‘What is this place? What is in it? What is its nature? How should men live in it? What must I do? I have not found the answers, though I believe that in partial and fragmentary ways they have begun to come to me.’ Wendell Berry, A Native Hill (1969)
Our journey is in its very early stages. Alongside learning about trees and woodlands, we have two main strands that we are pursuing: to discover the history of the land; to observe what we have got to create a scientific baseline. These will form the basis of our woodland plan.
Timeline
Pre-1800s
Fields: Moorland inclosed in north, woodland assarted in south. Mixed farming: pasture for dairy, meadow, arable, wood; some arable fields pared & burned. South farm (Ty-Isaf) was mixed farming but north farm (Cwm Garnant) may have only been dairy.
Woods: Mediaeval hedgerows. Older wood in valley (ash, oak); older oaks in open patch in southern valley where fields were alternately arable or woodland pasture (Coed Cae).
Other: Footpaths. Holloway and clawdd constructed.
1800s
Fields: Meadow and pasture in north, mixed rotational in south. Basic drainage implemented in both farms, but more extensive system towards south.
Woods: Oak grove planted, hedgerows naturally generated on banks.
Other: Mining (before 1830s), railway (1841).
1900 – 1950s
Fields: Meadow and pasture in north, mixed farming in south. More drainage ditches.
Other: Mining (to 1949), tramway (1904 – 1935), Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen branch railway (before 1914).
1950s – 1980s
Fields: Specialization in farming, with pigs in north and dairy in south.
Woods: Grey squirrels (c. 1960s).
Other: Tramway lifted; Royal Observer Corps nuclear bunker.
1983 – 1994
Fields: The two farms merged for dairy.
Woods: Encroachment from hedges and old trees (birch, blackthorn, hazel, oak, willow) into fields.
1995 – 2015
Fields: Dairy (1995 – 2001); Sheep (2001 – 2015). Dairy herd culled in foot and mouth crisis in 2001.
Other: Railway tracks lifted in south but remain in north.
2016
Fields: Land sold. Farming, grazing and mowing ends.
2017 – 2021
Woods: New trees planted in fields for carbon sequestration: alder in north, mixed native (alder, birch, oak, others) in south. Disease and invasive species: ash dieback amongst older trees, Himalayan balsam along Bryncethin Road, Japanese knotweed near to railway.
Other: Mineral railway ceased operations (2021) and both railway cuts will become a cycle path.
The landscape has been shaped by people and resonates with their patient labour, trees cleared, ditches cut, and banks built, streams straightened, fields ploughed, planted and harvested, and cows bred, nurtured, and milked, etc., etc.
The land was farmed on a small scale (40 – 50 acres per farm) for centuries, but maybe not for millennia; then again, most of Wales has been cultivated at some point in the distant past. It was always relatively poor land, marginal, low productivity farmland.
The fields to the south were part of Ty-isaf Farm, which is now on the other side of the railway cut in Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen. These fields were farmed as mixed farmland and woodland in the early nineteenth century. Its field boundaries have an ancient structure, so follow the shape of the land, are concave and flow outwards from Ty-isaf Farm and seem to extend into the neighbouring farm, Bryn-cethen-bâch. It is unknown how Ty-isaf was farmed in the 20th century, except that it had some pigs in the 1940s; however, it could have been similar to Ty-mawr, a neighbouring farm, i.e., a dairy farm with pigs, hens and horses, with its land a mix of pasture, meadow and wood.
The fields to the north, adjoining Bryncethin Road, belonged to Cwm Garnant Farm, which was originally in Garnant itself and included land in the valley heading towards Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen. However, with the advent of coalmining and the railways, the farm was reduced in size when the railway was built, and a new farmhouse was built in the early twentieth century northeast of the woodland. It was a dairy farm (pasture and meadow) in the 1840s, with all the fields in today’s wood, meadow. Unlike Ty-isaf, these fields have a modern shape with straight edges and may have been privately inclosed from moor in the early nineteenth century.
Whereas the current cowshed is modern (breezeblocks from around the 1960s), a building has been here since at least the 1840s, suggesting this farm was dairy in the early nineteenth century. The old steading was larger in 1906 and linked to the open drainage system, so the dairy herd could have been larger then. During the mid-20th century, Cwm Garnant was a pig farm, then in the 1980s returned to dairy again.
We can only imagine the stress as other farms became bigger, fields larger, herds larger, farmers investing in new technologies for economies of scale, and farm labour drifting to the cities, while supermarkets pushed prices ever lower. Perhaps to align with this, the two farms were merged in 1983 when the owner of Cwm Garnant purchased most of Ty-isaf’s land and specialised on dairy.
However, this meant perhaps that there was too much debt, which the family struggled to service, and because everyone in the family had to work on the farm (including his wife), as most farm labourers had moved away, this may have increased family tensions. So, family breakdown resulted and the land that now comprises the woodland was sold in 1994 but continued to be farmed for dairy until 2001 when the herd was culled during the foot and mouth outbreak. After this, it was likely rented out for sheep farming before being abandoned in c. 2015. It was sold in 2016 and trees were planted.
Agricultural improvement appears basic and limited to open drainage in an attempt to dry the ground, ‘paring and burning’ the peaty topsoil in some of the fields in Ty-isaf and burning rank vegetation (mainly purple moor grass) in the fields near Bryncethin Road (Waunfain, Waunygarnant). Beyond this, there is no evidence of anything else, specifically the low soil fertility (phosphates) gives no hint of any significant use of agrochemicals during the ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1950s; furthermore, soil samples taken in 2022 did not reveal traces of common pesticides or heavy metals, suggesting agrochemical residues may not be present at all.
There may have been limited rotation of the fields in Ty-isaf in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: after ‘paring and burning’, perhaps, four ‘white’ crops (barley, oats, wheat and maybe potatoes), then four years pasture, one year fallow, repeat. However, the application of scientific method is unlikely to have been extensive.
Nevertheless, the fields that were ‘pared and burned’ now have depleted topsoil, with no more than 20 cm of thin, dry and unproductive topsoil. Because of the degradation of the topsoil, at some point in the twentieth century, these fields became no longer suitable for arable, so were turned over to permanent grassland and mixed rotational farming was stopped. Perhaps, this was why the fields were merged with Cwm Garnant in the 1980s.
The 1849 Tithes Maps show the field shapes are largely unchanged, except that the larger inclosed fields have been divided into smaller fields, going against the trend for small fields to be combined to create bigger, more economic fields over time. The field names in 1849 were, as recorded in Welsh together with my translations:
Ty-isaf: Lowest Farmhouse
Cwm Garnant: Garnant Valley
Most of the land was then, like now, wet moorland; waun or gwaun means moor, moorland field or wet meadow. In the 1840s, 91% of the land was farmed. 4 of the fields (9 modern compartments) were moor, comprising 26 acres or 53%. The better fields were recorded as cae, i.e., fields, and were 20 acres or 38%. The remaining 9% was wood.
About 2015, the land was sheep grazing, and the woods had doubled to about 18% of the farmland, with the remaining 82% grassland split 50% to moor and 32% to meadow.
There has not been much wood in the landscape for a long time, except the valley to the northeast which was still woodland in the early nineteenth century, but it is a moot point as to how wooded it was in the past. There is no current evidence of ancient forest (pre-1500) but many of the trees and patches of trees are clearly very old, for example the inaccessible areas on the steep banks near the waterfall are unlikely to have been managed.
The Romans and the Normans considered Wales heavily wooded, but this may have been more of a military view than an ecological one. Excavations on Betws hills suggest the valley was quite wooded in the fifth and sixth centuries, with local trees being alder, birch, blackthorn, hazel, and oak. In the early mediaeval period, the woodland was in Glynamman Forest, but this was more likely a wasteland of moor and trees for hunting and subject to Forest Law as opposed to the modern idea of a wooded forest.
Although some of the land was moor with a thin scattering of trees, the farmland was mostly made by cutting down denser woodland. Indeed, there is evidence from maps of the woods in the valley being assarted during the nineteenth century, and some of the field names suggest a woodland origin: Coed Cae[1], Cae Carkit and (perhaps) Cae Newydd, which translate as Woodland Field, Deerwood Field, and New Field. If these fields are regarded as former woodland, the proportion of wood was at least one-quarter of the land within a wet moorland landscape.
