Valley Trail Blazers

As the Rhondda Heritage Trail opens today, John Geraint explains the thinking behind the ambitious project which reconnects this former mining metropolis to its proud past.

How do you boil the story of the Rhondda down to just 12 key sites? Ours is a history that’s multi-faceted, always complex, often astonishing, consistently pioneering and lastingly significant.

Before the First World War, more than 160,000 souls had rushed to be part of this ‘American Wales’, a thoroughly modern society built in next to no time to exploit the world’s best steam coal.

From one end of the Rhondda to the other, in an unbroken ribbon development, a ‘city’ sprang up: trendy shopping emporia, top-class entertainment venues and sports stadia, and a network of electric tramcars running the length of the twin valleys. Add to that a heady mix of progressive education, religious fervour, and articulate, radical politics. There was music in the cafés at night (as well as in the chapels) and revolution in the air.

And every Rhondda township, from Trebanog to Blaencwm, and Trehafod to Maerdy, had its own story, its own heroes, its own landmarks. So how do you commemorate them all in a single Heritage Trail?!

Our solution is to site our Heritage Stations throughout the Fawr and the Fach, but to focus each of them on particular theme. This way, we can cover more ground, as it were, and be truly inclusive of the whole Rhondda and its amazing, colourful heritage.

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Iconic

So, for instance, at Treorchy’s iconic Park and Dare Theatre – built with pennies contributed by the miners themselves from every hard-earned pound of their wages – we celebrate RHONDDA’S STARRY PERFORMERS.

They include not only the world-class music makers based nearby, such as the Treorchy Male Choir, and the Cory, and Parc and Dare Brass Bands, but also stars from other disciplines and from elsewhere in the Rhondda, like Tonypandy’s Glyn and Donald Houston, and Ferndale’s Sir Stanley Baker.

You can visit the Stations on the Trail in any order, but it all begins I suppose, like the modern history of our valley, at the Rhondda Heritage Park, in what was once Trehafod’s Lewis Merthyr Colliery, with a Station we’ve titled RHONDDA’S BLACK DIAMOND.

Move a mile or so on to Porth Plaza, and you’ll find the story of the ribbon development which stretched along the valley floors, forming RHONDDA’S LINEAR CITY.

RHONDDA’S TRANSFORMING CHAPELS feature at Penygraig’s Soar Centre, now brilliantly adapted as a thriving community hub run by Valleys Kids. The Mid Rhondda Athletic Field, in Tonypandy – a state-of-the-art stadium when it was built, hosting top-flight action in three codes of football, as well as professional cycling – typifies RHONDDA’S FAIR PLAY, in sport and more broadly.

At the Cambrian Lakeside, in Clydach Vale’s Copuntryside Park, we applaud RHONDDA’S COMMUNITY SPIRIT. And on Tonypandy Square we chart the (justifiable) reasons for RHONDDA’S ANGRY PROTEST across the decades.

But we don’t just look back. We see RHONDDA’S GREEN FUTURE at Welcome To Our Woods in Treherbert, and gaze upon RHONDDA’S MOUNTAIN VISTAS at Penrhys.

Pioneers

At Maerdy Gateway Miners’ Memorial, we celebrate figures like Elizabeth Andrews, Annie Powell and Sylvia Jones – campaigners, pioneers and leaders in politics, education and the trade unions – along with the indomitable Maerdy Women’s Support Group who marched into prominence in the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike. They all undeniably take their place amongst RHONDDA’S STRONG WOMEN.

There’s a touch of RHONDDA’S CHILDHOOD MAGIC at Darran Park, Ferndale – with a mystic lake for good measure. Finally, at Tylorstown Welfare Hall, we hail the enormous significance of RHONDDA’S WORKERS’ HALLS. With their superb libraries, ‘the brains of the coalfield’, they are amongst the most impressive cultural institutions created by working people anywhere.

Well, I wrote ‘finally’ in that last paragraph – but, actually, we’re not finished. We have a bonus Station at the marvellous Workers Gallery in Ynyshir, displaying RHONDDA’S STRIKING IMAGES.

So those are our Heritage Stations. Each of them has an interpretation board with a design element in fine metalwork specific to its particular theme. The designs and fabrication are the work of gifted Rhondda craftsman Jon Owen, of Owen Welding Services.

And at each Station you’ll be able to connect to a bank of audio content which will deepen your appreciation of the theme in question. Because since last autumn, Rhondda Radio has been collecting and recording local people’s stories and family histories – we’ve more than 100 of them – and broadcasting them in a weekly show as part of the Rhondda Heritage Project.

We’ve also involved the coming generation. And not just in speech. Last week, The Unknown – a group of four young people from Coleg y Cymoedd – recorded a version of ‘Heart of the Valleys’, the fantastic new anthem they’ve composed for the Project. The recording was made in Bethlehem Chapel, Treorchy, as they joined forces with the mighty Treorchy Male Choir, doing something that the Rhondda has always done – making our traditions anew.

And all of this is thanks to a grant awarded to Rhondda Radio – the Valley’s community station – by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

I wouldn’t suggest you try to walk the Trail in one go: it’s a fair step from Trehafod to Treherbert, and from Porth to Maerdy, and just a little hilly up towards Penrhys. But – more than a century after our electric trams first ran these routes – we’ve a revitalised metro system to transport you, and a warm welcome in the hillsides to offer.

Come and be a trail blazer – and discover a past that’s so significant for the whole of Wales and beyond, as well as something about our present, and a hint of what’s yet to come, here in the Valley of Song.

For more info about the Rhondda Heritage Trail and the Rhondda Heritage Project, go to www.rctourheritage.com/heritage-home

John Geraint is Creative Director of the Rhondda Heritage Project. He is one of Wales’ most experienced documentary film-makers, and author of two books about his own Rhondda heritage, Up The Rhondda! www.ylolfa.com/products/9781800994874/up-the-rhondda  and The Great Welsh Auntie Novel www.cambriabooks.co.uk/product/the-great-welsh-auntie-novel