Date walked: 12th August 2023 (the Llanfoist to Blaenavon bit)

Distance: About 10 miles

Map used: Ordnance Survey OL 13: Brecon Beacons National Park – with the route downloaded onto my phone using the OS Maps app. This is stage 7 of the Monmouthshire Way.

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From the car park near Llwyn-du to the car park at Llanfoist (from where Paul and I walked the next leg) is the slightly boring bit of crossing Abergavenny. Boring it may be but it had to be done so I did this when I had my car in for a service. So let’s get that out of the way. The car park off Sugar Loaf is on Pentre Lane, from which I had a pretty misty view across the valley to Twyn-yr-Allt.

I didn’t know this at the time, but near the bottom of the lane is garden designer and Chelsea Gold Medal winner, Sarah Price’s own Garden. We visited later in the year with the Hardy Plant Society. I thought it was remarkably  messy “natural”,  but here’s what Clare Foster thought of it in House and Garden magazine. 

It was magnolia time and I love magnolias (we’ve actually got a part of the garden where we have about 10 of them).

But we don’t have this beauty.

My cross-town route actually took me past Keith Price Volvos, so I was able to wave at my car.

I thought this house was rather special.

Just around the corner from there the road goes down a hill and the route turns left to cross Llanfoist Bridge.

Immediately after the bridge the path takes a track past the church and by the garden centre, crosses under the A465 and meets the B4246 at the very useful little (free) car park. That’s it for Abergavenny. (I said it was a bit boring).

The Llanfoist car park is especially useful because it is very close to a route up to the summit of Blorenge. I’ve done that walk and I can tell you, it’s quite a climb. Today Paul and I were going to be skirting the hill, but it’s still quite steep for a while. A tarmac road takes you past a church, which we left to climb a flight of steps taking us to a concrete path….

……which leads to a tunnel which passes under the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal. Exciting!

It’s always fun to find little “objects trouve” on my walks and I was quite taken by this chicken perched on top of a stone wall.

Considering that this part of our walk is also on the Cambrian Way as well as The Monmouthshire Way, it was remarkably overgrown in places….

… and even blocked by a long fallen tree.

We climbed slowly up this steep and narrow path for about half a mile. What was amazing was that we realised that we were walking on what must have been been a narrow tramway from when Blorenge was mined for limestone, the stone brought down to the canal. The stone at the side of the path…..

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….clearly worn from the wheels of the carts.

There is a remarkable collection of images of what remains of the extensive industrial workings in this area if you follow this link.

Emerging from the woodland, our path headed north around the lower slopes of Blorenge, where we found ourselves on another narrow tramway route (called Hills Tram Road according to the pictures in link above).

We followed this gentle sloping path for about a mile, passing what may have been a tramroad tunnel….

… before reaching the remnants of some building that would have served the quarrying operations.

This is referred to in the link of images I’ve given as “The Bungalow”.

The views from here were splendid though the skies rather foreboding.

Exaggerated, perhaps, by my filtering in Lightroom

We crossed the B4246 at Garn Ddyrys……

…..and almost immediately were struck by a continuation of the post-industrial landscape.

The link I referred to above describes this as the “monster” slag heap.

At first glance you might think of this as a rough rock….

……but on closer inspection we could see that it was basically a heap of iron slag.

A little googling turned up a Wikipedia entry that tells us that an Iron Foundry was established by Thomas Hill (hence the name of the tram road I mentioned above) here in 1816 and operated between about 1817 and 1860. By the 1840s there were about 450 people living around the Garnddyrys Forge.

Our route continued on a heather lined track that skirted the steep hillside.

Below us the map records a place called The Tumble. We could see a stone wall in the valley bottom. Googling turned up references to a blacksmiths shop around here and “The Tumble Beer house”, but nothing was obvious to us on the ground.

It seems that this is called Tumble valley and our path reached the head of it at a footbridge and a rather lovely colony of ferns.

We crossed over a little stream that was tumbling (boom boom) down into the valley.

It was all very luxuriant around here and on our left was a huge Clematis vitalba in full flower- our only native clematis – and familiar to everyone who knows our countryside apart from Paul who didn’t recognise it.

Over to our left we saw another wonderful fern colony amongst a pile of rocks that looked man-made….

… and went over to explore. Behind the trees was an opening into the rock face which must be to do with mining or quarrying. Our path narrowed again as we passed below a steep grassy bank dotted with heather and ferns. On our right was a rickety wire fence over which we could clearly see the remains of a man made stone wall.

The path became very narrow around here and the drop into the valley almost sheer….

… so we were relieved that the route soon turned away from the cliff to have us wading through a field thick with bracken.

Climbing up through a field we emerged on a minor road next to what had been a pub called The Lamb and Fox and is now a private residence, a notice on a railway goods carriage reminding people that parking there was for patrons only. The map records this place as a village called Pwll-du. The Wikipedia entry records that in the mid C19th this was a settlement there were two rows of terrace houses, one with 14 houses and the other with 28 and that at one time Pwll Du had two pubs, two chapels, a school and a shop. The main employment at its peak was the limestone quarry (which we had just passed) or the iron works at Blaenavon.

In 1960 the village was declared a slum. The mines had closed. The houses were dilapidated and had neither running water nor sewerage. The houses were demolished in 1963 after the remaining residents had been moved, most of them to Govilon, a village further down the hill. We could see almost nothing left of this village.

Facing the road was a wide track heading up a gently sloping hill which the map records as mostly comprising disused quarries and tips.

We passed a flooded pit….

… and the shell of a small brick building.

Nothing is natural in this worked out landscape and yet nature is doing a good job of softening the man-made lumps and bumps…

… returning it to an attractive moorland of gorse and heather and bilberry….

… grazed by sheep….

…and cattle.

Our path descended gently towards the Blaenavon Road passing  further glimpses of mans previous occupation.

We crossed the road and a track brought us quickly to the end of the Pontypool and Blaenavon Railway at Whistle Halt.  In the 1860’s this railway used to carry coal to the Midlands and Newport Docks. Just down the track it passes through the Big Pit National Coal Museum (free but hefty car parking charges apply).

This whole area is designated as a World Heritage Centre, with a museum in Blaenavon.

Before doing this walk I had not read Alexander Cordell’s novel  “Rape of the fair Country”.  It starts in 1826 when its main character is an eight year old boy working at the Garndyrus furnaces  that we had walked by earlier in the day and finishes with the Newport Rising of 1839. It is one of the most harrowing, brutal books that I have ever read, detailing the lives of the families who were working in the surrounding collieries and furnaces. I recommend reading it before you follow in these footsteps. And at the end of the day, pop into the Whistle Inn and give a toast to those who worked and died here.