There are a grove and lots of hedges. There is a grove of pendunculate oaks on the knoll in Waungroes that, because sessile oak is natural here, may have been planted rather than self-sown.[2] There are three types of hedges here: trees remaining after woods were assarted; banks alongside the ditches where trees have naturally grown on top; trees that have self-seeded along the edges of ditches that have no banks[3].
The trees alongside drainage ditches are younger as they have grown beside the newer drains. Most of the hedges are earth banks with trees on top. The banks are of varying heights and widths, and some are cased with stone, called a clawdd[4]. Some have a single ditch while others have two ditches. Most hedges were coppiced but have now been allowed to grow into full-sized trees. Along Bryncethin Road, they may have been laid as a hedge; this is now flailed by a tractor hedge cutter every year, but if it was a traditional double Carmarthenshire hedge would have been laid every 5 – 7 years.
The fields have been planted with new trees for carbon capture under the Glastir Scheme. This is a modern function for woodland that aims to tackle climate change by using the natural processes of trees to fix atmospheric carbon into cellulose and lignin in their tissues. At the same time, the wood could address biodiversity loss, but this is a more complex discourse. Generally, though, woods are currently valued for ecological services as well as for their timber.
[1] Ty-mawr’s field names, just south of the wood, include Coed Cae Isaf, Coed Cae Mawr, Coed Cae Bach, Coed Cae Mawr Isaf, and Wood. These names suggest another 17 acres of ‘woodland grazing’ to the south, giving a possible wood of over 20 acres. The field called Wood is now listed as Ancient Woodland.
[2] John Phillips recalls in his memoirs that “We would walk past Ty Isha, take a look at the pig, and then go up to a clump of trees we would call for some reason 'The Woods' where we could dig for a type of groundnut.” I think this refers to this grove of pendunculate oaks. Reference: A Journey through the Waun of my Childhood by John Phillips (rootsweb.com).
[3] Earlier ditches are deeper, usually double with a bank in the middle, which is often faced with stone (a clawdd), but later ditches are shallow, single ditches without banks.
[4] A clawdd (plural: cloddiau) is a traditional earthen bank, faced with stone to protect it from wear and tear from stock and erosion and collected from stones in nearby fields. This differs from a drystone wall with earth within it.
Before the railways and cars opened the fells up, folk walked. The landscape was crisscrossed with pathways that mostly went uphill from steppingstones that crossed the rivers and becks, with a smaller number of paths going along the valley. Paths followed the contours of the landscape, wending and winding their ways up and down the fells, coming up from the river, or from the farmhouses to their farmland. There are no paths on Cwm Garnant, perhaps because these were erased during inclosure, but there are traces of footpaths on Ty-isaf.
There were two ‘main’ roads that went from Garnant and Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen over the farmland and into the Betws hills. The first is Bryncethin Road which is now a road. The second is the holloway, which is now a public footpath. These may be of ancient origin: Bryncethin Road has a species-rich hedgerow that runs along the western edge of the wood; the public footpath has been bounded by two cloddiau.
The patient hard work that was needed to build the banks and clear the stones from the fields to face the earthen banks gives us pause for thought. Like the deep drainage ditches, these may be commonplace pieces of civil engineering but the more I find these stretches I am in awe of folk’s labour, hard work and patience in making them.
The holloway began east of Ty-isaf at the weir on the Garnant, then passed south of the farmhouse and went west to where the public footpath is today. Whereas its eastern end was removed when the railway was built, a short section still runs for 100 m in a hollow halfway up the hill, before disappearing where the public footpath carries on as a track through Waungroes.
In the 1840s, the holloway was slightly to the south of the current path in Waungroes, below its southern boundary; it was rediscovered in 2022 and, while broken in places, parts of its northern clawdd can still be found on the edges of Cae Newydd Uchaf and Cae Newydd. The holloway with both cloddiau can be found just west of the entrance to Cae Newydd, but these were clearly abandoned as too wet and the footpath moved several yards to the north.
