HILLSIDE’S MAKEOVER
GREEN RETURN FROM INDUSTRIAL PAST
The hill was lit up from end to end like a big Christmas tree. The Germans were after the docks, but dropped all their bombs on Kilvey Hill instead - Mike Lewis
TODAY, the slopes of Kilvey Hill, which looms over the eastern side of Swansea, are cloaked in lush green vegetation.
It’s a place enjoyed by hundreds of residents and visitors who trek to the summit to enjoy panoramic views right across the city and Swansea Bay.
On a clear day you can see as far as the Brecon Beacons.
When half of the hillside went up in flames which raged through the night on Thursday, May 17, people looked on, distraught.
Yet there was a time when Kilvey Hill was a place where no trees grew at all. In fact, just 60 years ago, the entire hill was a barren and toxic wasteland, where children played in abandoned mine workings, returning with knees blackened by carbon.
For thousands of years, Kilvey Hill has stood guard over Swansea. If it could talk, it would tell of the rise of the city, from the very first Iron Age forts, to Copperopolis and the Industrial Revolution. It survived the heavy industry and World War Two bombings. It was ravaged by fires in the 1970s. No doubt, it will recover from the latest fires too.
For Kilvey Hill is more than a monument to the heavy industry of the past. It is a monument to the work of many people who came together in the 1960s to rebuild the valley of Swansea and bring the green back to the valley long after the industry had deserted.
Before the Industrial Revolution, Kilvey Hill was a fertile place where farming flourished and crops of corn grew in abundance. In the 1600s, Bussy Mansell Esq. built a watermill called New Mill on what would later become the site of the Dyffryn Steel and Tinplate Works. Although the mill was beyond the wastes of the Llanerch Heath and quite some distance from Kilvey Hill today, the farm to the south is still known as Kilvey Mount.
It was built to process the tonnes of corn harvested off the hill and surrounding farmland.
In less than 200 years, however, it was not farming that Swansea was famous for; it was copper. By the early 1800s as much as half of the world’s copper was smelted in the lower Swansea valley. In 1806 the Grenfell family, who owned part of the copperworks, built rows of terrace cottages along the lower slopes to house the hundreds of workers and their families.
The Grenfell copper works flourished, employing around 800 people. Families lived on the banks at Foxhole and also in Grenfell Town at Pentrechwyth, in streets called Llewellyn Row, Lamb Row, Prospect Row, Pleasant Row, Jericho Row and Jericho Gardens, Owens Row and Fullers Row.
But while Swansea boomed, the natural landscape paid a heavy price. Thanks to the processing of iron ore, copper, zinc, arsenic and lead, along with the numerous coal mines, the land, air and water were heavily polluted. The roasting and melting processes produced mountains of slag and furnace ash, and billowing clouds of foulsmelling smoke that was laced with sulphur and arsenic.
Kilvey Hill did not escape. The once-flourishing fertile farmland gave way to toxic wasteland. Nothing grew. The corn fields that once supplied the Kilvey Mill were so poisoned the crops failed. In 20 years the oak, the ash, the sycamore, and the hawthorn had all died. It was “as barren as a road”.
In 1832 a group of 11 farmers from the lower Swansea Valley took the master of the copperworks to court in what was known as The Great Copper Trial. Their case for “public nuisance” against John Henry Vivian was a classic one, pitting farmer against townsman and Welsh-speaking Welshmen against the English copper-masters and their English and Anglo-welsh supporters. It was to prove a hopelessly one-sided fight.
The farmers said the smoke had made their cattle lame and unable to eat. Smoke elongated their teeth and made them “grow over one another”. Horses were similarly affected, their teeth finally blackening and decaying.
One farmer, Richard Bowen, testified that after the enlargement of the Hafod works the bones of his cattle became brittle and their ribs broke; lumps as big as fists appeared on their knees and leg joints, and their hooves “grew wild”. Unable to stand, the cattle fed lying down or on their knees. None had milk.
The farmers lost their case, and industry continued to ravage the lower Swansea Valley for another 150 years. More families arrived and set up home in the rows of terrace cottages at the bottom of Kilvey Hill.
The hillside was a playground for children in the 1900s. One lady, who did not want to give her name and now aged 73, recalled that her grandparents lived in Grenfell Town in one of the houses backing on to Kilvey Hill, and her great- aunt kept a little shop a few doors away.
“It was black and dirty and nothing grew on it,” she said of Kilvey Hill.
“My grandparents had a small backyard with the toilet in a little whitewashed building, then a big ladder that went maybe eight foot straight onto the hill. I was not supposed to go up there, but I always did and got into trouble with my mum.
“I realise I was rolling about in incredibly polluted and toxic ground, including arsenic deposits. This would have been around 1949 to about 1952.”
Although the woman moved away in 1964, she came back to Swansea to look after her mother in her later years, and hardly recognised Kilvey Hill.
“I can’t believe the green of the grass and trees and the heather and gorse now,” she said.
In the Swansea Eastside Historical Society group, people share fond childhood memories of growing up on the hill. Maureen Loveridge recalled how, growing up in Gwyndy Road, everyone knew one another.
“Kilvey Hill was our playground. Summer holidays was jam sandwiches and a bottle of water,” Mrs Loveridge said.
“Up there all day, not a care in the world, nor a tree in sight, parents never worried as they knew we were safe as long as we were home for tea.
“We had our fallings out, but all was forgotten the following day. Some great times.”
One man who was “born and bred down the bottom of Kilvey Hill” is 83-year-old Mike Lewis. His family arrived in Kilvey from Somerset in the 1850s after his grandfather came to work at Swansea Docks.
As a child growing up through the Second World War, Mr Lewis spent many days up on the barren slopes of Kilvey Hill.
“We would make dams in the streams flowing out the quarries, and we would take up loaves of bread to the American soldiers stationed up around Maesteg Park,” he said. “We would exchange the bread for their army sack rations: some dried milk, dried apple and a tin of Spam.
“The Americans were digging trenches, but there were never any tunnels,” he said.
“I remember going out when the Germans had gone after the Three Nights’ Blitz. The hill was lit up from end to end like a big Christmas tree. The Germans were after the docks, but dropped all their bombs on Kilvey Hill instead.
“I remember we were all under the desk at school.
“We went up the hill after and came back with black knees because of all the carbon from the fires.”
The glorious industrial era of Swansea faded after the war and by 1960 much of the lower Swansea Valley was for sale.
Although once a powerhouse to the world, the valley had sunk to a place of decay and degradation.
But in the 1960s an ambitious project to start rehabilitating and replanting the valley started.
The Lower Swansea Valley Project, led by Steve Lavender, used pioneering regeneration methods to start planting trees.
Inspired by the Reverend Ted Hunt, of St Margaret’s Church in Bonymaen, on Swansea’s East Side, he mobilised a large army of volunteers, which included young people.
Between 1963 and 1966, 100,000 trees were planted by Mr Lavender and his team of volunteers, and the Forestry Commission were persuaded to plant 250,000 more.
Not that it was all plain sailing, as grass fires were frequent up on the hill throughout the 1970s. In those days, children playing up on the hill set small fires, and discarded glass bottles in the hot summer sun ignited others.
Putting the fires out was just part of the fun.
Today, Kilvey Community Woodland is a nature reserve. With breathtaking views, it is a place for quiet reflection and exploration.
The wooded slopes are home to emperor dragonflies, blue-tailed damselflies, buzzards and even slow worms and lizards. It might only be a mile or two away from the city centre, but up on the hill, it feels like another world.