HLW (D) 14

Lower Teifi Valley  

2001  

Special  

Designated  

The River Teifi is one of Wales’s principal and, historically, most famous rivers. From its source in Llyn Teifi, high on the western flanks of the Cambrian Mountains, it cuts through the Cambrian Mountain foothills before flowing west in a classically picturesque valley that divides the Ceredigion plateau to the north from the Carmarthenshire plateau to the south. It enters Cardigan Bay at Cardigan, through a broad estuary which is over 90km from its mountain source. The area included here comprises the estuary and lower reaches of the Teifi valley between Cemaes Head and Cardigan Island at the mouth of the estuary and the Cenarth gorge in the south east. This narrow corridor represents a distance of about 20km in which the valley floor rises to about 20m above OD, between tightly enclosing sides that rise steeply to the plateau surfaces above at 150m to 200m above OD. The area has long been an important locus of study by Quaternary geologists. Recently, the shaping processes of the deglaciation of the area have been reviewed, and it seems that erosion of sub-glacial stream channels created the lower Teifi gorges at Cenarth and Cilgerran in which the post-glacial river flowed. Its earlier courses were blocked by deep deposits of glacial drift in the wider valley either side of the present course of the Teifi. Raised beach deposits at Poppit Sands at the estuary mouth and, on the northern side at Gwbert, later deposits of Irish Sea glacial till, are overshadowed by much more recent and extensive sand dunes. Whether beginning in later prehistory or not, there was, as elsewhere on the South and West Wales coasts, a rapid build-up of sand in the later 13th century. An important assemblage of medieval cooking pots in what has become known as Dyfed gravel tempered ware was recovered from a pit exposed in a cliff face at Gwbert. Sealed by sand, the pit may be part of a deserted medieval settlement within Towyn Warren on the north side of the estuary. The sand has also created a bar across the estuary mouth, perhaps in post-Roman times. The mouth of the River Tuerobis (the Teifi) is one of the few places on the Welsh coast named from 1st century coastal survey in Ptolemy’s Geography. But there is as yet no obvious candidate for any late Iron Age centre of power and focus of coastal trade which might have occasioned the inclusion of the Teifi estuary in the Geography. This contrasts with groups of Bronze Age ritual and funerary monuments on the high ground on the southern side of the estuary such as Crugiau Maen Saeson above St Dogmaels. Early medieval and medieval settlements were characteristically sited further up river, 5 km from the sea at the lowest bridging point. St Dogmaels on the south bank, Cardigan opposite on the north, and the fortified promontory of Old Castle Farm, are visible from several vantage points on the high ground on either side of the estuary. Visually and topographically, as well as in their surviving medieval monuments of abbey, castle, walled town and medieval priory and bridge, they provide a good example to correct the often over-simplified view of the processes of survival of native Welsh settlements and the imposition on them of Anglo- Norman castle boroughs. Although there is no direct archaeological evidence, it is likely that Robert FitzMartin's 1115 Tironian foundation of St Dogmaels Abbey occupied the same site as the early medieval monastery of Llandudoch, sacked by the Vikings in AD 987. Cardigan itself, established on a de novo site between 1110 and 1136, was preceded by earlier strongholds. At least one such is likely to have been on Old Castle promontory and to be identified with the Din Gereint of the Welsh Brut y Tywysogion or Chronicle of the Princes. Twelfth-century Cardigan was an embattled Norman outpost and in 1165 fell under the control of the Lord Rhys; it remained a Welsh urban centre for at least a generation. A staple port in the 14th century and centre of pilgrimage for the famous taper, a relic of the Virgin Mary, at the priory church, late medieval Cardigan leased many of its lands and mills to prominent Welsh gentry of the vicinity. But, like many towns, it was in decline in the late 15th to early 17th centuries. From the later 17th and into the 18th centuries, renewed commercial prosperity was based on an essentially coastal trade. Sea and river fishing were important and the river was increasingly used as a means of transport and as a source of motive power for mills and foundries. Deep sea trading had developed by the early l9th century and Cardigan became an important shipbuilding centre, mainly for coasting vessels, with an increase in all the ancillary trades, focussed on the Netpool and the Mwldan. Teifi valley timber, especially oak, was heavily used, but needed to be augmented by Norwegian and North American imports. The wharves and warehouses of this period are still a prominent feature of the river frontage. Also in the 1820s and 1830s, the town became a springboard for emigration from the impoverished and overpopulated hinterland. A notable recent study by the Canadian historian, Peter Thomas, details the foundation of a Cardigan in New Brunswick, Canada, from one such emigration, movingly recreated from a contemporary ballad, Hanes Mordaith y Brig Albion o Aberteifi. The falls at Cenarth, in a stretch of the river famed for its salmon, excited the attention of travellers after they were first described by Gerald of Wales. Whilst the antiquarian and traveller Richard Colt Hoare might, in the early l9th century, consider that the distinctive Teifi coracles ‘add much to the animation of the views’, it was also true that the communities of Cenarth, Abercych, Llechrhyd and Cilgerran depended heavily on salmon fishing for their livelihoods. The river was divided into four sections and the fishing was highly organized within orally transmitted rules. Battles with the landed interests and the rod and line fishermen were protracted throughout the later l9th century. Today, tourism seems set to become the main means of preserving some of these traditions and practices. The whole of the mature Teifi valley was favoured from the 18th century onwards for the building of gentry residences. Its wooded slopes and vistas were admired by travellers and artists, none more so than Cilgerran gorge surmounted by its romantic ruined castle, which was drawn and painted by J. M. W. Turner and many others. But during all this time, the gorge was being quarried for slate or flagstones which were shipped down river to Cardigan. This industry was developed by the Lloyds of Coedmor. Its effects and the massive dumping of waste on the Pembrokeshire side of the river on the marshes above Cardigan were not visible from their mansion above Cilgerran, a mecca for Teifiside society throughout the l9th and early 20th centuries. Incomers like Sir Benjamin Hammet were responsible for other industrial and commercial ventures. A Lloyd of Coedmor and other local entrepreneurs built a canal from Manordeifi to Llechrhyd, itself the site of an iron forge, to power an early tinworks in the 1770s; by the 1790s Hammet had taken over the works and built a new mansion, Castell Maelgwyn. Another later monument of industrial archaeological interest is the tramway constructed following the suggestion of County Surveyor, James Szlumper, in 1873, to carry quarrying waste on to the Cardigan marshes and prevent further clogging of the river and subsequent flooding. These industries have gone; some quarrying remains, but it is the leisure and tourist industries which make use of the river and estuary today. This is accompanied by an increasing recognition of the ecological value of the river valley and estuary.