In the nineteenth century, the holloway turned into a track that connected Ty-isaf to its partner farm, Blaen-y-garnant. Physical remains of this can be found in the wood in Coed Cae, as well as on older maps, where the path clearly turns south into Coed Cae, but no evidence has yet been found of a footpath linking the holloway to this path.
At the northern end of Cae Biettin, there is a footpath in the hillside in a dip. This splits into two and both branches went down the hill into a field that had been assarted from the wood in the valley, then at least one of the paths would have continued down the hill to the Garnant, where it would have crossed the stream. However, the sections to the river and the assarted field were removed when the railway cut was excavated.
There was, also, a footpath that began at a crossing over the Garnant north of Ty-isaf. It went west up the hillside by the beck, before crossing the tip of Cae Carkit and west over Waunfach, then probably joined the holloway in the fields near Bryncethen Cottage, to the west of the woodland. So far, no physical evidence has been found of these tracks.
With the Industrial Revolution, most of these footpaths stopped being used and were replaced by the railway, the tramway, and roads as people’s means of transport.
Today, a new track wends its way from Bryncethin Road to the public footpath following the natural shape of the land. It was perhaps created after the Hamer’s bought the farmland, as they would only have had access onto their land via a gate on the main road. We have kept it as it was on acquisition, except for a slight tweak in Waunygarnant where we have moved it slightly to the west and so it now cuts through the willow carr.
The land is in a space shaped by the Industrial Revolution. The geology is the South Wales Coal Measures and the ground almost leaks coal, and there is, also, a seam of iron ore that crosses the land. Bryncethen (or Bryncethin) translates as Black or Dark Hill, which may refer to its coaly character, and pollution from coalmining and industry meant the Garnant used to run black, so was locally called Nant Ddu (Black Beck) in the recent past.[1]
The Tramway that cuts northeast across Cwm Garnant was constructed in 1904 from coaly soil. it was built to transport coal from the Cawdor pit at the base of Cwmhelen to the ‘old’ mineral railway line in the valley. Coal wagons were winched up the slope to the mine, then wound down under gravity. Cawdor mine operated 1894 – 1935, after which the Private Siding Agreement was terminated. Charles and David James from Cwm Garnant worked at the pit in 1921, when about 500 men worked there, 410 working below ground and the rest above ground.
Most of the tramway has been removed from the fields between Cawdor pit and the old railway line, but a short 125 m section still exists on the woodland. It runs from the south of Waunygarnant to the Triangle. There are, also, several iron tramway tracks that have been discarded in the Triangle. Soil samples of the Triangle taken in December 2022 had low levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, e.g. dibenz(ah)anthracene; these are likely derived from the small pieces of coal that were used to build the Tramway, which runs to the south and the eastern edge of the sample area.
The land has been extensively mined beneath Cwm Garnant and the southeast corner near Quarry Place. Shallow mining was carried out in the north end of Waunfach in 1871, but most of the coalmining was deeper underground accessed from shafts in the valley at Garnant pit (around Cawdor House now) or later through adits in the hillside towards the northeast.
Garnant pit operated 1858 – 1914 but may have been mined from the 1830s. There was a terrible accident at Garnant pit in 1884 when it was known locally as Pwll Perkins (Perkins Pit); 10 men died when the rope holding the cage to take them down the shaft broke. In 1911, Charles James of Cwm Garnant was a timberman in the pit.
The seam to the southeast near Quarry Place was mined in 1910 but it is unclear how this was accessed.
Across Bryncethin Road, the land towards Glanaman is now green grassland. However, this is a reconstructed landscape that was all opencast mined 1988 – 1993. Some of the land has become Garnant Golf Course, the rest is farmland. The fields are very different from those on the woodland – big and with straight edges. They are green and uniform and stretch from the road to the golf course.
Running slightly north of the woodland, the railway has shaped the landscape. Before the railways were built, the valley was a remote farming community of scattered farms called Cwmaman (Amman Valley) with about 40 households living here. The railway opened the valley up to the transport of coal from its pits, so creating the mining industry, and allowed people to travel down to Llanelli and Swansea. Later, roads and motor transport further opened the area up, but around the same time the trains stopped carrying people, and then the mines closed.
