Abercraf

Abercraf sits at the top of the Swansea Valley where the industrial south stops and the limestone country begins. Below it is the anthracite coalfield; above it is Fforest Fawr.

The village was a mining community. Anthracite drift mines and levels worked the local seams from the nineteenth century, and the collieries employed most of the men here for a century. They are gone, and what is left is a village of terraced housing in a valley that is greener than it was.

The language

Abercraf, like Ystradgynlais three miles down the valley, is among the most strongly Welsh-speaking places in Powys.

The reason is industrial rather than rural. The coalfield drew its labour from Welsh-speaking country — Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and the Brecknockshire uplands — rather than from England, and the chapels and the unions operated in Welsh for three generations.

There is a local dialect feature worth knowing about: the Wenhwyseg or south-eastern dialect area reaches up this valley, and the speech here differs noticeably from Welsh spoken forty miles north in Montgomeryshire.

The caves

A mile north of the village the Tawe cuts through limestone, and the results are extensive.

Dan yr Ogof was discovered in 1912 by two local brothers, Jeff and Tommy Morgan, who went in by coracle with candles. It opened to the public in 1939 and now operates as the National Showcaves Centre for Wales, with three caves accessible.

It is also, unavoidably, a site with a large number of concrete dinosaurs in the field outside. That is a commercial decision from the 1980s that has become part of the place, and it obscures the fact that the cave system itself is genuinely remarkable.

Ogof Ffynnon Ddu, on the other side of the valley, is among the deepest cave systems in Britain and a National Nature Reserve. It is for permitted cavers only.

Craig-y-nos

Two miles up the valley is Craig-y-nos Castle, bought in 1878 by Adelina Patti, the most celebrated soprano of the nineteenth century, who built a private theatre in it and lived there for forty years.

After her death it became a tuberculosis sanatorium, and then a hospital, and generations of children from the south Wales valleys spent long periods there. The country park in its grounds is open and free.

That sequence — opera singer's retreat to TB sanatorium to country park — is a very Welsh piece of history and is not well known outside the immediate area.