Llanelly Hill

The Pub and Practicalities

The Jolly Colliers stands at Waunllapria, on the shoulder of the hill. It is food-led, popular with walkers coming off the gorge, and the cooking wanders between British, Welsh and Spanish. Recent dishes have included bang bang cauliflower, Thai red curry and Korean belly pork alongside a tandoori chicken burger, tapas and a cranberry-and-lentil bake. The regular cask beer is Wye Valley Butty Bach. There is a real fire, a beer garden, games, and dogs are welcome. The pub closed in 2015 and its owners applied to turn it into houses; permission was refused, and it reopened under new management, which is roughly the opposite of how these stories usually go.

You should know before arriving that there are no shops. Llanelly Hill is a dispersed settlement — six small hamlets strung along the hillside rather than a single centre — and its facilities come down to the pub, a playground and the Welfare and Memorial Hall. Buses are sparse: Phil Anslow's route 31 runs between Brynmawr and Blaenavon, but only selected journeys divert up to the Waunllapria stop outside the Jolly Colliers. The village is reached off the A465 Heads of the Valleys road, with Abergavenny the practical rail gateway.

Gorge Industry and Its Walking Trail

The reason to be up here is what lies below. The village sits high above the Clydach Gorge, where the River Clydach drops through beech woodland towards the Usk. This was heavy industry once, and the ground still shows it. Clydach Ironworks, founded in the 1790s in the gorge below, ran four blast furnaces and a cast-iron waterwheel forty-two feet across, and employed around 1,350 people by 1840 before closing in 1861. Much of the site has since gone back to woodland, waterfalls and ponds, part of it now a National Nature Reserve valued for its bats, birds, mosses and lichens.

The walking makes the most of the wreckage. A circular route of about five kilometres starts from the Clydach South car park, crosses Smart's iron bridge of 1824, passes the ironworks, climbs a former tramroad incline through the beech, reaches Llanelly Quarry and returns along an old railway bed through the Gelli-Felen tunnels and over Devil's Bridge. There are steep sections. Bigger days out sit close by — Big Pit and the Blaenavon ironworks are under three miles off, and the canal at Llanfoist Wharf offers a flatter walk when the gorge has worn you out.

St Elli's Church and Churchyard

St Elli's church holds the high ground, its broach spire — added in 1897 — visible for miles, on an elevated plateau with long views to the Sugar Loaf and the Black Mountains. A ring of old yews darkens the churchyard. Inside are a rough font probably from the twelfth century and an east window in which the Good Shepherd stands with the Sugar Loaf and Blorenge behind him, the local hills folded into the biblical scene. "Every week I am astonished by the history that survives here," says the archaeologist Katie Churchill, and the churchyard bears her out: several grave slabs rest on iron colonnettes cast at the works below, and one belongs to Joshua Morgan, who died at twenty in 1871 in an accident with the Cymro engine of the Clydach Railway.

Sandeman's Sculpted Dog

Another headstone, for Lieutenant Colonel Robert Preston Sandeman, carries a sculpted figure of his dog.