Leaving Cardiff for Llantrisant you rise up from the delta into the
South Wales coalfield. Cardiff at last touching that which made it
great. In its most recent expansion (1996) the city took in the villages
of Capel Llanilltern, Pentyrch and Creigiau. Upland parishes. Rising
roadways. Land and hills and far less sky. I'm on the A4119 which
heads for Llantrisant. I've already crossed the edge of urbanisation,
passed Cardiff's last thatched cottage (The Thatch at Radyr)
and travel between empty fields. Hedgerows, long grass. 59% OF THE
PUBLIC SAY KEEP HUNTING. Union Jack on a tree. Cardiff's edge is out
beyond here, ready for the next enlargement. Early clusters of up-market
Barrett brick and gable mark the way.
At the far edge, nestling against a stream, the Nant Cessair , after
which The Caesar's Arms, was named, lies the village of Creigiau.
Creigiau - rocks, crags, a place of stones. The district is almost
all new build middle-class and Welsher than anywhere else in the city
except possibly parts of Pentyrch and almost certainly Pontcanna.
Morgan and I have driven here from Penarth where we had lunch at
Cafiero Cioni's Bistro and Pizzeria Restaurant on the cliff top. Egg,
beans and chips. I wanted a steak and kidney but they didn't have
any. Morgan claimed, amazingly, never to have eaten pie. Afraid of
the dark meat. So what did you have from your Onllwyn working men's
chippie? Rissole. Morgan is a carpenter from Pant-y-Ffordd, in the
Neath valley, half way between Seven Sisters and Onllwyn, not in the
guidebooks. He's a teacher and a writer - man of hard hands, heart
of gold. With me for the history.
We drive through increasing mist and face-clogging drizzle. We're
looking for the Cae-Yr-Arfau cromlech. A ancient burial chamber. CADW
listed but to me so far utterly invisible. Morgan claims not to know
what a cromlech is, but I don't believe him. On the map it's shown
in a field and the local histories talk of it being bisected by a
farm wall, of its capstone sinking, of it being buggered by time,
stones stolen, status ignored. Maybe it's no longer there. Wiped out,
land ploughed.
In the paddock where it isn't, just beyond the golf club, there are
horses, mud and great bales of hay. A stubby public right of way sneaks
in here, hits a barbed-wire fence and stops dead. Used to go somewhere,
no longer. A mound which Morgan thinks might be ancient is just bramble
topping rubble. The cromlech is actually inside the garden of Cae-Yr-Arfau
house next door, a gated new-build on the site of an older farm, smart
driveway, neat lawns. This is the outer edge of the city. End. Cardiff
finishing. The streams seep into the soil. Ditches fill. There was
an ancient battle here. Blood on the grass. But, today, just damp.
The cromlech is half covered with stonecrop, ivy and hogweed. When
the farmhouse stood this Neolithic home for the dead was distempered
white and used as a store for coal. Milk churns stood on the path
alongside it. Where the capstone now rests on the boundary wall I
can still see a dab of weathered white. Sandra Coslett, the owner,
tells me that she may well build a replica of the cromlech on the
right side of the house drive. A garden feature. For balance. Much
better than a fountain. Does she ever feel disturbed by having new
stone age ghosts outside her window? No.
Creigiau's industrial centre was always its quarry. Opened in the
1870s this dolomite pit provided first the stone for the building
of Cardiff Docks and later the limestone and magnesium dolomite needed
for making steel at Guest-Keen's Tremorfa works. Two trains a day
carried rock down the now abandoned mineral line to East Moors. In
the woods the old passenger platform is still there serving an overgrowth
of grass tussock, ivy and dogwood. The quarry did small-time road
stone and material for river revetments until 2001 when costs outstripped
prices and work ceased. The stone crushers were silenced. You could
hear the birds again. The largest employer in the district, according
the council statistics, became the white painted Caesar's Arms - Hancock's
beer, bajan fish cakes, crispy laver balls, tiger prawns in garlic,
scallops with leeks and bacon, monkfish, steak.
We look next through the driving mist for Castell y Mynach, medieval
farmhouse, the largest in the county. The pub of the same name at
Groesfaen is not it. Repaired and repainted the real house, once more
residential, is now surrounded on all sides by the rambling Castell
y Mynach estate. New paving where the mud tracks were. Stone barns
now apartments. Houses in a weave of traffic calming bends, roads
that go nowhere, turning circles. Grassed communal space, an urban
resolution to the problem of fields. Ffordd Dinefwr twists through
the centre. The new dwellings don't shout. Their style blends. The
farm has no space to breathe but it's still there. No characterless
extensions. No dormer windows. As was, almost. Bricked in gate arches,
trefoil-headed lancets. Inside a mighty chimneybreast, shields, medieval
paintings on the walls.
In finer weather I'd been here walking and taken the path up beyond
the quarry towards Pentyrch hunting for medieval Bristol Fach - Brysta
Fach - an isolated thatched farm cottage used as a storehouse
for saddle leather lugged there from Bristol. The path went up through
paddock and field climbing to almost 600 feet and ending at a gash
of rubble overgrown with bramble. The cottage had been demolished
in the 1980s. For no good reason that I could see. Nothing done with
the space. Nothing rebuilt. From here Creigiau looked so totally detached
from the city as to be no part of it.
All that remains
of Brysta Fach
I walked back down, through woodland, across the old Craig y Parc
estate, passed Pentwyn Farm (that place name again, Pentwyn, the most
common in Wales), skirted the iron-age encampment on the hilltop,
went along bracken lined bridleways and returned through the forestry
along Nant y Glaswg to where I'd started. Still Cardiff. Cardiff when
I started and Cardiff when I finished. Strangest city I'd ever walked
through. There's hope yet.
Peter
Finch
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