Ghost village, wiped out by the might of a moving mountain
A former resident of Godre’r Graig recalls growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, and how her family and others were forced to leave their homes due to the constant threat of landslides which claimed their village. Geraint Thomas takes a walk back in time...
ON THE surface it’s just a wooded walk along a secluded stretch of Upper Swansea Valley hillside, but look more closely and the signs are there.
How many footpaths are this broad and have pavements on either side?
Look more closely and you will see steps leading up through a gap in the stone walls disappearing into a sea of bramble-choked undergrowth, a stretch of rusting wrought-iron railings and a stranded gatepost with no gate to cradle.
Now and then crumbling, ivy-clad retaining walls peep out at you, and the odd fragment of a building leaves you in no doubt that this was once a built-up area.
In fact, the route is part of Graig Road, which runs between Godre’r Graig and Ystalyfera, and was once part of the main highway between Swansea and Brecon... until the mountain had its say in the matter.
Go back half a century and children would be playing in the street, smoke would rise from the chimneys of rows of houses and men would till the soil in their vegetable gardens.
One person who knows this only too well is Rosalyn Davies, who grew up in the area before the mountain decided to step in.
Having agreed to lead my walk, she says: “There was a whole community here; this was my home, and always will be my home. There must have been around 100 houses lost in all.
“It’s an awful thing; you not only lose a house, you lose a home. I had happy times here; it was a fabulous place to grow up as a child.
“When I walk along today memories come flooding back, but at least they are happy memories. It is also very sad as well. We lost a community. People scattered.
“Today it’s a ghost village; it’s quite eerie, as I remember it as it was. It’s sad. So very sad. It was a very happy community. Very close-knitted.”
Memories of the place resurfaced for Mrs Davies following the most recent landslip in the area which saw families ordered to leave their homes for their own safety.
Mrs Davies knows the feeling only too well as it happened to her family not once, but twice.
She says: “When I was eight or nine we lived in Church Road and I can remember the mountain coming down.”
It was the first major landslide to hit the area in living memory.
The 69-year-old says: “I can remember hearing a noise and walking out the front door and seeing a double-decker bus reversing back down the hill; the driver was turning up and all the mud was coming to meet him.
“We were fortunate that we didn’t have a gate in the wall at the back of our garden, next door wasn’t so lucky and it went right through the house. It took a long time to clean it all up.”
Not wanting to remain in the shadow of the landslide, the family moved a short distance to Graig Road but the mountain, it would appear, followed them.
Mrs Davies says: “A few years later we moved to a bungalow on Graig Road but we eventually had to move out again because there were huge cracks in the road. When we started hearing the mountain move in the night we thought ‘it’s time for us to go’.
“It broke my heart having to move but you could hear what sounded like fine stones trickling down the mountainside. It wasn’t good.
“I was quite scared, but being a little girl, it was also quite an adventure.”
As we walk Mrs Davies, who has been a local councillor for many years, points out the ghosts of demolished buildings – the Bird in the Hand pub, “where the wall is now”, then The Golden Lion and “opposite was the Workingmen’s Club”.
Next “there was a Pentecostal church, Peniel, on the mountainside and over there was the billiard hall”.
A butchers, a fish and chip shop and a shop “that made its own ice cream and ice lollies, where we went for the gossip” and rows of forgotten houses where the excited shouts of long-gone childhood friends still float in the air for Mrs Davies.
She says: “When it happened they were scattered everywhere – some were sent down to Trebanos, and they never came back to the area.
“I lost quite a lot of school friends because they moved away. They had to move; they didn’t have a choice.”
The way ahead becomes blocked to any vehicles with a wall that resembles a Second World War tank trap.
She says: “This was once the main road from Swansea to Brecon. When the mountain came down and there were huge cracks in the road, they stopped the buses. It was still the only road until the bypass was built on the valley floor. It’s been there over 50 years and is still called the new road.”
Other memories come back, the gravity of which still makes her shudder.
She says: “I remember one woman, Gwynneth, had been preparing food in the kitchen and she walked into the living-room and by the time she went back in the kitchen the mountain had come down and into it.”
We pass the site of the former home of the Ystalyfera Public Band and another memory tumbles out.
She says: “I remember them telling me that the window frames in The Bird in the Hand were all offkilter and you couldn’t throw a straight dart because the floor was sloping so much.”
And when we reach another, she says: “In 1965, on a Sunday afternoon, Lewis Jenkins and his family were told to move out; they had only just left the house and it collapsed into the ground and buried a council lorry in the process. It’s still down there somewhere today.
“My sister and her fiancé were out walking lower down the valley and they actually saw the house disappear.”
As we near the end of our 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 says: “What can you do? There’s no choice. It wasn’t safe to be there. I suppose for those who actually owned their homes there must have been some resentment as you are talking about losing money.
“I know exactly how they feel. But you can’t risk people’s lives.”
Turning for one last look before climbing in her car, she sighs: “I only wish I could come back and it could be as it was. But that is impossible of course.”
Ystalyfera councillor Alun Richards, who also grew up in the area, meets us at the end of the walk.
He adds: “There’s a history of landslides here going back many centuries.
“It is a moving mountain. It’s probably down to 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. The mine working probably exacerbated them.”