Aberfan

From valley path to mining village

The Taff Trail runs straight through Aberfan on the line of the old railway and canal, so you can walk or cycle north toward Merthyr Tydfil or south down the valley without touching a road. The village sits on the western floor of the Taff Valley, terraced streets stacked up the slope, the river along the bottom, and Mynydd Merthyr rising immediately to the west. From the edge of the settlement the walks climb quickly out of the valley onto open mountain.

Before the coal, this was two cottages and an inn "frequented by local farmers and bargemen." When John Nixon and his partners began sinking the Merthyr Vale Colliery in 1869, the terraces followed, and by the 1960s around five thousand people lived here, most of them working underground. The Aberfan Hotel, a traditional valley pub, is the oldest kind of feature the place has; an inn predates almost everything else on the site. Crosswoods, the village grocer, was remembered as "a high-class business that sold the best of everything," provisions and confectionery of superb quality.

Chapel life and the disaster

Aberfan is a chapel village rather than a parish-church one. Bethania, Smyrna, Capel Aberfan, Zion, Mount Hermon and more Welsh chapels once stood along Aberfan Road and the streets around it. Most are gone now, demolished or burned. The Welsh-medium primary school, Rhyd y Grug, carries the language forward.

Then the history that defines the village. On the morning of 21 October 1966, water-saturated colliery spoil from the tip on the mountainside above broke away and slid down onto Pantglas Junior School and the houses around it. A hundred and forty-four people were killed, 116 of them children. It remains one of Britain's worst peacetime disasters.

The garden and the white arches

The Memorial Garden was laid out on the exact site of the school and opened in 1970. Retained playground and classroom walls trace the original footprint, and the paths follow where the corridors ran. It was renovated in 2019 with the National Botanic Garden of Wales, who designed a bee-friendly planting scheme; some of the rebuilt walls use reclaimed stone from disused local bridges. At Bryntaf cemetery the graves of the children stand in white-arched rows, many with photographs and inscriptions. These are places of quiet remembrance, and the village treats them that way.

Connections along the valley

For getting here, Merthyr Vale station sits across the river on the Merthyr Line, with direct trains down to Cardiff and up to Merthyr Tydfil; the A470 runs up the valley nearby, and Merthyr town is about four miles north with Cyfarthfa Castle and its park. Further up the valley are Bike Park Wales at Gethin Woods, the first purpose-built mountain-biking centre in the UK, and the Brecon Mountain Railway from Pant, a narrow-gauge steam line running toward Pontsticill and the southern edge of Bannau Brycheiniog.

A tree for the fiftieth anniversary

On the fiftieth anniversary, in 2016, schoolchildren planted a tree in the garden.