The first railway line into the area began in 1835 and went from Llanelli to Pantyffynnon, then branched into Amman valley, reaching here by 1841 with the building of stations at Glanaman and Garnant. This established these settlements as physical entities. The line continued via Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen to Brynaman to the east, where you could take a different line down to Swansea. These tracks were slightly to the north of the railway cut and were where the Private Siding Agreement connected the tramway to the rail network.
Later, a new line was planned by Great Western Railway to go slightly to the south of the original line, cutting through Bryncethen at Cwm Garnant, then curving to the southeast along the edge of Ty-isaf, before continuing down to Swansea. Work began before WW1 and the cutting was excavated along the northeast edge of the farmland and track laid to Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen, but work was halted by the war.
After the war, in the late 1920s, work restarted on the branch heading south by Ty-isaf, but this never became operational and, while a new railway station was built, it never opened. Together, these took out some fields and the woods in the valley, cut Ty-isaf off from its fields and a bridge was built to give access to its land, and part of Cae Mawr was dug out and the two original fields (Cae Canol and Cae Mawr) were combined to make a new, bigger field.
The East Pit at Brynaman, the last local mine, closed in 2021 and the mineral railway northeast of Cwm Garnant, which had transported some of its coal, ceased operations at the same time. Although the two railway paths may be used again in the future and remain owned by Network Rail, they are being converted into cycle paths and will be maintained by the local councils.
[1] There is a beck to the north called Nant Du, but this is a feeder into the Garnant. In his memoirs, James Tait wrote that in the 1940s ‘it flowed ice cold and crystal clear, but it became black and polluted and blackened as it passed the colliery’ but which stream he was referring to is unclear.
Nuclear Bunker
A curious remnant of the landscape’s past is at the eastern edge of Cae Mawr, right beside the railway cut, where there are the concrete remains of a nuclear bunker. This was the Amman Valley Royal Observation Corps Post, which operated 1959 – 1991, but is likely to have developed from an observation point used during WW2. Its purpose was to give warning of approaching aircraft and of possible nuclear attacks, then to monitor radioactivity levels after any explosions.
It would only have been manned during exercises and high levels of nuclear threat, i.e., the Cuban missile crisis (1962) and heightened tensions in the early 1980s.
Because it has been sealed, it is unknown what condition the monitoring post is in below ground.
Families
There are three families associated with the land, two landed families and a working-class family – these are classic working-class farms that were owned by landed gentry until the early twentieth century.
The James family moved from Glamorgan to work in the mines, renting the farm to enable them to continue farming. At first, they rented it from the Stepney estate, which was in the hands of William Chambers at the time. In 1906, Charles James bought the land and built the new Cwm Garnant farmhouse. Since then, it has remained in the same family for four generations; they initially worked in the local coalmines and farmed on the side, then when the mines closed farmed the land but struggled to make a living. In 1983, the James family bought the land of Ty-isaf and combined the two farms, but, following his divorce, he sold the farmland in 1994 and the farm on 2022.
The two farms were owned by local gentry, Cwm Garnant by the Stepney estate, who were baronets and lived in Llanelli (Carmarthenshire), and Ty-isaf by a branch of the Mansel family, descendants of the Mansels of Muddlescombe (Carmarthenshire) and related to the Mansels of Margam (Port Talbot).
The Stepneys originally lived in London and St Albans but built their fortune in the sixteenth century when Alban Stepney became Receiver-General for the Bishop of St David’s, a relation of his, then married two rich heiresses. Although starting in Pembrokeshire, they switched their property interests to Carmarthenshire in the eighteenth century, owning and developing much of modern Llanelli, and had many industrial interests.
Sir John Stepney (who died in 1811) was a notorious gambler and rake; he never married but had numerous affairs and several illegitimate children. Through his complex will, William Chambers, one of his illegitimate children, inherited the Stepney estate, developed their properties, and was involved in the industrial growth of Llanelli. The families of Sir John’s sisters spent years challenging the will, then when William Chambers died in 1857, and, after some further wrangling, the Carmarthenshire estate passed to the heirs of his sister, the Cowells. In 1906, the Cowell-Stepneys sold Cwm Garnant farm to the James family.
