Clydach

Pub life and the wooded gorge

The Cambrian Inn sits on Lower Station Road, near the former Clydach railway station. Inside there is a log-burning stove, a games room and a pool table, and the beer changes: two cask ales at a time, usually from Tudor. The current owners bought it at auction and kept the place much as it was. There is a Thursday quiz, a walking club, and the occasional beer or wine tasting. Dogs are welcome if they behave, there is a garden and parking, and the Wi-Fi works.

Step outside and the village explains itself. Clydach fills a steep, wooded gorge where the River Clydach comes down off Mynydd Llangattock towards the Usk. Waterfalls throw spray into deep shade, which suits the mosses, lichens and ferns, and beech, oak, birch and ash have grown back over what was once heavy industry. Part of the gorge is now a National Nature Reserve, valued for its woods, its birds and its bats.

Ironworks and tramroad trails

The industry is still here, in ruins. Clydach Ironworks was founded in the 1790s, and by 1841 it employed 1,350 people, day and night. Four blast furnaces went up between 1793 and the 1840s, fed by a Boulton and Watt engine and a cast-iron waterwheel forty-two feet across, with a counterbalanced incline hauling pig iron up the slope. The works closed in the 1860s, but limestone quarrying carried on for another hundred years and left the raw cliffs at the head of the valley. The official trail through the site calls what remains "romantic and peaceful ruins." Entry is free, so is the parking, and there is a picnic area.

Two waymarked walks start from the Clydach South car park, each about three miles and an hour and a half. Puck's Valley takes you past Smart's Bridge, which carried a tramroad over the river from 1824, up old tramroad inclines through ancient beech woods to Llanelly Quarry and Devil's Bridge. The Corridor to the Past climbs to the quarry and then follows National Cycle Network Route 46 past tunnel mouths, the old station, a curved viaduct, double-arched limekilns and a row of unusually narrow houses. The Crawshay Bailey Trail is here too. Local interpretation claims Shakespeare heard tales of the shape-shifting Pwca in these woods and wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream; the trail files it under "myth or reality."

St Elli above the gorge

Above Clydach and Gilwern, the parish church of St Elli keeps a broach spire added in 1897 and a rough-bowled font that is probably 12th century. Its Whitefriars east window shows the Good Shepherd against the Sugar Loaf and the Blorenge, and there is a monument to John Powell, who ran the ironworks. Some churchyard slabs are held up by iron supports that were most likely made at the works themselves.

Road, rail and bus connections

Clydach is directly off the A465 between Abergavenny and Brynmawr, with brown signs to the ironworks car park. Abergavenny is the rail gateway, on the Welsh Marches line and step-free throughout, with its bus station about ten minutes' walk from the trains. The Newport Bus A3 links Clydach South with Brynmawr, Gilwern, Abergavenny and Raglan, though not on Sundays.

The last train through Clydach

There is a story locals tell about the railway, which ran on one of the steepest gradients in Britain and held its downhill trains to twenty-five miles an hour. As the last train of the day came through the gorge, people would flick their kitchen and bedroom lights on and off to see it past.