The Mynydd-Y-Bwlch tramroad - the mystery blocks at Waterloo

[00:00:05]So, hello and welcome to a field uh just north of Waterloo near Caerphilly, not the station Waterloo, uh but the village Waterloo.

[00:00:17]And I've been here before.

[00:00:20]I I featured the village uh when I talked about the two lines that went between Caerphilly and Machen because there was one of those halts that went in one direction that was here.

[00:00:31]And I originally came here, oh, must be 3-4 years ago now, one of my first videos I made about the Machen Forge Trail.

[00:00:39]And I was walking up this bit of it uh up this path when I noticed these.

[00:00:46]Now, you may think, well, hang on, it's a stone with a hole in it.

[00:00:51]Yeah, it is, but when you follow the path that goes all the way up there to that stile up there, it looks like there could have been something here.

[00:01:04]You see, these blocks are tram road blocks. Now, I have talked a lot about tram roads recently because of doing videos about the Brecon and Merthyr and the Pen-y-Darren and Griffith's, uh which were originally tram roads and then became railways. And tram roads were built really late 1700s, early 1800s, right through actually the 1800s because they were a great way of being able to get goods from A to B or to a canal head for ongoing shipment uh without using roads. They were metal, in most cases L-shaped rails, though some of them had um external bits so you could run normal trains, normal trucks on them as well. And what would happen is you'd haul wagons along them using horses or lastly steam engines and pay tolls for what you used. They were very popular in areas where it was a little bit hilly and you couldn't build a canal or what have you.

[00:01:59]And they caused me one or two problems in trying to find them on maps.

[00:02:06]Let me explain more.

[00:02:09]You see, because they were counted as a road rather than a railway, they were quite often marked in the same way on older maps as you would mark roads.

[00:02:21]And so, if you look at this one here, you've got the Romney Railway, new Romney Railway, the one that went from Romney down to Cardiff, and alongside it you've got the old Romney Railway, which was a tramroad, which is marked the same way.

[00:02:35]Lastly, we flip over a valley or two, you can see this one here marked as tramroad. It's very difficult to differentiate between that as a tramroad and a normal road.

[00:02:47]Hence, they can be uh I want to say little sods, but they can be very difficult to find. There is a group in the uh Railway Canal Historical Society specializing uh old railways and early tramroads. Uh and they've pointed me to tithe maps, and I've been looking at some of those.

[00:03:04]And even on those, it's not easy to find. So, what is it that is here?

[00:03:11]Now, just south of here in 1828, an ironworks opened called the Rudry Ironworks.

[00:03:17]And coal for that came from a ridge a level just up here. And so, this tramroad was built down here. It was called the Minera Tramroad.

[00:03:27]And it linked that coal level down to these ironworks. The issue with it is that it wasn't very successful. In 1831, actually, it went bankrupt. And uh the buyers kind of who bought afterwards ran it into about 1834 1830.

[00:03:46]Uh and by sort of like um I would say probably the early 1910s, 1920s, all traces of it completely disappeared. So, all along here you can see um There's one there, there's one there, there's a couple on this side. So, you can imagine it probably would have been about 4 ft in uh in gauge um heading down here towards >> [snorts] >> the iron works. That's quite a large one there, actually. That's quite a big one.

[00:04:18]Uh but heading down towards the iron works. So, if you have an iron works and you're creating iron, how do you get your iron out?

[00:04:27]And that's where things get interesting because there is some suggestion that there was a further extension to this tramroad that went past the iron works and linked up with our old friend the Romney Railway, the Romney Tramroad uh up at Graig Raca.

[00:04:43]So, I've been plowing through the various maps and what I found is this.

[00:04:47]You see, right here is a road or is it a tramroad?

[00:04:53]Because it would fit, when you look at this end, that it kind of links into the Romney Tramroad. And at the other end, it would have gone to roughly where the iron works were.

[00:05:05]So, it's very possible that this road this tramroad that I'm standing on here in this field would have continued on down over the river. And by the way, I've mapped the two together with the current road that goes out of Waterloo and the two don't match in any way, shape, or form.

[00:05:24]Not easy to track, not easy to trace, but down here very probably would have been the Minera Bute Tramroad. Very possibly would have continued past the iron works across the road and hooked up with Graig Raca.

[00:05:40]So, sometimes these things take a little bit of work, a little bit of research, a little bit of understanding uh and a little bit of uh bolt light bulb moment, shall we say, to all come together. So, from a field north of Waterloo on a slightly windy bank holiday Monday, um, please like and subscribe. Uh, leave a comment if you wish to. Please tell your friends. Hit bell notification buttons for future stuff coming. And uh, well, until [music] next time.

[00:06:11]>> [music]