Because of landslides
to walking home, I don’t know whether someone had taken the signs away, he fell into the ditch. He broke his leg and was down there overnight.”
Near the end of the walk, Mrs Davies reflects once more on what she has lost but is pragmatic enough to know that the evacuation was the right course of action.
She said: “What can you do? There’s no choice. It wasn’t safe to be there; let’s be honest about it.”
Turning for one last look before climbing in her car, she sighed: “I only wish I could come back and it could be as it was. It broke my heart having to move; it left me unsettled for a long time. But that is impossible of course; it’s just something you have to live with.”
Ystalyfera councillor Alun Llewelyn, who also grew up in the area, arrived at the end of the walk. He said: “There’s a history of landslides here going back many centuries.
Of the probable cause of it all, he said: “It is a moving mountain. It’s probably down to a number of things. There are springs, old mine workings and quarries. Of course when the mines closed the pumps would have been switched off and the workings filled with water. So there is a lot of water pressure underground.
“You do get other areas of landslides around the South Wales coalfield but there are also a number of natural geological faults around here. The mine working probably exacerbated them and when houses were built on the hillside – in those days homes were built close to the mines where people worked.”
Gareth Roderick, now 79, was brought up on Graig Road and has lived there all my life. He too recalls the house belonging to Lewis Jenkins, disappearing.
He says: “There was a quarry and a spring on the hillside behind the house a few doors away and the pipes became blocked and the water came down.
“It caused the mountain to come down and it pushed the house over. It came very quietly. It had been squeezing against the house all morning. There was no noise at all. It then came down over the road.
“There was a lorry parked outside moving the furniture out and that was buried.”
Such a sight would be alarming to most of us but Mr Roderick didn’t panic.
He says: “I wasn’t scared; I have lived here all my life and knew what was going on. There was a family living next door to us who had only been here a few months and they scarpered.”
When they road became unsafe a few years later Mr Roderick believed he knew the cause.
He says: “Then there was subsidence on the road. There had been a colliery underneath years ago and we also used to get lorries carrying huge coils of steel from the works in Llanelli rumbling past every morning on their way to Birmingham. The windows used to shake when they went past. It was that and the subsidence caused by the mine working that made the road unstable.”