Letter from Wales

Lord, when they kill me, let the job be thorough
And carried out inside that county borough
Known as Merthyr, in Glamorganshire,
A town easy enough to cast a slur
Upon, I grant. Some cyclopean ball
Or barn-dance, some gigantic free-for-all,
You’d guess, had caused her ruins, and those slums –
Frightening enough, I’ve heard, to daunt the bums…

Thus Glyn Jones in a love letter (though you might not suspect that) to his birthplace. Perhaps with an outing in prospect, I bought the Landranger 160 ‘Brecon Beacons/Bannau Brycheiniog’ Ordnance Survey map, probably soon after it was reprinted in 1996. Spread out, it promises well-scattered villages, a couple of small towns and as much high, open country as you could wish to view in in a day – apart from the bottom right-hand corner, which is largely occupied by the urban-industrial sprawl, here a relative term, of Merthyr Tydfil, current population 58,000. The town’s name celebrates the martyrdom of Tydfil, one of the many daughters of the legendary fourth-century king Brychan Brycheiniog, who gives his name to the mountains and the neighbouring county. About the middle of the nineteenth century it was boasted to be the ‘iron capital of the world’.

Close examination reveals a minor road leading east from the town centre, through Twynyrodyn, where, as we know from Meic Stephens’s poem, half wild mountain ponies would come down to the streets in winter for shelter and hand-outs. Thereafter the road dwindles, climbing and narrowing, past Ffos-y-Fran (‘Crows’ Ditch’) before splaying out in minor routes over ...