Source: author).

The route of the pilgrimage way picked up again via the footpath on the other side of the roundabout (Source: author).

Remnant woodland inter-mixed with new town housing in the Freshwater area of Cwmbran (Source: author).

In this elevated western part of the new town, open and green prospects are juxtaposed in places with some rather tired-looking housing stock. A public footpath followed through the block of woodland below Cwmbran High School comes to a dead-end at the school gates and meandering, sometimes litter-strewn, desire paths eventually lead to the old lane - Graig Road - still zig-zagging its nineteenth century course up through Fairwater, a hidden away but still extant artery for cyclists and dog-walkers masked by suburban closes. This route would have provided a more direct route up to the open common of Mynydd Maen from the abbey, by-passing the hilltop pilgrims diversion of St. Dial’s.

Housing in the Greenmeadow area of Cwmbran (Source: author).

Here rural tranquillity is found again as the lane crosses a stone bridge in a dingle carrying a fast-flowing stream down from the hillsides around Llanderfel. The arboreal spell somewhat broken by the litter collecting around the information board at the start of the holloway that runs uphill towards Landerfel. As the board attests, this part of the pilgrimage route is now well publicised. However, less well-known or promoted is the fact that the line of the route east from here to St. Dial’s can also be traced on the ground, preserved as a series of walkways through 1970s housing and crossed by new roads – a linear piece of history stubbornly retaining its place in the modern-day topography.

The old lane through Fairwater disappears into the trees on the curve of this residential close (Source: author).

Bridge carrying the lane, hidden away behind the suburban closes (Source: author).

This route eastwards and downhill, back towards the centre of town, is now followed. A footpath, sometimes following sections of well-worn holloway flanked by the mature remnants of out-grown beech hedges, at others the memory of the old track is only preserved by a line of trees or a depression alongside the tarmac path.

The line of the pilgrim route from St. Dial’s to Llanderfel, now a hollow line behind garden fences (Source: author).

A further section of the track, preserved as a line of trees (Source: author).

A more well-defined section of the track, lined by beech (Source: author).

Crossing a busy through road, a further piece of rural history within the contemporary townscape is observed: Greenmeadow ‘community farm’, its farmhouse partly dating to the seventeenth century, home to post-medieval tenants of the Magna Porta manor and perhaps their monastic period predecessors. A public footpath traverses the perimeter of the farm leading into steep woods shielding the noise and grime of the large central industrial zone of Forge Hammer, previously the site of railway yards and a nut and bolt works. Emerging from the woods, an oasis of grass in the form of a large oval pasture (preserving the shape of a prominent enclosure alongside Church Wood as recorded on the 1887 Ordnance Survey map) is walked through.

Greenmeadow community farm (Source: author).

Hard by the industrial estates, the valley of the Cwm Bran Brook holds a nature reserve along a series of silted-up and wildlife diverse industrial ponds and weirs. Yet another quiet semi-natural place in close proximity to the busy urban apex.

Industrial pond returned to nature, Forge Hammer (Source: author).

Leaving the stream, the walk strikes north along the towpath of the Pontypool to Newport canal towards the northern-most part of the abbey’s Magna Porta lands at Pontnewydd, the gently rising section here lined by a series of deep locks. The canal dissects the manor from north to south, the precursor to later further linear communications routes in the form of railways and roads.

The Pontypool to Newport canal looking southwards (Source: author).

From the canal the route runs through the centre of the industrial village of Pontnewydd, later part of the northern suburbs of Cwmbran and named for a crossing over the Afon Lwyd dating from at least the seventeenth century, now marked by a nineteenth century bridge. Looping southwards having crossed the river, the site of the Gelli-las grange farmstead is now approached. Along the riverside some of the grange’s water meadows are preserved as sports fields. Surrounded by roads, a multiplex cinema, a multi-story car park and a supermarket, can be found, somewhat incongruously, the Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre, housed in the nineteenth century upgrade of the old farmhouse of Gelli-las (which took the name of Llantarnam Grange) and standing in the remains of the ornamental gardens surrounding the house. Although it is hard to get a sense of a medieval agricultural estate in this setting and on the long walk back down Llantarnam Road, it is at least reassuring to know that this particular grange farm has an on-going and distinct afterlife having so nearly been demolished in the 1960s.

Sports fields occupying some of the water meadows of Gelli-las grange between the Afon Lwyd and the railway line (Source: author).

Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre (Source: author).

Landscape in particular 8: Siarpal in the Vale of Ewyas

“In the deep vale of Ewias, which is shut on all sides by a circle of lofty mountains and which is no more than three arrow-shots in width...”

Gerald of Wales (Giraldus), The Journey Through Wales, 1188

The Vale of Ewyas, more commonly known as Llanthony Valley, winds its way through twelve sinuous miles, one of four major valleys dissecting the upland massif of the Black Mountains; its eastern ridge forming both the English-Welsh boundary and also a section of the Offa's Dyke National Trail. At the heart of the valley lies Llanthony Priory, magnificent in its ruination. Here, the Black Canons of the Augustinian order, backed by lands and patronage from the de Lacy Marcher Lords, had the vision, faith and tenacity to build a monastic community that lasted for over 400 years. 

