Blogathon 11/24: FMP for infrastructure?

I have a Find My Past account; my sister and I have been burrowing away from different directions; her using Ancestry, me using FMP. It gets tricky when one’s paternal grandfather is Peter Jones from North Wales because every third child, of a certain age, in North Wales, seems to have been called Peter Jones. Even if the child was a girl. Probably. However this post isn’t about family, as such.

Every other weekend my mother would pack my sister, brother, and I into the car, and off we’d trundle, south-west to the small mining town of Bargoed, where the aforementioned paternal grandfather and grandmother lived.

The outgoing journey marked a well-travelled route; down to Pontypool, then across past Hafodyrynys colliery (slag heap pointing high into the sky), down the steep hill into Crumlin and underneath the massive viaduct, then Oakdale, Pengam, and into Bargoed, catching sight of the giant coal buckets high in the air as we drove into the town.

Those three huge landmarks are now gone; the slag heaps have all been flattened or greened, the Crumlin viaduct was dismantled, and so too have the flying coal buckets. And that’s a shame. They weren’t just landmarks on the journey, they were heritage markers; examples of (good and bad) Victorian engineering. Losing those is regretful. Whatever one thinks of what the Victorians achieved, the erasing of the practical, day-to-day reminders is sad.

My grandfather worked underground all his life, the dust eventually collapsing his lungs until he could breathe no more. I think we need more reminders of his time, how he lived, and the conditions in which he died. I think we need more reminders than the Big Pit museum in Blaenavon. The slag heaps, coal buckets, and engineering works like the Crumlin viaduct had a cultural role to play even when they had reached end of life.

It’s such a shame the decision-makers were so short-sighted they couldn’t contemplate this.

Crumlin viaduct:

Bargoed coal buckets: