MORNING SERIAL

HOME THE Taff Valley narrows as the river runs down from Merthyr. By the time the river has flowed five miles, and reached the sibling villages of Aberfan and Merthyr Vale, the valley floor can be crossed in a five-minute walk, and the mountain sides rise steep on either side.

The closeness of each mountain narrows the sky and restricts any direct sunlight that might reach the villages; the shadow of one mountain delaying the dawn, and the shadow of the other hastening the sunset.

Today this valley is verdant and looks unspoiled, even though in reality barely a square foot of it has not been turned over, tunnelled into or had coal waste heaped upon it. It is a man-made landscape, softened now by nature.

In my childhood this landscape looked different. It smelled different. It even sounded different.

Like all the valleys in this part of the South Wales coalfield, the Taff Valley runs roughly north to south.

It is capped in the north by the town of Merthyr Tydfil and terminates in the south with the village of Quakers Yard; barely more than a dozen miles from top to bottom.

The lie of the land has always dictated the shape of anything that man has wanted to build here, and the villages of Aberfan and Merthyr Vale are no exception.

When the Merthyr Vale Colliery was first sunk in 1869, the Victorian engineers were forced to divert the river in order to reclaim enough level ground to establish a pit head.

In those days a colliery of that sort of scale might employ more than two thousand men, and there was an urgent need to provide housing for the new workforce and their families.

Houses were thrown up quickly, in the cheapest and easiest way possible.

This is why the two villages have the “linear” shape so common in south Wales, with long terraces of houses following the contours of the ground, spooling out from the pit, and aligned roughly north to south.