Despite a National Park location, an iconic heritage site in its midst and the National Trail traversing the valley, not to mention easy accessibility from the urban areas of South Wales and Bristol, the Vale retains the atmosphere of a remote and little known place. Even in summer the sense of a tourist honey-pot is largely absent; yes, the three camp sites and handful of self-catering cottages will be peopled, there will be cyclists, hikers, pony-trekkers and day-trippers, but these are generally word of mouth folk, often returning year after year.

Looking north-eastwards from the Priory ruins to the ridge, England just over the horizon, the view beyond sheep pasture and mature trees is of a dip in the skyline, the hillside incised by a number of steep gulley's. This is Cwm Siarpal, the backdrop to a thousand photographs, traversed by several footpaths up to the high ground and yet largely an unknown place to visitors to Llanthony and walkers going up to or coming down from the Offa's Dyke path.

Section of 1:25,000 map, courtesy of Ordnance Survey (from Digimap).

An unmetalled track runs from Llanthony up the cwm to a lonely farmstead hidden behind Wiral Wood. As the track bends sharply to the right at the break in slope it passes a collection of ruinous buildings. On the face of it, just another abandoned farm, a fading ghost of upland toil. However, this architectural relic has a more interesting back story.

Image from http://en.wikiquote.org/

In 1809 the forgotten and quietly declining backwater estate of Cwmyoy-Llanthony was purchased by the Romantic poet and prose writer Walter Savage Landor. He was held in high esteem by his literary contemporaries but never widely popular and is now largely forgotten. Sidney Colvin opened his 1881 biography of Landor with the memorable line: "Few men have ever impressed their peers so much, or the general public so little, as WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR". He was one of a number of eccentrics attracted to the remote beauty of the valley: in the late nineteenth century the self-styled Father Ignasius built a new Llanthony Abbey at Capel-y-ffin, four miles north of the Priory and later owned by the artist Eric Gill who established a bohemian artistic community there; and the beat poet Allen Ginsburg spent time here in the late Sixties. 

Taking temporary quarters in one of the surviving towers of the Priory, the 32 year old Landor entered into his new career as country squire and 'beneficient landowner' with gusto, as he contemplated the "wild and striking country that he had chosen for his future home". A lover of nature, Landor had a particular passion for flowers and trees, "...not with any scientific or practical knowledge, but with a poet's keenness of perception" (Colvin). Of the wild flowers of Llanthony, he observed: "I love these beautiful and peaceful tribes". His most striking scheme was to reinvigorate the neglected woodland of the valley through the mass planting of cedars of Lebanon, popular at the time for the their Classical associations, with the eventual preposterous sounding aim of adding two million trees to the landscape. He also engaged construction gangs to build new roads and bridges throughout the estate, and sought to change the moribund nature of the agricultural activity of the estate through the introduction of sheep imported from Segovia in Castile and new tenants bringing improved methods of cultivation.

For a time Landor was ebullient in his praise and affection for his new home:

“Homeward I turn; o’er Hatterils rocks

I see my trees, I hear my flocks.

Where alders mourned their fruitless bed

Ten thousand cedars raise their head.

And from Segovia’s hills remote

My sheep enrich my neighbour’s cote

The wide and easy road I lead

Where never paced the harnessed stead…”

Letter to Robert Southey, 1812

Due to his position as a son of the landed classes, Landor was able to push a personal Enclosure Act through Parliament in 1813. However, his scheme to enclose the upland grazing land surrounding the valley was never completed. Indeed, Landor's ambitious plans to turn the property into a grand country estate predictably ran out of money, local goodwill and motivation before most of his designs could be realised. Ill-advisable financial decisions (including the installation of an expensive printing press) led to eventual bankruptcy. A disillusioned Landor abandoned the estate (his affairs brought "...to such a pass as utterly to disgust him with Llanthony, Wales and the Welsh") and left for a new life on the Continent after just five years of hopeful activity, over-expenditure and neighbourly dispute. His ire was especially reserved for his local tenants and labourers. In a viscous but undoubtedly memorable parting shot he claimed:

"If drunkenness, idleness, mischief, and revenge are the principle characteristics of the savage state, what nation - I will not say in Europe, but in the world - is so singularly tattooed with them as the Welsh?" and further, in case the point had not been made clearly enough "The earth contains no race of human beings so totally vile and worthless as the Welsh". 

The views of the inhabitants of the valley have not been recorded but the feeling was no doubt mutual. Llanthony was left in the hands of trustees of the Landor family, who remained as unspectacular absentee landlords as the valley returned to its familiar pattern of gentle decline and neglect and the estate was finally broken up in the early twentieth century.