The Stepneys and the Mansels were indirectly related: John Stepney (seventeenth century) married Jane Mansel of Muddlescombe. In the nineteenth century, Ty-isaf was owned by Colonel Mansel-Pleydell, who was, also, descended from the Mansels of Muddlescombe. His grandson, Algernon Mansel, sold Ty-isaf in 1920.
Edgeland & Mythology
This is edgeland, although this has become blurred through time. The border was between the Demetae and the Silures, Welsh-Wales and English-Wales, between Carmarthenshire and Glamorgan (now Neath Port Talbot). The borders move but are roughly where the Garnant river is, or along the top of the hill on the border with Pen-Rhiw and Cwm Garnant farms then southeast along the brow of the hill until the third stream where it goes north down the slope to Garnant river. The border in Garnant river is the county boundary and the other stream the parish boundary.
Essentially, the Betws hills is a boundary between Welsh-Wales and English-Wales and has been disputed through battles. Indeed, it is roughly here that the Norman invasion into Wales halted.[1] An example is recorded in ‘Brut y Tywysogion’ for 1094, when it is said that the Normans were slain by the Welsh at Celli Carnant, which resembles the farm called Gelli Fawr on the banks of the Garnant, near the boundary with the French in the Gower.[2]
This hints at an alternative meaning for Garnant. Garnant is usually translated as ‘rough beck’, with ‘garw’ meaning ‘rough’ and ‘nant’ beck. However, a less well-known derivation is ‘deer stream’, where the water was originally ‘Carnant’, and ‘carw’ is a stag or deer. What adds some weight to this alternative is one field was recorded as Cae Carkit in the 1849 Tithes Map, which may be a phonetic spelling for ‘car coet’ or ‘deer wood’. This seems a more likely interpretation than ‘rough wood’ or ‘gar coet’.
Naming places for animals is a Welsh tradition. For example, the valley is Cwmaman, or the Amman valley. Amman is said to mean ‘young boar’ and was originally the name of the hill beside the valley. This is linked with the Arthurian legend of The Hunt of the Twrch Trwyth, where the evil boar was chased through the Amman valley. The river is claimed to have the shape of how a boar snuffles through the undergrowth, twisting and turning, so the random walk of a young boar.
Arthur is, also, said to have stopped to remove a stone from his shoe on the flat rock above Brunant Farm, near Grenig Road.
Returning to the name of the wood there is a much more tentative derivation. ‘Carw’ (deer) could be a Welsh retranslation of the original Celtic ‘derw’ (oak), where this had become Anglicized as ‘deer wood’ then translated back into Welsh in a sort of Chinese whispers game. If so, this suggests the valley was an old oak wood which, itself, is not implausible, even if somewhat speculative.
Banc Cwmhelen, meaning Bank of Helen Valley, may refer to St Elen (St Helen) or the road named after her, Sarn Helen. Elen lived in the fourth century, might have been the wife of Magnus Maximus, Emperor of Rome 383 – 388, and helped introduce Celtic Christianity into Wales. She is credited with getting roads built in Wales to help move troops around so is the patron saint of roads; the main route from Caernarfon to Carmarthen is called Sarn Helen. As an aside, on St Elen and roads, I wonder whether she did build roads or whether it is the conflation of her name with the Welsh for road, heol – not sure that it matters how exactly it became linked?
[1] Southwest of Coed Cae, one of the fields belonging to Blaen Garnant Uchaf is called Cae Disgwylfa, which means ‘Look Out Point Field’. This suggests that here was borderland, perhaps reiver country.
[2] ‘1094: The ensuing year William, son of Baldwin, died, who founded the Castle of Rhydy Gors [at Carmarthen], by the command of the King of England. And then the Britons of Brecheiniog, Gwent, and Gwenllws resisted the domination of the French. And then the French directed an army against Gwent, but empty, and without having gained anything, they retreated; and in returning back they were slain by the Britons, in the place called Celli Carnant. After that the French raised an army against the Britons, meditating the devastation of the country; without being able to fulfil their intention, on returning back, they were cut off by the sons of Idnerth, son of Cadwgon, Gruffud and Ivor, in a place called Aber Llech. And the inhabitants remained in their houses, confiding fearlessly, though the castles were yet entire, and the garrisons on them.’
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