In the midst of this eventful period in the estates stewardship, the jewel in the crown was to be Landor's mansion at Siarpal, the building that now stands ruinous in this quiet corner of the valley, a quarter of a mile uphill from the Priory. With no known plan or picture of the house to study, the remaining structures are all that provide an indication of the scale and ambition behind its construction. Iain Sinclair provides a distinctive fictional account of Landor's vision for the house and wider estate in his novel Landor's Tower: 

"He saw the avenues of his planting, pastureland and parkland declining to the ruined priory. Here is my place. Siarpal. A mansion, commodious but plain, facing the warm south, respecting the nature of the chosen site; a vervent spirit responsive to method, the laws of proportion, simple husbandry. The Roman model. Senatorial retirement from the fuss of society. Estates, well-managed, conversing quietly with the original rudeness of this remote valley; withdrawn from the vanity and pomp of the careless world, its princes and popes. Here Landor declared his republic. Here would he bring his new bride." 

There is no indication that the building was ever fully completed or lived in, although it would seem that during the summer of 1811 Landor and his new wife, Julia, played host to a number of house guests, including the poet Robert Southey and his wife. Shortly after Landor's theatrical retreat the half-built mansion was mostly pulled down and remained in use as a hay barn into the late twentieth century. Colvin noted that the adjacent stream "is all but dried up, and silent, as if its Naiad had fled with her master, while all the rest are vocal", and indeed, the watercourse has often seemed surprisingly wan for a Welsh mountain brook when I have visited.  

Although Landor was both a quixotic dreamer and an arrogant incomer (possessing, in Colvin's words a "lordly, imaginative, sanguinely unpractical manner"), his imprint on the landscape remains in the form of a range of features, including trackways, dry stone walls across the higher slopes, the remnants of avenues of trees, as well as the remains of his mansion. The vision of a wide parkland vista narrowing to then reveal the handsome mansion as the approach track curves its way uphill can still be clearly realised walking up to the ruin from Llanthony. A noticeable number of the beech, cedar and larch that he had planted have survived and are now, two centuries later, magnificently mature specimens.  

Landor’s house was probably built on the site of an existing upland small-holding: Siarpal was recorded as a farm of 2 acres, let on a lease for life and worth 1 shilling, in the 1799 particulars of sale for the Cwmyoy, Llanthony and Llanvihangel estates. The name therefore predates the Landor period, its origins lost in the bastardised Welsh-English etymological fog of centuries of border interactions, consistency in the written word an irrelevance. Siarpal, recorded as Sharpole and Sharpwell on nineteenth century maps; possibly originally from the Welsh Siarp meaning 'sharp': Sharp Hill, an accurate topographical description for this steep sided cwm. Iain Sinclair, with Welsh-born insight, adds: "The Sharples. Sharpil or Sharpll: so they cursed it. Sharp Hill, something of that sort. The Welsh had a flair for stating the obvious and making it portentious by speaking in an awe-struck whisper". There are numerous other examples in the area, probably Welsh in origin but anglicised into arcane mutation: Hatterrall Hill, Loxidge, Llanthony itself (in the original Welsh, Llanddewi Nant Honddu, meaning ‘the church of St David on the Honddu brook’).

As a postscript, the current long-standing custodians of the site have recently had an impressive new roof constructed on the coach house, the best surviving part of the house, and repaired the walls to prevent their imminent collapse. With the owners kind permission I have been lucky enough to camp in this special place on two occasions, the first a memorable birthday party. On the more recent camping weekend I was told by the owners that they are not yet sure what to do with the buildings. As, in Robert Southey's words in his poem The Ruined Cottage, "I pass this ruin'd dwelling oftentimes, and think of other days" I hope that these relics of a Romantic poets vision, loaded with memories of unrealised dreams, will continue to bear quiet witness to the layered landscape that they survey.  
  

This is the latest in a regular-occasional series of posts on specific landscapes and places that are particularly meaningful to me, for whatever reason; after all, interest in the topographical is nothing without a feeling for sense of place: genius loci.

Previous 'Landscape in particular' posts:

The Uffington White Horse and Wayland’s Smithy

Harburton: Devon and Tierra del Fuego
Hergest Ridge

Worth Valley

Cold Ashton

Kenilworth Castle

Bolton Abbey

References

Bradney, J, 1907. History of Monmouthshire Vol. 1 Part 2a: Hundred of Abergavenny (Part 1). Academy.

Colvin, S, 1881. English Men of Letters: Landor. MacMillan.

Craster, O, 1963. Guide to Llanthony Priory. Her Majesty’s Stationary Office.

Evans D et al, 1980. Excavations at Llanthony Priory, Gwent, 1978 in Monmouthshire Antiquity 4, p5-43.

Fancourt, L, undated. Llanthony Priory: History and guide. Leaflet.

Gerald of Wales (Giraldus), 1978. The Journey through Wales/ The Description of Wales (Trans. Thorpe L). Penguin.

Sinclair, I, 2002. Landor's Tower or the Imaginary Conversations. Granta.